Geno Auriemma sits at the intermission of the 2021-22 UConn women’s basketball season, the couple of days between a tumultuous regular season and the postseason that will determine how far the Huskies have come — and gone. At his desk in the Werth Center, he is surrounded by 11 championship trophies, all reminders that for decades he has been the one with the answers, and yet, he has left his office these last three months questioning himself more than ever.
His toughest season? Most challenging? How about complicated?
“Complicated,” he quickly agrees. “That’s a good word. Complicated and never more questioning. I used to be pretty good at saying ‘this is what we’re going to do,’ and I knew it would work. I found myself this year, more than any other year, asking will this be what we need? I was going home every day questioning, what am I doing? Am I putting these kids in the best position possible to win games? And I’m helping them navigate all this? And if the person in charge is searching for the right path, how can they know?
In a one-on-one with The Courant this week, the Hall of Fame coach offered a guided tour of a season like no other for his program: Paige Buckers’ injury, his approach to managing a depleted roster, the midseason losses that left him, at one point, wondering if he could fix what was broken.
“Given the magnitude of the injuries, and adding the COVID layer to it, knowing what the COVID experience was like the year before, you’re already dealing with a damaged product,” Auriemma said. “Kids are coming off a down experience. Now you throw this at them? It was incredibly difficult, incredibly frustrating. I try to put myself in [the players’] shoes and wonder, ‘If I’m feeling like this, what are they feeling?’”
‘The way the rest of the word lives’
Auriemma identified the low point as Jan. 10. The Huskies, already without Bueckers, Azzi Fudd and Aubrey Griffin, learned before their game at Oregon that Christyn Williams would be out due to COVID-19 protocols. Oregon, meanwhile, was getting its key injured players back. The Ducks won 79-52, the first time in 18 years UConn had lost twice to unranked teams in a season.
“I’ve never been as low in my career as I was after the Oregon game,” Auriemma said. “I couldn’t tell you 99 percent of the things that have been said about our team, but I did see one thing after the Oregon game that said, ‘UConn routed,’ and I thought, ‘When was the last time you saw that? UConn routed,’ That’s when it hit me, like, ‘holy crap. This is where we are? This is what they’re saying? We got routed? Oh my God.’ That’s when you think, ‘Man, this is the way the rest of the world lives. I can’t live like this This is not who we are. That may have been the start of the turnaround.”
How did UConn get there? After winning the first three games, UConn ran into top-ranked South Carolina in a No 1-vs.-No. 2 game, the type Auriemma’s teams have won more often than not regardless of where they are. Though Bueckers and Fudd were playing, UConn lost 73-57 in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament in the Bahamas on Nov 22.
“We came back from the Bahamas [and] I had all these questions in my mind,” Auriemma said. “Practices the next three days were like they were back in the day, old school kind of practices. Part of me thought, ‘We need to be harder. We need to be tougher, mentally and physically. We need to be better than we are.’ At the end of those three days, part of me felt, ‘I hope you’re doing the right thing because this could completely blow up on you.’ The coaches were saying we’re right there, this the road that’s going to get us back. And me, being the softie that I’ve become, started worrying, ‘What if they can’t take it? What if we’re demanding too much? What if they don’t have it in them?’”
Everything ratcheted up. No margin for error, nothing but perfection tolerated. He found some players approving of the harder practices, and some, by the looks on their faces, suggested the level of intensity was not sustainable.
“We did it to prove a point,” Auriemma said. “Is this what we’re going to have to do get you to understand what it’s going to take?”
‘I don’t want to be stupid like this’
UConn bounced back with wins over Seton Hall and, on Dec. 5, Notre Dame. But with 38 seconds left and the Huskies leading the Fighting Irish by 18 points, Bueckers, the reigning national player of the year, collapsed without contact on the XL Center floor. The team later found out the sophomore suffered an anterior tibial plateau fracture and lateral meniscus tear that required surgery and and forced to her to miss 19 games. Auriemma was criticized for not taking her out when the game reached garbage time, and he still beats himself up over it.
