The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
UConn coaches on the verge of another milestone
Coaches can collect 1,000th win Tuesday against Sooners
When Geno Auriemma left his successful gig as an assistant coach at Virginia to take over a UConn women’s basketball program with one winning season, one of his first moves was enticing Chris Dailey to join him in Storrs.
There was no talk about making women’s basketball history, and certainly not a mention of teaming up to win 1,000 career games. The initial entry on their to-do list was to get the Huskies out of the dreaded 8/9 game at the Big East tournament.
Eleven national championships, six perfect seasons and countless milestones later, Auriemma and Dailey are on the verge of a milestone neither of them thought was even a remote possibility when they arrived in Storrs in 1985.
A victory against Oklahoma in Tuesday’s Hall of Fame Holiday Showcase at Mohegan Sun Arena (7 p.m., CBSSN) would be the 1,000th regular-season win during the Auriemma/Dailey era.
“Whenever I do get a chance to think about it, I’m struck about how many great coaches that I do know that never got a chance to coach 1,000 games, much less be in a position to win 1,000 games,” Auriemma said. “When you think about how many people have walked the sidelines and have been great and had great careers and for whatever reason never got to that number of just attempts, it puts it into perspective for me.”
The greatest challenge is not coming up with the numbers to quantify what Auriemma and Dailey have accomplished as much as it is where to stop spouting statistics.
There are the aforementioned national titles, 10 straight Final Four appearances, 22 seasons with at least 30 wins, six undefeated seasons. Need another number? How about 135? As in the 135 losses UConn has suffered in the 33 seasons with Auriemma and Dailey at the helm. The legendary Pat Summitt had 187 losses when she became the first Division I basketball coach to win 1,000 games; Stanford’s Tara Van-Derveer had more than 200 when she reached the milestone last season.
When Auriemma won his 200th game, he also had 81 losses. Since that time the Huskies are 799-54 with 24 winning streaks of at least 10 games, including the three longest in NCAA Division I women’s basketball history. The Huskies also haven’t lost consecutive games in that stretch.
“It’s amazing because people will come and ask me the same question about Coach and CD,” said junior guard/forward Katie Lou Samuelson, the leading scorer on this year’s team. “It’s something else that shows how
much they’ve dedicated their lives to this, and they’ve done it in a way that excellence is the only thing they’ll accept. When they recruit you to come here, you know you want to live up to all the players who’ve come before you, and you want to live up to their expectations and do whatever you can to help them. Just getting to 1,000 in the amount of time that he did, it’s just amazing.”
Auriemma jokes that before Gampel Pavilion opened in 1990, he was tempted to pick up recruits and drive through through Yale’s campus acting as if that would be where they’d spend the next four years if they decided to play for him. Since 2014, Auriemma’s office has been in the Werth Family UConn Basketball Champions Center. Sometimes he will peer out of his office window onto the practice court, see the 11 national championship banners and those hanging in honor of the All-Americans and national players of the year and wonder how all this happened.
“It’s kind of like our players when they walk in and they say ‘Is there pressure to (play) at Connecticut?’ or you walk in, you look up at the banners of the names of the players who played there and you can’t hide from it. You either live up to their standards or you aren’t any good so they can’t hide from it,” Auriemma said. “When I walk in there some days and I catch sight of it, I’m struck by (how) one program isn’t entitled to that many great players; it’s just so rare. We have the leading scorer in the history of the WNBA (Diana Taurasi) and we have (the career) assist (leader in Sue Bird) and they started in the same backcourt at Connecticut. That just doesn’t happen anywhere. In fact, I can’t imagine it happening, so we’ve had more good players play for us than anybody deserves.”
Auriemma won four Big East games in his first season, one more than his predecessor Jean Balthaser managed in her final season. UConn lost its first game in the Big East tournament in each of Auriemma’s first three campaigns before breaking through during the 1988-89 season by sweeping the Big East regular-season and tournament titles. The Huskies made their NCAA tournament debut that season and two years later were in the Final Four. That was when Auriemma and Dailey began to think that they might be in Storrs a little longer than originally planned. Certainly getting a commitment from Rebecca Lobo, the first nationalcaliber recruit signed by the Huskies, helped the duo realize that their goals might be attainable without heading elsewhere.
“We’d be there for a couple of years, we’d go from the bottom to the middle (of the Big East) and go somewhere really good where we’d have a chance to win the whole thing,” Dailey said. “We had no idea when we started that it would be here, but when you look at what we’ve done men’s and women’s basketball-wise at UConn is amazing. A small college town now is so different from when we started but when all of this started happening, there were a lot of people that had to take a chance on what our vision was and what it was going to become and we didn’t even know what it’s going to become. We were fortunate to get people to buy in to what we thought we could do here.”
Invariably, when milestone wins approach, both Auriemma and Dailey think about those who were there at the beginning before there were sold-out crowds to cheer on the Huskies or television crews to follow the team’s every move.
“I think we’ve always tried to make sure that we as players and coaches understand where we came from and that there were people before our current players who allowed them to have what they have now,” Dailey said. “Do I think about all the time? No. But when these kinds of milestones come up, you think about the people who had a hand in what is an amazing accomplishment .
“When we started, it wasn’t even a thought, not even a possibility, we just wanted to win more games than some other teams in our conference. I don’t think I’ll truly appreciate it until I’m done and then maybe when I look around I’ll get more nostalgic about all of it. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and one that you don’t do alone, and there are a lot of people, when we first started we didn’t even have a full complement of staff. Geno and I were full time, we had a part-time assistant in Steve Siegrist and we had a grad assistant, Kim Belliveau. So you think about all of those people, their input and their willingness to take a chance on two coaches that really weren’t proven. Just to see how far we’ve come, all those cliches, they all come to mind, but I can’t think of anything else to describe it except that it’s been an amazing experience and it turned into a career that I never expected.”
Auriemma could have some company in the 1,000win club. If North Carolina defeats Washington on Sunday, Sylvia Hatchell would go after her win No. 1,000 on Tuesday at 2 p.m. It should be noted that her first 272 victories came with NAIA powerhouse Francis Marion. There would also be a Connecticut connection to Hatchell’s milestone win since former Hamden Hall star Naomi Van Nes is a sophomore who has been on the court for 20 of Hatchell’s victories.
Auriemma’s players figure to have some sort of presentation ready for Auriemma and Dailey after the game, as has been the case with previous milestone victories.
“They are quite the (tandem),” UConn senior guard Kia Nurse said. “Not only are they the most fashionable (tandem) in women’s college basketball, but they did all of this together. I think to have somebody like CD on your side who knows different things, she has one way of doing things and he has another way and they match together so well.”