A clash of coaching titans
Auriemma, Staley both looking to stay perfect in title games
MINNEAPOLIS — The moment a referee sends the ball up into the rapid fire of camera flashes Sunday night at the Target Center, many of the thoroughly interesting storylines heading into the national championship game between the UConn and South Carolina women’s basketball teams are essentially wiped clean.
Paige Bueckers or Aliyah Boston, or any combination of players who surround them, will push a lasting narrative into college basketball lore and few observers, if any, will sum up April 3, 2022, simply as the night of Geno Auriemma and Dawn Staley, a couple of Philadelphia coaches who are so seemingly different but so similar in at least one way.
“Maybe it’s because we were close to New York, and we have this inferiority complex that we have to prove to everybody that we’re smarter and tougher and better than everybody else,” Auriemma said. “I think all of us from that area carry that around. We know everything about everything. We’re smarter than you are. We’re tougher than you are. And whatever we don’t know, it’s because we don’t want to know. And whatever you do know that we don’t know, it’s because you don’t know anything about what we know. We rationalize all that, trust me.”
The news conference room broke into laughter.
There was a lot of GenoDawn and Dawn-Geno talk Saturday and understandably so, with compelling titans of the sport representing the two remaining programs. That’s the Final Four funhouse, all sorts of room for conversation and comparison laced into a week ultimately remembered for the final two hours of basketball and 40 minutes of playing time.
“I don’t think I’ve won one national championship, and I don’t think Dawn is going to win any either,” Auriemma said. “I think
her team has a great chance to win a national championship. I think my team has a chance to win a national championship. I don’t want to speak for Dawn. But I feel like once this game starts, once you get to tip-off, you kind of relinquish about 80 percent of the control to the players, and they now have the ability to win it or they don’t. You can coach the best game of your life and lose. You can make the most mistakes you’ve ever made coaching a game, and your team will find a way to win.”
So maybe this stage becomes Azzi Fudd’s like it was once, say, Breanna Stewart’s. Maybe it is to be Destanni Henderson’s as it was once A’ja Wilson’s. But both teams’ arrival to this point has been guided by compelling Philly figures who have pushed forward an entire sport.
Auriemma has actually won 11 championships, of course. UConn is 11-0 in national championship games.
“We’re 1-0,” Staley said of the Gamecocks’ 2017 title. “So we’re 100 percent, too.”
More laughter filled the room.
They blazed different basketball paths out of Philadelphia. When Auriemma — an assistant coach at Virginia before Staley arrived there as a player — first coached
UConn to a Final Four in 1991, the Huskies lost to a Staley-led Virginia team.
Auriemma wound up at UConn in 1985 and turned something that looked like an intramural program into a national power by the time Staley retired as a player in 2006. He is in his 37th season at UConn and has won 1,000 more games than he has lost, with a career record of 1,149-149 — with more national championships than any college basketball coach in history.
He broke through for the first here in Minneapolis in 1995 with a victory over Tennessee and Pat Summitt, the longtime rival he’d defeat four times in the championship game (1995, 2000, ’02, ’04). He beat Louisville’s Jeff Walz in 2009 and 2013, Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw in 2014 and 2015, Oklahoma’s Sherri Coale in 2002, Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer in 2010 and Syracuse’s Quentin Hillsman in 2016.
“He has had a legendary career,” Staley said. “Whether people believe that or not, he has helped our game grow tremendously. I think a lot of what we’re able to do and get is off the backs of their success. … If you invest in it, you could end up having similar success. Actually, not even similar success. Just, you could actually scratch the surface and have some success, so it’s
going to be cool, competitive.”
Staley, one of the best point guards in history, won three Olympic gold medals and played in the WNBA until 2006, long past her 2000 debut as coach at Temple, where she spent eight years. Hired at South Carolina in 2008, Staley is in her 14th year with the Gamecocks. This is their fourth Final Four appearance and they are 92-8 over the past three seasons. Her career record is 365-105 at South Carolina, 537-185 overall.
Auriemma was the U.S. national team coach for gold-medal Olympic runs, at London 2012 and Rio 2016, with Staley an assistant for the latter. Staley then took over as coach, leading the U.S. to gold at the 2020 Tokyo Games. Auriemma was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2006, Staley in 2013.
“I think anybody who builds a program that can get to the Final Four and win a national championship and put themselves in the position to do that multiple times has been able to do it by building a solid foundation, a solid base,” Auriemma said. “She’s very, very demanding and very exact in what she wants and what she expects from her players. They play exceptionally hard defensively. Doing all those things then allows you to recruit a team like they have right now — high school All-Americans who want to win a national championship. And once you do that, then that train is going, and it’s not going to stop as long as she’s there.”
Auriemma is 68 and doesn’t appear ready to even consider retirement.
“I won’t be here at 68,” said Staley, 51.
And there was more laughter.
Geno-Dawn fits so comfortably into the lead-up to an event of such national focus. It isn’t the rivalry of Geno-Pat. It isn’t the utter disdain of Geno-Muffet. It isn’t the friendship of GenoJeff. It’s unique. It’s one man having built something that may never be matched. It’s one woman building a program with enough success already to cut into a sport’s landscape that was previously so UConn-dominated.
Both will have left a significant mark on this sport, whenever they leave. UConn will have the impossible task of trying to replace a coach whose success will likely be impossible to match. Staley’s success and exposure will have created more opportunities for Black female coaches and Black coaches in general.
Auriemma is coaching in his 12th championship game, two nights after coaching in a national semifinal for the 22nd time. Staley is in her second championship game. No player on either team has played in a championship game — but one of them, some of them, will make plays Sunday night to become the real story of the 2021-22 season.
“We can talk about the numbers, but the numbers give them no edge,” Staley said. “The numbers aren’t going to give us an edge. Our season, the great season that we’ve had, it’s not going to give us an edge. We’ve got to play it. They’ve got to play it. He is not going to be thinking, ‘Oh, we’re 11-0. We got the 12th one in the bag.’ We’re not going to think, ‘Oh, here’s UConn. We’re going to automatically win.’ You can’t go into games thinking that way. You’ve got to play. And we’re going to play off of this year. We’re not going to play their history.”