“My initial reaction when I saw it happened was, ‘If this is really bad, I’m going to be really pissed off at myself,’” he said. “I knew eventually I’d be able to look at it rationally and say, ‘This didn’t happen this game, this injury happened some other time and she didn’t let us see it.’ At the same time, I’m thinking, the kid never, ever, ever wants to come out, and I gave in to that. Because normally, we got our starters out of there.
“But something about her, she never wants to come out. She loves playing so much that I never even think of taking her out. And then when that happened, I really kicked myself, really beat myself up and said, ‘I don’t want to be stupid like this. If this is really bad, I’m going to feel like I did it. It’s my fault.’ Until the doctors told me after the operation [it would be all right], there was a little bit of relief. For some reason, I let my emotions [dictate it].”
UConn lost at unranked Georgia Tech the next game but bounced back with a win over UCLA. By the time No. 6 Louisville came to Mohegan Sun on Dec. 19, freshman Caroline Ducharme was emerging as a force, taking pressure off veteran players like Williams, Olivia Nelson-Ododa and Evina Westbrook, who were struggling with Bueckers out. UConn led much of the game but lost 69-64.
“I always tried to project to our team that the only thing that matters is what we’re doing today,” Auriemma said. “No one ever makes excuses for us because we never make excuses. No one ever feels sorry for us because we never feel sorry for ourselves. Nobody pities us because we don’t pity ourselves. We have to figure out a way to win this Louisville game despite the fact we’re missing four guys. We have to figure out a way to win this Georgia Tech game despite the fact we just learned Paige is going to be out two months.
“Why couldn’t we win that game? I started to sense that the players were like, ‘That’s okay, everything’s going to be all right. This is just another step in the process,’ and I’m like, ‘Bleep that stuff, it’s not all right. Since when is it all right for a team to come in here, and we had every chance to win this game, and we let it get away from us and we’ve done that over and over again?”
‘I didn’t get it right until way later in the season’
Juggling his depleted roster in late January, Auriemma put Nika Mühl in the starting lineup and assigned Westbrook to provide spark off the bench. Both players responded. “It took all the air out and now, it seemed like everybody was just playing free and clear,” Auriemma said.
Meanwhile Fudd, the heralded freshman, came back from her foot injury and had a breakout game with 25 points against Tennessee on Feb. 6, a signature late-season win. Auriemma had been urging Fudd, a perfectionist, not to overthink and let her natural ability flow.
“Until a freshman really breaks out you’re really not sure if they have it in them,” Auriemma said. “The way she broke out in the Tennessee game. It was the attacking the basket, the pull-up jumpers, the threes, the way she played defensively, the look of confidence on her face like, ‘I’m the best player on the floor.’ Before that, Carolina did the exact same thing, and maybe Azzi sees that and says that’s the way to go.”
Ducharme suffered a late-season head injury and Nelson-Ododa a groin injury. Both missed the game against Villanova on Feb. 9, when the Huskies streak of 169 wins in conference play came to an end with a 72-69 loss. After that, the Huskies won their last seven games by an average margin of 39.2 points to clinch the Big East regular-season title and finish 22-5. Bueckers returned with short stints, 12 and 13 minutes, in the last two games, so UConn is whole again and hardened by their experiences as the Big East Tournament starts for them on Saturday.
Auriemma, who will turn 68 on March 23, is not on a farewell tour. He plans to keep coaching beyond this season. He has talked, maybe more than other years, about not being able to read the modern college player. But in putting the coaching gas pedal to the floor when he did, and lighting up when he did later on, Auriemma once more found the right buttons to push at the right time. Eventually, the answers came.
“With all the uncontrollables, we didn’t know which way to go with our team,” he said. “Do we go easier? Lighter? Do we try to harden them and make them tougher so they can be resilient? Where are they? How much can they take? I didn’t get it right until way later in the season for me, not knowing who’s practicing, when we were playing, made me less than the coach that I wanted to be. It wasn’t until late in the season that I started to come to grips with this is how it’s going to be.”
