When UConn women’s basketball won its first national championship with an undefeated, historically dominant season in 1995, the program decided to collect all its major press clippings. That proved surprisingly difficult. There were enough clippings to fill an expandable 16-by-18-inch scrapbook. And enough to fill a second, and a third, and a fourth, all of which brought them to… mid-February. There was still the entire tournament run to go through. A program aide was still at work on the project as the start of the next season approached.
But the work of documenting that season felt important. It had not been so long since any kind of press coverage was a rarity for them. When a 31-year-old Italian immigrant named Geno Auriemma took over the program in 1985, “we'd get excited about a one-inch column in the local paper,” UConn associate head coach Chris Dailey told SI back in ’95. “Of course, back then we didn't even have our own locker room.” The Huskies went 12–15 in that first year under Auriemma. It certainly did not provide enough to fill a scrapbook. And so a decade later, with a perfect championship season covered at length by every major newspaper and magazine, they wanted to record every last bit of the experience. They would get as many scrapbooks as it took.
