Geno and the challenge of coaching during COVID
What Geno Auriemma most appreciates about his chosen profession of more than 40 years happens to be exactly what the COVID-19 pandemic has stripped, among other things, from everyday life.
Momentum. Building it. Riding it.
Auriemma’s greatest source of joy over the years, 37 of them at UConn, has been to continually add to something while asking others to do the same: plans established, long-term goals in mind, path charted, progress noted, energy continually lifted.
“Right now,” Auriemma said Friday, “we’re just happy there’s a game Sunday.”
One is scheduled, anyway, against Creighton at Gampel Pavilion. UConn, with enough healthy players having emerged from COVID-19 protocols, expects to actually play. It will be the team’s first game since Dec. 19, the latest three-week chunk of the nearly two years since the way we navigate the world — big picture and step by step — changed dramatically.
The Huskies will take the court through a fog. Nothing to do with pregame histrionics; everything to do with a natural response to the incomplete experience, 22 months and counting, college coaches and student-athletes have been offered since March 2020.
Momentum in sports has been thwarted time and again. Four positive COVID cases and four consecutive canceled games have left UConn, for example, feeling as if it’s starting all over again — in the third month and 10th game of the season.
“All the things that made coaching what it is — what it was — is, to me, personally, it’s no longer that,” Auriemma said. “You’re not doing the same job you used to do, based on these past two years, and I think every coach has had to figure out a way to deal with it and some deal with it better than others. Some players deal with it better than others. … Everyone’s been affected and it’s all negative. I don’t know that there’s one positive aspect that has come out of these past two years, for anybody.”
This is not what anyone is used to, signed up for or imagined, of course. Instead of more closely considering offensive sets or defensive approaches, instead of focusing solely on incremental improvement individually or as a team, players and coaches are walking the COVID high-wire through another bizarre season, wondering about test results, masks, protocols, a seven-player minimum.
Can the Huskies beat top-ranked South Carolina later this month? Such a scenario is usually fun to consider.
Will the Huskies’ game Wednesday at Butler even take place? Flip a coin.
A better question: Is this a time players will look back on as a happy, rewarding experience? Or just as something they had to manage and withstand?
“This is something I actually think about often,” Evina Westbrook said. “I’ll get to tell my kids one day, ‘I had to play through COVID. You don’t know what that’s like.’ Obviously COVID has been affecting everyone around the world. I try not to dwell and feel sorry for myself because things aren’t going the way I thought they were going to go. Just trying to find the light in things.”
We’re not seeing the best college basketball these days. And how could we?
“All this time of uncertainty,” Auriemma said. “You think you have something and you don’t. It’s test and wait. … Do we have a game? Do we not have a game? And I don’t know that there’s any joy in that. I don’t know that there’s any fun in that. I don’t know that the players show up every day being engaged 100 percent when for the last two years they haven’t had to be engaged in anything.”
Everyone’s in that fog, the fog that, like Auriemma said, is probably seen in any home, on any job, in schools — the fog that has blanketed this basketball program and probably an entire sport.
“That more than anything, I think, has been the biggest struggle for me personally,” Auriemma said.
Asked what he’s most valued in coaching over the years — game-planning, winning, relationships, anything — Auriemma said: “The day to day practices, the grind. Show up, work out, players come to push themselves really hard, tremendous amount of energy, lots of wanting to get better because you know the challenge ahead of you, and getting your team ready to play. I think these last couple of years there’s been very few times when that’s been the case, when you could actually feel the energy, feel the level of excitement.”
The world keeps on spinning, and all the while the usual pressure and attention have mounted in the Storrs area of the snow globe.
The Huskies entered the season with the usual lofty expectations. Auriemma thought he had a really deep team. UConn has eight players officially available for Sunday, seven he’s comfortable playing and one, Nika Muhl, coming off an injury and on a 15-minute limit.
The Huskies are 6-3, ranked No. 11. They lost the first matchup with South Carolina, falling apart in the fourth quarter in the Bahamas two months or two decades ago, whenever that was. Paige Bueckers — probably the best player in America, certainly the most famous — went down with a knee injury in early December and is out until early February while recovering from surgery. Muhl and Azzi Fudd were lost to foot injuries and Fudd, the nation’s top recruit who arrived with as much fanfare as Bueckers, isn’t even running yet. Aubrey Griffin remains out with a back injury — and she might miss the rest of the season.
There was a loss Dec. 9 at Georgia Tech, with another fourth-quarter collapse. The Huskies fell again Dec. 19, to Louisville at Mohegan Sun Arena, again faltering late in a game that “seems like a year ago,” Auriemma said.
Since, there have been four cancellations, Auriemma’s public back-and-forth with former rival Muffet McGraw, testing, waiting, altered plans, a few holidays. There have been many days when UConn had only five or six players available for practice.
Fans are back in arenas. Players are vaccinated. Still, this hasn’t really been a season. It’s been a tip-toe journey through the forest with a blindfold.
At least the snow has hit. That’s right, celebrating winter weather. Everything is upside down. Olivia Nelson-Ododa suggested some of the Huskies go sledding Friday night and that was the plan for young women constantly trying to integrate some sanity into the COVID equation.
The players are “in each other’s faces 24/7,” as Westbrook said. They’re together at the basketball facility, in the apartments, flopping on couches to watch basketball together, eating a lot of ice cream, constantly texting, still doing what college students ordinarily do even if they’re not doing what college basketball players ordinarily do.
“We’re staying connected,” Westbrook said.
No matter how disjointed the whole thing looks and feels.