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NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FINAL FOUR

March 28, 2017

Geno Auriemma

Dallas, Texas

RICK NIXON: Good morning and welcome to today's Women's Final Four head coaches' media teleconference. For the next several minutes, you'll have the opportunity to visit with the head coach of the UConn Huskies, Geno Auriemma. UConn will be playing in its record 10th straight Women's Final Four in 2017 and will be playing for a record 12th national championship.

I'll bring Geno into the conversation. Geno, just a quick opening statement, your feelings on coming back to the Women's Final Four here in Dallas.

COACH AURIEMMA: Thank you, Rick.

Like you said, we've been fortunate enough to be in the Final Four, this is our 10th year in a row. It just seems like it gets harder and harder to believe because it is getting harder and harder to accomplish this. The teams that you have to beat year in and year out are getting better and better.

This year certainly with Albany and Syracuse, UCLA, then Oregon. We're very fortunate to be able to make another trip to the Final Four. It doesn't get any easier from here. The teams that are going to be in Dallas are obviously great, great teams.

We're anxious to get down there. We're leaving today. It's a real quick turnaround from last night. But I think once we get settled in there tonight, we'll be like everybody else, and we'll get ready for Friday night.

RICK NIXON: We'll go ahead and take questions for Coach Auriemma.

Q. Coach, you said something to the effect last night, on a taped segment on the broadcast, about the stars of this year's team kind of taking on the identity that the previous players have left. I'm not sure if there was any buy-in from them. What kind of a process was that for them to take the next step from role players to 'stars' or the ones who were leading the way?
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, that's the big unknown going into the season, when you're asking kids to do something that they haven't necessarily done to the level that you're going to ask them to do it. You have to hope you have the right kind of kids, the right kind of people.

Certainly they're good players. I mean, obviously we wouldn't be where we are if they weren't really good players.

But, you know, in order to accomplish what we accomplished, you can't just have good players, you have to have a certain maturity about you. You have to approach things, you know, in a way where you do take full responsibility. You don't have the luxury that they had last year of, Well, if I play great, we win by a lot. If I don't play great, we win by almost a lot. That was the world they lived in.

Now you're asking them to go immediately to, If I don't play great, we're going to lose. So generally you have to suffer a little bit and lose a little bit to have that realization hit home.

But for these kids, they showed a maturity that I didn't know if they had or not. They looked around and made a quick decision early on, It's on all of us. They all took responsibility. That's why we had the success that we had.

Q. Last night on the telecast, there was a reference to last summer, after the game you played against Mississippi State in the tournament last year, that Vic Schaefer reached out to you, you got together. Is that accurate? What was the conversation like when y'all met?
COACH AURIEMMA: Somebody asked me about that. I didn't know exactly where that came from. I had a chance to speak with Vic after the tournament last year. We ran into each other in Houston. I don't know what we were doing down there. I wish I knew what it was. I can't even remember what it was.

We just ended up talking over, you know, a drink and some food. Believe me, I didn't give Vic anything he didn't already know. We just discussed, you know, in general what we do offensively, what our philosophy is. It was just us basically going back and forth on a couple ideas. It wasn't me, believe me, saying, Hey, Vic, if you do this, this and this, next year you guys are going to be in the Final Four. There wasn't anything like that at all.

I think what they did this season was remarkable, not because all of a sudden they're in the Final Four, but because they already had a good team. They changed the look of their team, even though they had a lot of the same players back.

He did some things that were a little bit different than they did last season, and it showed in their play. It was never more evident than it was the other night against Baylor.

They're an unbelievably good team. He's done an amazing job. Believe me, I take none of the credit for that. Trust me.

Q. That was just generally a chance meeting as much as anything? That wasn't like he reached out and y'all planned to meet or anything like that?
COACH AURIEMMA: No. He had mentioned to me, Hey, I want to come up to practice, I want to come up, spend a couple days. It never materialized for a lot of different reasons. I was still involved with USA Basketball. Obviously, he's got his thing going. We could never really put it together.

