NCAA WOMEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP FINAL FOUR: UCONN VS SOUTH CAROLINA

April 2, 2022

Geno Auriemma

Target Center

UConn Huskies

Finals Press Conference

Q. Back in December, the Georgia Tech game when you guys lost, I remember you said that at the time somehow, someway I don't have the ability at this point in time to affect my players, to make sure that we're in a better place mentally and physically and to play the kind of basketball we need to play. How do you think back on that moment now, and do you feel like there's been growth? Was there change in that area of being able to affect the players that you felt like you couldn't back in December?

GENO AURIEMMA: I think coaches go through periods in their careers or during seasons when they feel like it's out of your control. You know, that you don't have the ability to effect the changes that you want to effect. Sometimes it has to do with who the players are and what the circumstances are, who is healthy, who is not, whether they're a mature team or immature team, whether you have handled things the right way all along. A lot of things go into it.

I don't think anybody was in a really good state of mind going into that Georgia Tech game, and I think not having Paige was just part of it. This team needed a lot of growing up to do. Obviously, I think they have or we wouldn't be playing tomorrow night. If we had stayed the same, if we were the same team mentally and physically that we were back then, I don't think we would still be playing, so...

And even yesterday there was a growing up moment at halftime in the locker room that took place, so it's never ending. It's never ending. There will be something tomorrow.

I remember the championship game here when we played in '95 when Rebecca Lobo became Rebecca Lobo the last 15 minutes of the second half. Before that I was constantly, like, you know, if she doesn't do something soon, we're going to lose. It can't just be -- and she took over the game. It took her that long to finally see the light, and when she saw it...

So who knows? That particular time was not a good time for me against Georgia Tech.

Q. Coaching against Dawn tomorrow, what's it going to be like for you personally, tactically as it relates to their defense and Aliyah, and also knowing that both of you have never lost a championship game before? It's a lot more for you than her, obviously, but she's undefeated in the finals too so far.

GENO AURIEMMA: I don't think I've won one National Championship, and I don't think Dawn is going to win any either. I think her team has a great chance to win a National Championship. I think my team has a chance to win a National Championship. But in terms of me personally or Dawn personally, I don't think either of us -- at least I don't. I don't want to speak for Dawn. But I feel like once this game starts, once you get to tip-off, you kind of relinquish about 80% of the control to the players, and they now have the ability to win it or they don't. And you can coach the best game of your life and lose. You can make the most mistakes you've ever made coaching a game, and your team will find a way to win.

I've been in this situation a lot against a lot of coaches, and I've taken the same approach with every single one. It's not about them. It's not about me. It's always -- it's UConn versus South Carolina.

Q. Dawn Staley was talking earlier about the impact Debbie Ryan had on her career as a coach and a player. What lessons do you recall taking away from Debbie when you were an assistant there, and what do you recall, if anything, about playing Virginia in that first National Championship run?

GENO AURIEMMA: Yeah. Well, I had been coaching a lot as an assistant coach, obviously, and it really was an opportunity that came out of nowhere. It certainly wasn't something I was looking for. I was pretty happy doing what I was doing. And through our connections with Cathy Rush Basketball Camp in Philadelphia, somehow or another I ended up at an interview with them, and Debbie hired me. It was my first experience. I had already coached at St. Joe's for a couple of years with Jim Foster, but UVA was a different story.

Much bigger school. Bigger everything. Bigger expectations. Bigger -- just bigger in every way. So running a big program like that was something I had never experienced before. Recruiting at the level was something I had never experienced before. The organization that it takes to make that happen on a regular basis, you know, was completely new to me. And Debbie treated me like I treat my staff. She told me there's your office, and make sure we win.

So she gives you a lot of room to figure things out, and whatever impact you want to have, you can have. I think we did some great things together, and as it so happened, our first Final Four we're playing Virginia.

