Geno adjusts from home
UConn coach Geno Auriemma is cooped up in his Manchester home with COVID-19 as his team prepares to open the NCAA Tournament in San Antonio without him.
When the ball goes up Sunday night at 8, with the top-seeded Huskies facing 16th-seeded High Point at the Alamodome, he won’t have assistants to talk to, players to direct or referees to argue with.
“Watching a game is way harder than coaching a game, just like coaching a
game is way harder than playing a game,” Auriemma said Friday. “The less control you have, the less effect you can have on the game, the more angst you feel. Even to the point where I said, I might not watch.”
That’s about as likely as top-ranked UConn, seeking a 12th national championship, actually losing to the Panthers.
High Point’s first-ever NCAA Tournament game will be the 11th Auriemma has missed, out of more than 1,250, since taking the UConn job in 1985. Associate head coach Chris Dailey, also in her 36th year at UConn, will lead the team Sunday and, barring the greatest upset in tournament history, again Tuesday against Syracuse or South Dakota State.
Auriemma, who says he is not experiencing symptoms, tested positive for COVID on Sunday and again Monday, when it was announced he would enter a 10-day quarantine and be ineligible to join the team until March 24. That is the day after UConn’s secondround game. Third-round play begins March 27.
The Huskies are 10-0 under Dailey, who was inducted to the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2018. Her job is more complicated than usual this time. Assistant coach Shea Ralph left San Antonio Wednesday after learning that a member of her family tested positive for COVID.
That leaves Dailey and Jamelle Elliott, in her second stint as a Huskies assistant after serving as Cincinnati head coach in 2009-18. Ben Kantor, in his sixth year as the program’s video coordinator, served as an additional coach in practice Thursday and UConn has the option of having Kantor designated as an in-game coach as well.
“This preparation didn’t start Monday or Tuesday after Geno got sick,” Dailey said. “This preparation started in September. What we’ve done well and what we’ve gotten better at all year will be part of what we do against High Point. And what we’ve not been good at all year will probably be evident — hopefully less evident — against High Point. This has been a yearlong process. We’re just looking to be able to put it all together in a 40-minute game on Sunday.”
UConn has won its past five NCAA Tournament openers by an average of 50 points. The team has been to the Final Four 12 tournaments in a row, and the Sweet 16 every tournament since a first-round loss to Louisville in 1993, the year before the field expanded to 64.
Dailey first served as head coach in February and March of 1989, when Auriemma was suspended due to a mistake made in scheduling that season. He missed the regular season finale at St. John’s and the Big East Tournament. UConn went 4-0 under Dailey, winning the first conference championship in program history without Auriemma in the building.
Auriemma didn’t have access to real-time updates in 1989.
Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t avoid them in 2021.
“It might be better if I was sitting in a school bus outside St. John’s waiting for one of the managers to run out and tell me the score,” he said. “I might need to hide down in the basement and have somebody come down and give me the update, or like ticker tape back in the old days, have somebody read it out and make it up and sound like we’re winning.”
UConn doesn’t lose games like this anymore. Auriemma, 66, has 1,115 victories and 11 national championships — and he still has Dailey, the Rutgers assistant he hired to help him build the program shortly after he was hired. Auriemma, previously a
Virginia assistant, had gotten to know Dailey on various basketball committees and on the recruiting trail.
“Sometimes you just have a hunch about people,” Auriemma said. “I just thought, if I ever have an opportunity to be a head coach that’s certainly someone that I would want at my side. That’s how it all came about. I’m very fortunate and so is everyone at Connecticut for the last 36 years that she walked away from a great opportunity at Rutgers to come up here and take a chance on something that no one knew was ever going to be as good as it’s been, or even worthwhile. It’s turned out to be better than we could have imagined.”
UConn taking a twocoach staff to the national stage is the latest twist in a bizarre season COVID complication. The Huskies have no seniors and only three players with NCAA Tournament experience — juniors Christyn Williams, Olivia Nelson-Ododa and Evina Westbrook — because last year’s event was canceled.
Dailey, 61, last filled in for Auriemma on Dec. 22, 2020, a victory over Oklahoma. Auriemma was recovering from surgery to relieve symptoms of diverticulitis.
“It’s definitely a different feel,” Dailey said. “This time, stepping in is definitely different because the other times, if we lost, the season still continued. …
Instead of making the suggestions, you’re making the decisions. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s challenging, it’s all of those things. I just hope, between Jamelle and myself, we have the kind of experience that we need going into this game, and the NCAA Tournament, to be able to help our players move forward. I’m expecting that we do.”
Dailey prepared the High Point scouting report. Elliott is handling scouting for Syracuse and Kantor for South Dakota State. Kantor was previously an assistant coach at Houston Baptist and Colgate.
“There’s obviously less eyes on particular situations,” Auriemma said. “There’s less ideas, less viewpoints. Sharing the workload now is a little bit more difficult. They’re going to handle it OK. Sometimes in a game, the less voices in your ear the better. So I think those guys might be better off during the game. Who knows?”
Players aren’t living the true NCAA Tournament experience. COVID protocols have necessitated long blocks of isolation in hotel rooms. A national conversation took place Thursday and Friday about the almost non-existent workout areas provided to the women in San Antonio, compared to what is provided for the men in Indianapolis. There are no large crowds, no celebrations, just a few practices, meetings, eventually a game.
“We usually have our coach here,” Williams said. “That’s the biggest difference.”
Dailey often runs the pre-game show during road trips, though, coordinating team activities. Auriemma watched practice through Zoom Thursday night and addressed the team afterward and planned to again Friday.
Of Dailey’s value to the program, Auriemma said, “The No. 1 thing is her consistency. You know what you’re going to get every single day. There are absolutely no surprises. You know exactly what to expect, and the players know exactly where she’s coming from. There’s never any doubt that she has the best interest of the players at heart. She’s very detail oriented, very thorough, very persistent. She’s organized. She kind of has an even keel demeanor. She’s not going to be volatile like I am sometimes. There’s a lot of stability you’re going to get.
“Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of little things that only CD can do that kind of irritate the players. I get a kick out of it but sometimes they don’t. In the end, the one thing they do know is that every morning she wakes up and every night she goes to bed and she only has one thing in mind — and that’s the welfare and the success of our players and our team.”
Auriemma is already scratching the walls. He joked that he broke from an “excruciatingly busy schedule,” to participate in Friday’s press conference.
Dailey was listening to Auriemma speak.
“First of all, I’m not as boring as he made me sound,” she said. “I’m not the exact same every single day, just to let you know.”
UConn will have gone 12 days between games by Sunday.
“It just seems like it’s been a month since we actually left Connecticut,” Dailey said. “It seems a lot longer because there’s been such a long time without basketball. Practicing [Thursday for the first time in San Antonio] was great. I thought the players went really hard. They wanted to go hard. They wanted to go out there and get their legs back.”
If UConn makes the Sweet 16, it will get its coach back.
“I’m just swamped with just trying to decide which game film I want to watch for the 10th time,” Auriemma said. “Am I tied in? Yeah, I’m tied in.”
Digitally, only. Through Zoom. Through texting and calling. Come Sunday, through TV.
“You can only do so much,” he said. “You’re not there. You’re not hands on. So it is kind of weird. It’s kind of different in the divide, but they’re in great hands.”