It just kind of happened that we just had one night where we just happened to be sitting and talking. It just was good. I enjoyed it. It was a learning thing for me, too. They do things that we don't do. We do things they don't do. Probably the same conversation you have with a lot of coaches in the off-season.

Q. Like you said last night, this is a different Mississippi State team than what you played last year. Because of what they did to Baylor, I'm assuming that you don't have to convince your players that this isn't the same team you beat by 60 last year?
COACH AURIEMMA: No, no, I don't have to convince them of that at all. The guys that beat them by 60 aren't really playing in this game, you know. We have three players that scored a lot of points that night and did a lot of things. They're not here.

Mississippi State has, if I'm not mistaken, almost their entire team back. And they're better. You know, we haven't gotten to where we are by pretending that anybody is not as good, or is not good enough to beat us. That's not how we've gotten to where we are.

If we're not going to take Oregon lightly, we're certainly not going to take Mississippi State lightly.

Q. Coach, I want to ask you a question about your coaching staff. As you mentioned a while ago, you had to coach Team USA in the Olympics. How do you keep your coaching staff focused when you're busy doing stuff in order to keep this thing going?
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, the good thing about it was I didn't have to miss any what you would call crucial time. You know, a lot of stuff that I did maybe was in September when the staff was maybe out recruiting. So maybe we didn't get a kid or didn't spend as much time with a kid because I wasn't there. But, you know, I don't worry about that that much.

I was never away during practice. I was never away during games. I was never away during any of the crucial times or any of the important times that you have to be there to make it all work.

On the other side of that is, whenever I'm away, whether it's for a day, a week or a month, my coaching staff is so good, they don't miss me one bit. And my players kind of enjoy it when I'm not around, to be honest with you, because I'm a pain in the ass.

It actually does everybody good when I'm not around (laughter). My staff, I don't have the kind of coaching staff where, you know, they follow me around 24/7 and they have to check with me on every single decision that has to be made in our program. I'm lucky in that respect. If I didn't have that kind of coaching staff, we might have had some slippage in what we're doing, but that wasn't the case at all.

Q. The SEC with Mississippi State, then we saw Florida, you look at South Carolina, I mean, it's just amazing. Before it was Tennessee. I know the conference, they keep bringing these teams in action. Can you talk about that.
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, I think it's the natural progression of things. Everything goes in cycles. There isn't anything that lasts indefinitely. There was a time when the SEC referred to itself as 'The always difficult SEC.' Not by the commentators, it really used to bug a lot of people in this part of the world that the SEC was somehow better than every conference in the country.

They had some great coaches, don't get me wrong, and they had some great teams. The last time I checked, there's only one SEC team that won a national championship, and that's Tennessee.

All of a sudden that kind of changed. A lot of the coaches are no longer coaching in that league. Schools that were struggling back then, whether it was Kentucky, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, obviously they won a national championship, but I don't know if they were in the SEC then or not.

So, you know, South Carolina obviously being the most recent, along with Mississippi State. So you've got teams that really weren't prominent when Tennessee was dominant. Auburn was more dominant. Georgia was. Vanderbilt was.

Now they still have a lot of quality teams, it's just different names. That's what's supposed to happen in college basketball. Each year there's supposed to be more teams that get better and better.

Q. Geno, if you could not coach UConn, what would be the team that you would most want to coach, male or female? I'll let you go NBA, Olympics, anywhere else.
COACH AURIEMMA: Oh (laughter). Well, I've had the privilege of coaching the best team in the history of the world, and that's the USA national team. I've had a chance to coach them for eight years. If you were to ask me if I could end my career only coaching one team for the rest of my coaching career, I don't think it could get better than that, especially with the players that I've had during those eight years.

That's about the ultimate in terms of the talent that I was coaching, the passion that they play with, the experience that they have. Just everybody that they are, you know.

When you've coached at that level, you know, you've coached those players, it's pretty hard to say, I would rather coach anybody else.

