The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Huskies down Oklahoma to give Auriemma his 1,000th win
Auriemma notches career victory No. 1,000 at Mohegan Sun
UNCASVILLE — In the days leading into Geno Auriemma’s historic 1,000th career victory at the helm of the UConn women’s basketball program, he told anybody who would listen that it was going to be just another day at the office.
Not long after he became the fastest women’s college basketball coach to hit the 1,000-win mark, his emotions told a different story.
Seeing so many of his former players — including many from his first UConn team — had Auriemma on the verge of tears after the top-ranked Huskies topped unranked Oklahoma 88-64 in front of a sellout crowd of 9,151 at Mohegan Sun Arena on Tuesday night.
“The first 12 were the hardest wins of all 1,000 of them,” Auriemma said in reference to his 12-win, 1985-86 team. “It’s a great memory of that group because they were so excited, so thrilled, so happy and I have never seen a bunch of kids happier to get 12 wins, pour everything they have into those games. To see them today, see where they’ve been, and they still carry it around with them.”
The importance of the milestone to Auriemma’s former players was something not lost on the current group of Huskies.
“It’s extremely special and they (Auriemma and associate head coach Chris Dailey) are special people,” UConn senior guard Kia Nurse said. “What’s so great and what we are so fortunate to be a part of in this program is they genuinely want you to be better basketball players but better people as well.”
Oklahoma pushed the Huskies to become better basketball players, especially when the Sooners pulled within seven points in the third quarter.
UConn (9-0) responded with a 13-3 run to end the third quarter, culminating in Katie Lou Samuelson’s buzzer-beating layup off a steal just seconds after Napheesa Collier hit a layup of her own.
“We have that confidence in every game that we want to win it and we want to give ourselves every chance, so kind of balancing that is what Coach and CD have been good at having us do,” Samuelson said.
Oklahoma (5-6) — which lost to Little Rock and South Dakota State earlier
this season — didn’t go down without a fight, pulling within seven points when Gabby Ortiz hit a 3-pointer followed 45 seconds later by a layup from Shaina Pellington, setting the stage for the game-deciding run.
Collier led UConn with 21 points and had nine rebounds; Azura Stevens had 20 points, eight rebounds and four assists off the bench; Samuelson had 19 points; and Nurse added 17 points.
Gabby Williams had 10 rebounds and seven assists and Crystal Dangerfield added eight points for UConn (9-0).
After a somewhat stagnant offensive performance in the first half, things got worse for the Huskies in the second half. UConn missed its first three shots (all 3pointers) in the third quarter and seven of its first eight shots to go with four turnovers.
With 4:14 left in the first half, Nurse became the 12th UConn player with 200 career 3-pointers. With Samuelson making her 200th career 3-pointer earlier in the season, it marks just the second time in program history that two active UConn players have 200 3-pointers. It was first accomplished by Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis and Bria Hartley during the 2013-14 season.
Maddie Manning had 15 points and Vionise PierreLouis had 13 points for Oklahoma.
Former Tennessee coach Pat Summitt was the first women’s collegiate coach to win 1,000 games and still holds the record with 1,098 career victories. Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer joined the 1,000-win club last season with Karlie Samuelson — the older sister of current UConn star Katie Lou Samuelson — the leading scorer in the milestone game. Earlier on Tuesday, North Carolina coach Sylvia Hatchell won game No. 1,000. Former Hamden Hall star Naomi Van Nes had two rebounds in four minutes in the 79-63 win over Grambling.
Auriemma reached the milestone in 1,135 games, easily topping the mark of 1,186 set by Summitt when she won her 1,000th game in her 35th season at the helm. He made it point of letting the assembled media know that if his first move in his first headcoaching job hadn’t been hiring Dailey as an assistant coach, he wouldn’t have been discussing his 1,000th career win Tuesday.