Huskies road trip no trivial pursuit
STORRS — The competition is fierce and involves meticulous planning and preparation. There are instructions handed out from coach to player, and the results vary wildly.
Sound familiar? If it does, well, think again.
It includes basketball, but it isn’t basketball. It’s trivia, a fun activity that has become a roadtrip tradition for the UConn women’s basketball team.
The questions are chosen by associate head coach Chris Dailey and range in topic from history to geography to past UConn teams and upcoming opponents.
“Chris comes up with a million different things,” head coach Geno Auriemma explained Friday before practice. “Part of it is just to keep everybody entertained, part of it is just something to do, part of it is competition because our guys love to compete. Any little game that we can come up with that involves a little bit of competition, we’ve been doing that for a long time. I like it, they like it a lot.”
Considering what’s at stake, the competition is always strong. The losing team is given an embarrassing item — last year’s was a poop emoji plush toy — to carry around until the next game or shootaround.
“Nobody wants to lose,” junior forward Megan Walker said. “Sometimes it will be onesided, one team will get lucky and they’ll get a bunch of older players and take the win.”
Senior guard Molly Bent and Ben Kantor, the team’s video coordinator, are regarded as the best trivia players. Occasionally, Auriemma will compete — only to regret it later.
“It’s supposed to be an educational thing, you know, like teaching them new things, new words, new ideas, and instead it turns into a comedy show,” Auriemma joked. “The best part of the trivia is seven or eight people saying, ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’ ”
All kidding aside, the Huskies (40) see this next road trip, which begins Sunday (3 p.m.) against Ohio State and concludes Tuesday versus Dayton (7 p.m.), as an opportunity to build chemistry. It’s a change of pace for a team that, to this point, has spent most of its time at home. Trips to Vanderbilt and Temple were sandwiched between home tilts against Cal and Virginia.
They had a particularly long road trip early last season, with three games in three days at the Paradise Jam in the U.S. Virgin Islands over Thanksgiving. Their three biggest games (Notre Dame, Baylor and Louisville) were on the road, as well. This year’s schedule is flipped, with all but one (South Carolina) of the team’s heavyweight bouts coming at home.
“I think it’ll be good,” sophomore guard Christyn Williams said of heading back on the road. “Last year we had a lot more away games, so we got to build chemistry that way.”