Q. Geno, I wondered if I could ask two things real quick. The first being, when you look at the coaches in this group, you and Tara coached the Olympic team, and Dawn is the new Olympic coach. You both coached against her when she was a player. Could you put into historical perspective having three people who have had that much involvement with the national team, still right at the top of the college game. Then, if you could maybe talk a little bit about Vic Schaefer, somebody who was an assistant for a long time, won a national championship as an assistant, then became a head coach. I know he had been a head coach before, but now is a head coach of a program that is in a Final Four.
COACH AURIEMMA: Yeah, it really is an interesting dynamic in Dallas this weekend. Obviously Tara has been to a number of Final Fours. I thought about that yesterday, about the Final Four history that they have, that we have, USA Basketball history that she has, that I have. Then you throw into that, you know, a former player of hers, a former assistant of mine in the Olympics, a great player at the Olympics that played for Tara and coached on my staff.

You really couldn't orchestrate something like that. It kind of just has to happen. It's unique. You don't see that generally anywhere, much less in a Final Four.

Then, as far as Vic is concerned, you know, when you're an assistant for a long time, you always worry, Am I going to get a great opportunity? Then, when you get an opportunity, Am I ever going to be able to take advantage of it? Then you find yourself in the exact same place you were when you were an assistant.

That to me is a testament to how much he's worked, how hard he's worked, how much he's given to the game, what he's getting in return. It's what he deserves. You went to a place that never played at this level, and has been there now in a short period of time.

The coaches that are in this Final Four, none of them are getting there by accident. Nobody stumbled into this thing, believe me.

Q. Napheesa Collier obviously had a great season. You seem to have a fun relationship because you're always teasing her about something. She plays it pretty close to the vest with the media. You don't see a lot of her personality. Can you share a little bit more of her personality, what kind of drives a kid like that, especially the type of sophomore season she's had.
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, in some ways she's very introverted, like she comes across in the press conferences, being interviewed. But away from all that, she's kind of a kid. She doesn't take herself or things too seriously. She doesn't really stress about much, including guarding people. She doesn't really hold onto things. If she makes a mistake, she doesn't wallow in it. She just moves on to the next thing.

She has tremendous confidence in herself. It's a confidence based on she's worked at it, she's put the time in. She has a lot of God-given things.

She's a little more mature than her years as a player. As a person, she's exactly her age. Maybe that helps her a lot.

Q. Coach, Vic Schaefer made a lot of changes to his lineup and rotation, team runs about 10 deep or so. How does that increase the difficulty in game planning against Mississippi State? What do you expect to see against Mississippi State on Friday?
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, I think Vic did some really courageous things. It takes a little bit of courage to, one, extend your bench, because you have to live with some of the challenges that come from that. I mean, there's a lot of challenges when you only try to play six players or seven players, like we have right now. That's not by design, believe me.

But there's a lot of challenges when you're trying to play eight or nine, as well. He's done some great things. He's moved some starters, made them come off the bench a couple games.

I think he's done what good coaches should do: he's followed his instincts, he's followed his gut, and he's done what he thinks is best for his team. It's worked out. It's worked out great.

You know, a lot of times a lot is made over how many players somebody has. This team has 10 players or nine players. This team has five post players that are all really, really good. That is a huge problem. The only thing you can console yourself with, only five of them play at one time.

What you got to do is you got to deal with the five that are on the floor. We don't necessarily try to get into how many players are they going to play. We're more worried about what is their style of play, what are those players going to do when they get in there, what is their team identity, what are they going to try to get accomplished against us, and how do we combat that.

But I think what he's done has gotten them to where they are. I don't think that's going to change. I don't think there's any easy answer for it.

Q. Geno, I wanted to get your impressions of Chloe Pavlech, a first-year GA on your staff. Would you say her relationship with your players is almost like peer-to-peer, given they're basically all within the same age bracket?
COACH AURIEMMA: Yeah, Chloe has been great. I've really enjoyed getting to know her. She's got a great way about her. She really wants to learn. She's in a tough situation, though. That's the hardest part for someone who is getting into coaching right out of college. You're not a player, so the players don't look at you as a player, because they know you talk to the coaching staff all the time.

