The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A Heartbreaking Exit
Auriemma’s concerns surface in loss to Irish
The day before his team’s quest for an unprecedented 12th national team would end with yet another heartbreaking overtime loss, UConn coach Geno Auriemma had his concerns.
Some might have been surprised at how much difficulty UConn had slowing down rival Notre Dame, but Auriemma knew what was coming. He stood against a wall just outside the media interview room at Nationwide Arena not long after Katie Lou Samuelson and Gabby Williams were named to the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association All-American team When an impromptu question-and-answer session with members of the Connecticut media turned to the Fighting Irish, Auriemma looked and sounded extremely concerned.
“The hardest part with Notre Dame is how do you stop them and who do you decide you don’t feel like guarding?” Auriemma said. “I think it is an impossible matchup. Anybody who has tried to guard them figures out at the end of the game that you can’t guard them, you have to hope they miss. They have a kid in the middle (Jessica Shepard) that you can’t guard one on one, they have a couple of guys on the perimeter that you don’t have the matchup for. It is going to be tough.”
Auriemma has been known to embellish stories every now and then, but this was one time when he was prone to unleashing the understatement of all understatements.
When UConn and Notre Dame met at the XL Center on Dec. 3, the perimeter duo of Arike Ogunbowale and Jackie Young were a combined 9 of 30 from the field including 1 of 11 from 3-point range. In Friday night’s national semifinal, they scored early, they scored often and in Ogunbowale’s case, she scored late in Notre Dame’s scintillating 91-89 overtime win.
Young scored a career-high 32 points, and Ogunbowale had 27, including the game-winning jumper over Napheesa Collier with 1 second left in overtime.
“I’ve been saying for the last 15-20 years that winning national championships is hard and I don’t think anybody would believe me because it seemed so routine for a while, but these last two years is a big reminder that this is hard to do,” Auriemma said.
UConn was undefeated heading into the Final Four the last two seasons only to fall in overtime to Mississippi State on a basket by Morgan William and to Notre Dame.
As was the case in the loss in
the 2017 Final Four, UConn committed some costly turnovers and had stretches when the ball movement they are known for was nowhere to be found.
After Crystal Dangerfield gave UConn an eight-point lead with 6:49 to play, UConn promptly missed six of its next eight shots. Then the turnovers started mounting. There was one by Samuelson and two by Williams as Notre Dame seemingly had the game in its back pocket with a fivepoint lead and 21 seconds to play. Then Collier drained a 3-pointer to pull within two. After a Notre Dame timeout, Kia Nurse intercepted Jessica Shepard’s inbounds pass and drove in for the tying layup. Another turnover by Shepard gave UConn a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Williams was open and hurried a shot that was off the mark.
“We got the ball exactly where we wanted to get it at the end of regulation,” Auiemma said. “I was surprised that Gabby was that open to catch it in the lane and I think she just lost track of how much time there was, there were three seconds left in the game. What are you going to do? You can prepare, you can go over what you are going to do, you can do all of that stuff, but it still comes down to when you are in the moment, you either make a good decision or you don’t make a good decision. You either make a shot or don’t make a shot. That’s two years in a row.”
A year ago Auriemma said his team struggled to execute in end of the game situations in practice, something that came back to bite them at the worst time. This year, however, Auriemma said it was perhaps the best group he has had in the last decade in getting the shots they wanted late in practice when a score was needed to win a drill.
In the end, though, it wasn’t the offense that brought an end to the season as much as the defense.
Collier led five players in double figures with 24 points, while Azurá Stevens came off the bench to score 19 points, including 10 in a pivotal stretch in the second quarter when UConn turned a doubledigit deficit into a doubledigit lead. Katie Lou Samuelson had all 16 of her points in the first three quarters, while seniors Gabby Williams (12 pooints, 10 rebounds, seven assists and three blocked shots) and Nurse 10 points, 5 rebounds and 2 assists) went down swinging.
The final tally for the two seniors included 147 victories, four Final Four appearances, a pair of national championships and the longest winning streak in NCAA women’s basketball history. Yet, for the second year in a row they stood in the locker room surrounded by cameras, tape recorders and notebook-holding visitors to answer questions of what went wrong.
Welcome to the world of UConn women’s basketball where the Huskies have won so often and in such dominating fashion, that any loss get discussed based on its historical significance. A 36-1 season would probably lead to a parade being planned at a lot of programs, but when the loss comes in the Final Four, it results in a feeling of unfinished business.
“They made one more big play than we did, it came down to one play to win the game,” Williams said.
While either Notre Dame or Baylor may be the most likely choices to start the 2018-19 season as the nation’s top-ranked team, UConn still will return Samuelson, Collier, Crystal Dangerfield and Stevens, assuming she doesn’t opt to make herself eligible for the WNBA Draft. Few teams will have a quartet as offensively gifted and diverse as UConn’s returning nucleus. Freshman Megan Walker had her growing pains, but big things are expected from her. Christyn Williams, the winner of every national high school player of the year award in addition to being named the MVP of the McDonald’s All-American Game, is coming in as is fellow McDonald’s All-American Game participant Olivia Nelson-Ododa, who created quite the stir with her performance competing against some of the best boys’ basketball players in the country at the dunk competition leading into the McDonald’s game.
Auriemma has expressed regret that more wasn’t done to get more production out of freshmen and fellow reserves Molly Bent, Batouly Camara and Kyla Irwin. Time will tell if any of them become part of the regular rotation as UConn looks to extend its NCAA Division I women’s basketball record by reaching the Final Four for a 12th season in a row.
“That’s the only requirement that players and coaches can honestly say that we want to be there every year to honestly win a championship,” Auriemma said. “Notre Dame has a chance to win a championship.”
Meanwhile for the second season in a row, UConn finds itself in a “wait ’til next year” mode something that has been a bit of unchartered territory in recent years for the mighty Huskies.
“Because of what our team standard is for every season and we don’t meet that, you don’t want to hear, ‘it is OK,” Dangerfield said. “After five months you didn’t reach your goal.”