I've said this before, the world does funny things to you, man, if you are around long enough. I think there were a lot of players, including Tonya Cardoza and Dawn Staley, two people obviously that I know, that Debbie had a tremendous effect on. It's probably no surprise that they went into coaching.

Q. Two-parter. The first one is the clutch free-throw shooting. The other night you were 16 of 18 at the end of the third quarter all the way through the fourth. NC State, you hit a bunch down the road. I remember you saying the other day, I have kids that want the ball at the right time to make the free-throws, including a freshman in Azzi. What is it about late-game situations that you seem to hit the free-throws you need them to?

The second part is you mentioned the approach -- you use the same approach for all these Final Four or championship games. No one else has gone 11-0 in any sport in the title games. Maybe Michael Jordan. But what is this approach that seems to work every single time you've been in this spot?

GENO AURIEMMA: I think for me the approach that's worked the best is make sure you bring the best team. So I would venture to say that all 11 times that we've won -- maybe there was one time -- but I don't think we surprised anybody by winning because we had the best team. We had the best team all year. We had the best talented players. We played harder than everybody. We were just better than everybody.

The ten times we lost, sometimes we had the best team and didn't win. Sometimes we didn't have the best team and didn't win. One thing was for sure, every time we did win, we had the best team, and we played great that particular night.

Can that happen again Monday night? I don't think when we got on the plane to come out here, anybody in America thought we were the best team coming out here. So that's probably not the case this year, but you don't have to be the best team for a long time. You just have to be the best team for 40 minutes, or play the best for 40 minutes.

As far as the free-throw shooting is concerned, I'm as shocked as anybody that they're going in because all year long we have not been a good free-throw shooting team. Then there are times when we have been. And I think our free-throw shooting is exactly like our team. When we're good, we are really, really good. Like when we're good, we're making every free-throw, right?

When we're not good, it's not fun to watch. Monday night, hey, I hope it comes down to free-throws. Then we take our chances. If we don't get a chance to shoot big free-throws Monday night, that means we're in deep do-do, right? That means the game is already over.

Q. I was curious. You look around women's basketball, and a lot of the top programs, the top coaches, they're older. They're closer to retirement than not. You and Tara are both 68. Gary just stepped down. Vic is in his 60s. First of all, are you concerned that we have -- there's a drought, there's a pipeline drought? Where are the good young coaches? What's going to happen when you eventually do retire? Do you feel good about your program and other programs? Are they going to be handed off to other people?

GENO AURIEMMA: I do. I do. I think a lot of times, the better school you're at, the more resources, the more opportunities, the better coach you become; and if you don't, you get fired. So maybe all these old coaches that you are talking about -- and you missed a couple of them too. I don't want to go into who they are. I don't want them mad at me, but you missed a couple of them.

Q. There's a lot of senior citizens.

GENO AURIEMMA: There's a lot of experienced coaches out there, right? And maybe we've been so good for so long we've overshadowed some of the good, young coaches, and I think that's happened a little bit.

But I do think there are a lot of really good young coaches that just haven't had the space yet to grow in, and I think you're starting to see -- I think all those upsets that happened this year in the NCAA Tournament, I don't know for sure, but that was a lot of young coaches coaching those teams that went on the road and beat good teams on the road.

So they just need a little more time. I'm sure athletic directors need to be a little more patient. I think athletic directors a lot of times do a horrible job of hiring the right coaches for their school. They just look at somebody and look at their credentials and say, hey, yeah, that looks good without really, really digging in deep.

I think as that gets better and space becomes more available -- you know, if I left UConn tomorrow, some 60-year-old isn't going to get the job. It's going to be a young coach who is really good, who really knows what they're doing, and is going to come in and hopefully keep us exactly where we are right now, if not better. I think that's probably the case everywhere.

Q. You've talked about the trials of the season, the difficulties you've gone through. I'm wondering, has this season tested you in new ways as a coach, and have you actually -- you've been here so many times, but have you learned some new things about yourself as a coach through this season?