You're not one of the coaches because you're not really, like, a coach yet. You're someone who's in limbo all the time. Navigating that is not easy. If you try to be too much like a player, then the coaches are like, You're not too serious about coaching. If you're going to be too much like a coach, the players are not going to confide in anything.

You really have to walk the fine line. I think she's done a great job of that. She'll be here again next year. That will make it a little bit easier for her.

My impression of her right now is that she's on the right track to move up in this business.

Q. Geno, from a big-picture standpoint, so much has been written and said about the streak, what you've accomplished, the 10 straight Final Fours, all that sort of thing. From the inside, is there something that gets overlooked, from your standpoint, maybe under-emphasized that people need to pay more attention to about what's happened at UConn in terms of the success? Second question. This year's team, there were even some quotes from you after last year kind of hinting that this year may be different. When did you learn in the course of the process that maybe things weren't going to be all that different with this team, that there was maybe a special spark in this year's team?
COACH AURIEMMA: I don't know that there is anything magical certainly about what we do. Not at all. I think what you see is what you get. We try to stress some things that we think are important.

There's a lot of teams that are really good. I mean, I bet you if you talked to all the coaches at the Final Four this weekend, you might get four completely different ideas about how to run a basketball program and how to manage a season. They all got there, and they're all successful, you know.

I don't think there's anything we do that's exclusive, that's revolutionary and different. What we do is what works for us. What works for us, you know, is the attention to little things that we think are important.

That doesn't mean anything we do is different. It's not. There are things that exist in every program. We just try to emphasize every one of those little things.

We try to recruit kids that love being coached. You say, Doesn't everybody? No, not everybody recruits kids that love being coached. A lot of coaches recruit kids that are really good players. That doesn't mean they love being coached.

We try, anyway, to recruit kids that we think want to be held accountable. They want the responsibility that comes with playing at Connecticut, having to live up to a certain expectation. They want to share. They don't want to necessarily be the, you know, man, so to speak, on the team. They want to share. They don't need to be the center of attention.

That's so easy. Why doesn't every coach do that? They don't feel like it or they don't think it's important. I don't know.

I'm just trying to say what we try to do is try to find the kids that work for us, for me, for how I am, what I value. That doesn't mean that it's the best thing or the right thing or the wrong thing. It just works for me.

Obviously, there's a lot of teams that go to the Final Four. They may have the same philosophy, they may not. It works for them.

So, you know, that's the best way I can answer that.

Q. This year's team. When in the course of either practice or the season did you get the feeling that this might be something special, that there wouldn't be the expected dropoff, even with all the talent you lost from last season?
COACH AURIEMMA: Last night, about 9:00 (laughter).

You know, there was a time during the first two weeks of practice when I knew we weren't going to be very good, 'cause we couldn't be very good the way we were practicing, the way our players were approaching certain things.

With two minutes left in the Florida State game, the opening game of the season, I was convinced that we got major problems; this team is going to really learn a huge lesson that they haven't had to learn up until now, and it's going to hit 'em tonight, and we'll be better off for it. If it doesn't hit 'em tonight, it's going to hit 'em against Baylor, for sure.

We ended up winning that Florida State game. Probably shouldn't have. We probably shouldn't have. Then we won the Baylor game. I think from that day on, there was this sense of, We can be pretty good if we can beat those two teams.

Then when we won at Notre Dame, I think that sealed the deal. That pretty much made everybody on the team feel like, All right, maybe we should stop talking about who we don't have and start talking about who we do have.

