Birds-eye view
UConn’s Dailey had a front-row seat for Geno vs. Pat rivalry
This was the spring of 1995, the week after UConn had toppled mighty Tennessee in Minneapolis for its first NCAA women’s basketball championship.
Chris Dailey was scouting at Boo Williams’ tournament in Virginia and she was sitting next to Lady Vols’ assistant Mickie DeMoss.
“Mickie goes to me, ‘We’ve got to change our style of play,’ ” said Dailey, UConn’s associate coach who has been next to Geno
Auriemma for all 1,097 of his victories. “What?” Dailey said. “Because of the way you play, we’ve got to change,” DeMoss said.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, wow,’ ” Dailey said.
Later, Dailey went out to the car. Auriemma was waiting to head to another game. In those days, she said, they probably couldn’t even afford to rent two cars.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Dailey told Auriemma. “Tennessee is going to change their style of play because of us.”
“Are you kidding?” Auriemma said.
The Lady Vols had a set style with two big post players. They pounded it inside, rebounded, played physical. They were the standard, yet UConn had beaten them twice that season and they needed to change.
“We broke into a laugh,” Dailey said. “We couldn’t believe it.”
The belief that they could win 100 games, never mind tie Summitt’s record of 1,098 this Saturday against Providence, came in evolutionary stages. The belief they could win one national championship, never mind a college-record 11, did, too.
“That stuff was so far beyond what we could have imagined when we started,” Dailey said.
She has a framed jersey of win No. 900 on her wall. That rendered No. 800 obsolete and, in turn, was rendered obsolete by No. 1,000. That was a cool night in December 2017 at Mohegan Sun, confetti and Geno bills dropped from the rafters as players from win No. 1 to win 1,000 gathered
on the floor afterward.
“There had been a stretch where Geno and I specifically as coaches probably got caught up in winning them and not enjoying them,” Dailey said. “I know we made a concerted effort to enjoy them.
“Way back we used to sit there and figure, ‘OK, if we win all our home conference games and half our road games, here’s where we’ll be.’ Now, the thought of losing a game at home or on the road is beyond imaginable for people when they think about UConn.”
It wasn’t always that way for the greatest coaching tandem in the history of college basketball. Win No. 1 came in a small gym in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Nov. 24, 1985. Rose Battaglia, who had coached Anne Donovan at Paramus Catholic, was on the Iona bench. Dailey remembers almost no fans, except her dad who had driven up from New Brunswick.
“Geno gets two technicals from the referee Gary Schimel,” Dailey said. “I still see Gary down on the boardwalk in New Jersey. In those days you needed three technicals to get ejected. I’m sure my dad thought Geno was crazy.”
Dailey has since perfected the move to get between a shouting Auriemma and an official and saved Geno countless technical fouls over the years.
So, you beat Iona by six for No. 1 and you’re thinking lots of W’s to come?
“I’d never coached a game with him before,” Dailey said. “He was assistant (at Virginia). He wasn’t wild. What I remember thinking is what have I gotten myself into?
“Rose, who just passed in November, and I were inducted together into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018. We were talking there about that first game, getting to share this together and how everything comes full circle.”
No circle was larger than UConn vs. Tennessee. Geno vs. Pat. Pat vs. Geno. It became one of the biggest rivalries in all sports.
“My first introduction to Pat Summitt was my senior year at Rutgers (1982) and we beat them without one of our best players,” Dailey said. “At the RAC, we had to go through the training room to get to our locker room. We were celebrating and as we went through and I remember seeing Pat in the face of one of her players, letting her have it.
“I remember thinking, ‘She scares me.’ ”
A year later, Dailey was a Rutgers assistant and USA Basketball used the RAC as a training facility. Summitt was there.
“I could barely breathe,” Dailey said. “She still made me nervous. I could barely function. I was in awe. I knew the tradition, everything. Her teams became the standard.”
UConn beat the Lady Vols in 1995 and slowly, surely the standard changed. Dailey and Auriemma began to understand the difficulties of enjoying the wins. There’s always another challenge.
“My biggest fear was I don’t want us to be a onehit wonder,” Dailey said. “Pat showed she was willing to change, to adapt. I think that showed a lot about her. A lot of people wouldn’t be that way. I respected that.”
Along the way, Dailey became friendly with Pat’s son Tyler. One summer he was on the road with Summitt at the various tournaments. Dailey said, “Ty, you don’t have to like me on game day. But when we’re not playing, we can be friends.”
In Clarksburg, Tenn., Dailey went to the the top of the bleachers to talk to Tyler, maybe 8 at the time. He told Dailey how he had been camping in the tent in the backyard with his mom.
“I’m like, ‘Wait.’ ” Dailey said. “I couldn’t picture Pat in a pup tent. It gave me a little different sense of her, as a mom. Another time I sat next to her brother and we talked about the family dynamic and their competitiveness. It gave me more insight into her and to appreciate what she had done at a time when being a competitive female wasn’t accepted.”
From awestruck player to colleague to competitor, Dailey even loaned Summitt her car on the road one time.
“I told her to just make sure she brought it back,” Dailey said.
She avoided getting into the middle of Geno vs. Pat feuds, although obviously there were hard feelings between the programs when Summitt made some wild and erroneous allegations about the recruiting of Maya Moore.
That day when Auriemma and Summitt finally talked at the 2012 Final Four in Denver, the talk that did so much to thaw relations before Summitt passed in 2016?
“It was important,” Dailey said. “I had written Pat a nice note (before the 2012 Final Four) that ended with we still want to kick your ass. She appreciated that part.
“The Geno-Pat thing was between him and Pat. I kept it cordial. I don’t think Pat ever — maybe later on some — figured out how to handle Geno and put him in his place.”
And Geno’s place? “Even after everything, I don’t know he has ever been given enough credit for the kind of coach he is,” Dailey said. “He is a visionary. He sees offense as not a lot of people see it. He has this vision about how it’s supposed to look and he has the ability to make it look that way.”
Few things irk Dailey more than people saying Auriemma wins all the time because he always gets the best players.
“It’s unfair and it’s inaccurate,” Dailey said. “We’ve also won in different ways in different years.”
Over the years, they’ve run the triangle, 1-4, five out offenses.
“I can give anybody the Xs and Os,” Dailey said. “Those are plays. He envisions, OK, they take this away, what do we do? Now this is taken away, then what do we do? He makes all of it happen on the court. We don’t run plays. We teach our players how to play basketball, because of that it’s hard to take things away. The players make adjustment while it’s going on.”
Everybody scouts. Everyone knows tendencies.
“It’s how they handle all the adjustments and quick decisions while they’re happening,” she said. “We spend a lot of time on offense and that’s why when it looks bad, he can’t stand it. It kills him.
“Some coaches are control freaks. I’m the control freak. He’s not a control freak about the game. There are some players that won’t breathe unless the coach says it is OK. That’s never been his style. He’s not afraid to keep learning. He’s not afraid to have you question. He definitely listens to our players, especially the older ones who understand and have insight. He really wants to see what they see.”
Why? He considers it a failure if a player doesn’t reach her potential over four years. And, two, he wants to stay one step ahead.
“One of the years we went undefeated, we’re on the bus back from the airport after the national championship and he goes, ‘We’ve got to be better next year.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, my word.’ ”
Dailey and Auriemma have been walking a line this week. Tara VanDerveer recently surpassed Summitt’s record, so 1,098 is no longer the all-time mark.
“You don’t want to make a big deal out of it, yet it’s something you don’t want to minimize,” Dailey said. “It is quite a milestone. We can appreciate it more because we competed against Pat Summitt. We have a true understanding.”