GENO AURIEMMA: Yeah. Maybe every coach goes through this at some point, but for the longest time, I think what made us successful was I thought that I had the ability to bring any kid into my program and make them into exactly what I wanted them to be. As each year has gone by, they started to see the fallacy in that. Not that I have not still tried to do that, but I think this year more than any other year, it's -- I think it's hit me more than ever before that you really can't change people that don't want to change. And those that do, you're going to have a huge impact on them.

You can't change the team that's in front of you. No matter how much you try, sometimes you just can't. I used to get real frustrated at why can't I change this? Because of circumstances, I think this year I've more times just thrown my hands up and said it is what it is and let's deal with it and let's move on and see what happens. It hasn't made me any less neurotic or anything like that or paranoid about losing. I still have my assistants going, you know, we're doing a lot of really good things. I'm, like, yeah, name one. Because I refuse to see the good things that we're doing. I already know what they are.

I always feel like my job as a coach is to only see the things that could help us lose. So if every single day I'm attacking those things that can help us lose, I don't have it in me to see the ten things we're doing that are great that are helping us win. All I care about is if I don't fix these things, we're going to lose. That's a lousy way to live too, man. (Laughing). That's a lousy way to live, but it works for me. Wouldn't work for somebody else, I don't think.

Q. I cover Lindsay Whalen's team, and she's actually brought up a couple of times when she talks about coaching. I'm wondering about what you remember when she played for you on the national team.

GENO AURIEMMA: I've gone on the record, I think, of saying this. When I first saw Lindsay play, it was when she was a player at the U, and I remember praying that they would lose because I knew that we would have to play them in the Final Four, and I knew that they were going to be really, really, really difficult the way that team was put together. She reminded me so much of Jen Rizzotti, the kid that I had coached.

And I've always loved her competitive spirit. She has a personality that's infectious to everybody else. She's a great leader because of that. She's An All-star, and she's a WNBA champion. And I asked her to come off the bench and be a role player for the Olympic team, and she did it about as well as it could ever be done by anybody and did it twice without ever batting an eye. To me, that's what champions do. They do exactly what's asked of them. She's one of my favorite people, and she's one of my favorite people that I've ever coached.

Q. Geno, I want to ask you about Dawn, and particularly if you see some similarities in the way she's built her program from where it was to the way you built yours all those years ago?

And if there are some things you have in common that are uniquely Philadelphia. When you think Philly basketball, how do you see that manifest in her? Then, also, if you could comment on Swin Cash making it into the Hall of Fame.

GENO AURIEMMA: I think anybody who builds a program that can get to the Final Four and win a National Championship and put themselves in the position to do that multiple times has been able to do it by building a solid foundation, a solid base. And that starts usually in your staff, and she's had a great staff; recruiting the type of kid that you want to coach that wants to play for you. She's very, very demanding and very exact in what she wants and what she expects from her players. They play exceptionally hard defensively. Doing all those things then allows you to recruit a team like they have right now, you know, high school All-Americans who want to win a National Championship. And once you do that, then that train is going, and it's not going to stop as long as she's there.

The Philly part maybe is just the drive of -- Philly people are kind of -- maybe it's because we were close to New York, and we have this inferiority complex that we have to prove to everybody that we're smarter and tougher and better than everybody else. I think all of us from that area carry that around. We know everything about everything. We're smarter than you are. We're tougher than you are. And whatever we don't know, it's because we don't want to know; whatever you do know that we don't know, it's because you don't know anything about what we know. We rationalize all that shit, trust me.

I said this before, right? Philadelphians, they cheer their champions better than anybody, and they boo their champions better than anybody.

Q. Paige took a couple of spills yesterday, and I wanted to see how she was doing. Are you concerned at all about her going up against a defense like South Carolina. And also, how are you managing her rehab and playing time going into tomorrow's game?

