The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
History lesson
1989-90 UConn Huskies return to celebrate Gampel Pavilion
STORRS — When Kerry Bascom took her visit to UConn, she toured most of the basketball facilities — except for the locker room inside Greer Field House.
At the time, there technically wasn’t one.
“It was a 10-by-10 locker room with five stools that we all had to share if you were going to get dressed. Then we had a communal bathroom-shower area type thing,” Bascom recalled. “I think we had two bathroom stalls, four shower heads and it was like, ‘There you go.’ It was very small. It was very cramped, and then at the end of the season they were like, ‘Pack up all your stuff, you guys have got to move out.’ When you were out of season, somebody else used the locker room.”
Picture that, and then imagine Bascom’s excitement when the Huskies moved next door to brand new Gampel Pavilion before the 1989-90 season. Finally, they had a place that felt like home, not to mention a bigger and better venue for their young, charismatic coach to sell to recruits.
As Gampel Pavilion grew, so did Geno Auriemma’s Huskies, building incrementally and sustainability before transforming into a dynasty unrivaled in the world of women’s basketball.
“Without this building, we would’ve just been another team from the Northeast that nobody knew about, nobody cared about and wasn’t going anywhere,” said Auriemma, who is now 35 years into a Hall of Fame career at UConn. “By getting this building, we were able to recruit a certain kind of kid that could make us as good as any team in the country.”
Bascom, a 2,000-point scorer and the program’s first All-American in 1991, returned Sunday to celebrate Gampel Pavilion’s 30th anniversary. Several members of the 1989-90 team on which Bascom starred were honored at halftime of UConn’s game against Tulsa.
“I try to come back two or three times a year just to catch a game, but this was the first time I’ve been back where my entire team was back,” Bascom said. “I haven’t seen some of them since I left here in 1991. It was an incredible time here to get together and talk about the memories. In some ways, it doesn’t feel like 30 years when you’re talking about the field house and coming into here.”
Memories, yes, there were lots of memories. Standing a few rows up from the home bench following the Huskies’ 92-34 victory, Bascom glanced up at the 11 national championship banners hanging in the rafters and got nostalgic when thinking back to the first game she ever played at Gampel. On Jan. 31, 1990, UConn beat Georgetown 76-54.
“I just remember coming in and having space,” Bascom said. “Lights that weren’t in your eyes depending on which angle you were shooting at the basket, and no leaks in the roof so you knew where not to run during the game when it was raining. (At Greer Field House), we had a curtain that went around the court, and they had baseball practice outside it. … It was just a huge difference.”
“It actually felt like a collegiate game, as opposed to the track with the curtain pulled around the courts,” added Debbie Baer, who is now a color analyst for UConn IMG Radio. “It had the excitement that something big was happening.”
The Huskies won 25 games in 1990, including the Big East regular season championship, but lost to Clemson in the NCAA tournament, 61-59, when Bascom’s shot rimmed out at the buzzer. To this day, Auriemma still replays that scene in his mind.
“All the time, all the time, all the time,” Auriemma said Sunday. “All the time. That shot was devastating that it didn’t go in. It made me feel like we’re never going beyond the first or second round of the NCAA tournament. It actually felt like that. It felt like we had one opportunity to make this work, and that opportunity’s gone away.”
Not quite. The Huskies made their first Final Four the next season, losing 61-55 to a powerhouse Virginia program in New Orleans. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“We thought it was a great thing to get to the Sweet 16,” Baer said. “Then there’s the Elite Eight, and you make it, and all of a sudden it’s the Final Four. We were caught up in it and didn’t really realize, the first time, ‘OK this is what we do. We keep on going.’ It’s after the fact that you realize, ‘Oh wow, we actually did that.’
“In UConn world today, it’s like, so what?”