Q. Coach, going all the way back to the Chattanooga game, a game you win by almost 40. I remember talking to Gabby afterwards. It seemed at that moment they embraced the fact they needed to play their game at a different level, to the UConn standard. Even though you won the close game against Florida State, is that around the time in which you think they kind of adopted, We're not living up to what was here before us? The second part is, talk about Bridgeport, the support you got there, even with it moving out of there next year.
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, I have a theory on today's players. They will work very, very, very hard. They will practice hard. They will compete at a real, real high level, up until a point. I don't think our kids are that much different than anybody else.

When we were getting ready to play, let's say, Notre Dame, or getting ready to play Baylor, or Texas, you could see the different look in their eyes in practice, the different mindset, as opposed to when we were getting ready to play a team that they didn't think was good enough to beat them.

Maybe that comes from winning all the time. Maybe that is just natural. But I think maybe around that time, and that's why I think this year it was hard to coach at times, because you were trying to get them to understand, We're not coaching for the regular season. You can't just decide who's good and who's not. We have to be great every night.

It took a while for us to really embrace that. The way you usually teach players to embrace that is you bench them. You say, Look, you're not going to play hard every night, you're not going to play as much. We didn't have the luxury of doing that this year.

We really had to embrace it as a team or we weren't going to have the kind of success that we had. They did. It's to their credit. And they deserve all the credit.

Q. And Bridgeport, the support?
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, I heard a rumor that the NCAA is thinking about moving the regionals to one site for all the regionals, which -- I don't know if the NCAA is saying that, but people are suggesting that, which automatically doesn't make it a regional anymore. The term 'regional' means people in the region get to see the team live.

I've also been concerned about, Well, we're going to move the regionals out of the Northeast. I'm sure there's a lot of anti-Connecticut sentiment out there, Let's get these guys on the road.

Look, I don't care where we play. I don't care what time we play. I don't care if we play in a parking lot with the lights on at midnight. We've had some teams that are going to win, no matter what.

I understand the idea that you don't want somebody being close to home all the time. But one thing we're saying is, Well, we're going to move the regionals to home court. Maybe now we can't do that. We have to move them to one place. Those are two really big extremes.

So a place like Bridgeport, whether we're in it or not - obviously if we're in it, it's better. Our attendance in Bridgeport was higher than almost three regions combined.

It's a great place to have a regional. Well, they say, Only if Connecticut is in it. Which regional is any damn good without the home team anyway?

So, you know, there's no secret why the crowd is the way it is at Bridgeport. One, they love basketball. Two, they think we're going to be in it. They're going to buy the tickets ahead of time. Even if we're not in it, X number of people are still going to show up because they're huge basketball fans here.

So I'm not surprised by the turnout, not surprised by the enthusiasm of the crowd, by the support. It was like that in Albany. It was like that in Rhode Island a few years ago. There's a lot of really knowledgeable basketball fans up this way.

We'll see what happens in the future.

Q. Coach, I was wondering if you could comment, Morgan William had sort of an amazing game, she's a real little person. She's listed at 5'5", but I'm sure smaller than that. Can you talk about when you're facing a guard that's that small. She didn't have any turnovers. She can be a difficult person to guard and stop. Also, what do you think it does when somebody like that has a game like that? I think a lot of people probably identify with her, were cheering for her.
COACH AURIEMMA: Well, it was certainly one of the more remarkable performances that I've seen in the NCAAs, especially by a kid that isn't necessarily used to those kind of performances.

So for her to have the kind of game she had in the biggest spot she's probably ever been in, obviously her game is way bigger than her size. You know, it was fearless. That's the best way I can describe it. She played the game fearlessly. A lot of times kids get in that situation, they're afraid to lose. She was playing all out, and only one thing in her mind: we're going to win.

I was riveted to the TV the entire game. I was really, really impressed with their team as a whole, but she was just incredible.

I'm going to tell Crystal Dangerfield, who may be able to look her eye-to-eye, This is a big game that could be won by little people, so you better get your butt in gear.

RICK NIXON: Thanks, Geno. We appreciate you being with us today. Congratulations. We look forward to seeing you here in Dallas this afternoon.

COACH AURIEMMA: Thank you, Rick. Thanks for having me.

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