GENO AURIEMMA: First, I want to finish up with Dom. The committee voting Swin Cash into the Hall of Fame might have been the easiest vote they'll ever have in all of women's basketball history. I don't know anyone who has been -- and they never saw her in high school obviously. These voters never saw her in high school. I've never coached anybody who has been more relentless in pursuit of what she wants than Swin, and I don't mean just in basketball. I mean, this woman is a relentless human being. When she sets her mind on getting something, she gets it.

I don't know that she said I'm going to be in the Hall of Fame someday, but I know that everything she's ever wanted, she's gotten it, and now she's got what she deserves.

As far as Paige is concerned, yeah, she took a couple of falls, but that's every game. People bang her around. They knock her around. There were a couple of plays yesterday that were just mind-boggling to watch. It's the part of the season right now where if I'm managing her time, that means I'm worried about the game we're going to play nine months from now that's really meaningful, and she won't have enough time to recover between now and nine months from now.

So I'm not really interested in managing her time. I'm interested in managing her performance. So as long as she's getting the things done that we need done, I'm going to leave her out there. If she's struggling a little bit with whatever, physically or her game, then I'm going to take her out. She's not going to play 40 minutes. How many, though? I don't know. Depends on the game. And she's going to have her hands full tomorrow. We're playing probably the best defense in America.

Q. Obviously, you and South Carolina have played before. I'm just curious your thoughts on Aliyah Boston, kind of what the -- without giving away too much, what the game plan to try to contain her would be.

GENO AURIEMMA: I don't think it's a stretch to say that she might be the hardest person in America to guard. She scores if there's one, two, three, four people on her. It doesn't matter. She's able to carve out the space she wants. She gets the ball on the rim whenever she wants. She rebounds whichever ball she goes after. She just has a knack.

And I think when you can anchor your team with that, then you can go into every game as a coach pretty confident that you might not have other pieces working that day, but you got that piece working. That's the most important. I think she's the most important person in the country in terms of what she does for her team.

How do we guard her? I don't know. I'm open for suggestions.

Q. I'm curious. I'm guessing in your career you've been asked this question, but I've never asked you this. When you took over in 1985, was there something about Storrs or UConn that you saw and thought, yeah, this is where I can build a foundation?

GENO AURIEMMA: Yeah. It reminded me of how I grew up, and I don't mean in Norristown, Pennsylvania either. I mean in Italy. No sidewalks. Stone walls. No heat. No electricity. I thought, wow, this is just like home.

It was very, very rural, very out of the way, very parochial. Very much an intramural program instead of a basketball program. The only thing I saw when I got up there was a really, really great group of people working there. That really was the first impression that I had. They have a great group of people working here.

The other thing was this is an opportunity to be a head coach, and those don't come along very often. So my only objective going up there was if I can take this team from last to the middle of the Big East or fourth or third -- I'm going to give myself four years and if I can't do it, I'm done. If I do do it, then I'm going to go coach at a place where we can win consistently.

Things kind of happened and we won Big East Championship my fourth year, and then I started having a family, and I've been stuck there all this time.

Q. Geno, two-part question. The two other Naismith Hall of Famers from UConn had their numbers retired. Will Swin have her number retired at some point? And the second part is what has been the most impressive thing about Swin, do you feel, in the 20 years since she graduated?

GENO AURIEMMA: Swin is pissed we haven't retired her number already in anticipation of making the Hall of Fame. That's Swin. I think I touched on it. Her teammates, whenever we talk, I started to call Swin, Swin Cash Inc. She had her hands in so many things. She got involved in so many things. She's such a grinder at life. It's not even shocking that she's working in the front office of an NBA team. She probably wants to own an NBA team or probably wants to own the WNBA. Who knows?

But to me, her willingness to do whatever she needed to do to get what she wanted and was a great teammate -- I mean, if you can have those two things, that kind of competitive greatness, which she has that in a supply that I've never seen before how competitive she is. And she's competitive in basketball, and she's competitive in life. I saw that in high school, and it's still there today. She's somewhat humble, and I know very appreciative of this announcement.

Thank you.