The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For UConn, losing streak is thing of past
It has been 24 years since Huskies had consecutive defeats.
NEW YORK — Geno Auriemma and the UConn Huskies are on an unbelievable run.
No, not the 109 straight wins. Or the four consecutive national championships.
Try this: They haven’t lost back-to-back games in almost a quarter century. That’s 883 straight games without consecutive losses.
Think about that for a minute. No current UConn player was born the last time this program had a losing streak. And that mark is safe for at least another year, which has Rebecca Lobo thinking about popping the champagne with her former teammates — the ones who actually lost two in a row.
Lobo was a sophomore on the 1992-93 UConn team, which suffered consecutive defeats. The Huskies actually had a three-game and two-game losing skid that season, dropping the final two games of the season.
“They should trot us out at halftime next year at one of the games and recognize us,” Lobo said. “That’s what it comes to. The only thing they can honor that’s new and different. Maybe that team is the black sheep of the UConn family.”
Maybe without that failure, the success UConn has had since wouldn’t have been so great.
“That loss helped fuel us for the future,” said Jen Rizzotti, who was a freshman on the team. “I remember all offseason wanting to make sure that never happened again.”
It hasn’t. In fact, UConn has lost only 57 games since that year.
That team went 18-11 — the last UConn squad not to win 20 games — and was in danger of missing the NCAA Tournament, an unheard of thought for a Husky team that has since won 11 national championships. The players had planned to watch the selection show together, but a blizzard hit the area that night, so they couldn’t even watch as a group.
“I was nervous,” recalled Jamelle Elliott, who was a freshman on that team. “You either get in or get on a train for an eight-hour trip to D.C. the next day to spend a week at home with your family, as it was spring break.”
Kathy Ferrier, the lone senior on the team, remembers watching the show with her boyfriend and feeling a sense of relief when the Huskies’ name popped onto the screen.
“I knew as a senior this could be it, the season could be over,” said Ferrier, who lives in Connecticut now. “As soon as the name appeared, we started calling each other.”
The three-game losing streak in the middle of the season included a visit from Stanford that was believed to be the first sellout at Gampel Pavilion. The season ended with consecutive defeats to Miami in the Big East Tournament semifinals and Louisville in the first round of the NCAAs.
The Huskies won the first of their 11 titles two years later, going undefeated for the first time in school history.
The makeup of that team sounds familiar to this season’s squad, the one that’s kept the NCAA-record winning streak going and is four victories away from a fifth straight national championship.