He’s tried to retire, but Geno Auriemma keeps coming back … and winning
TAMPA, Fla. — Back in September, Geno Auriemma quit his job as UConn’s coach. Left the gym, got in his car and wrote his resignation letter in his head on his way home as he wound through the Connecticut roads.
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My guys don’t hear me anymore. I’m not getting through to them. They’re too stubborn, and I’ve been too stubborn. I’m not going to practice anymore. I’ll call in sick tomorrow (and every day after that). I’m done. I’m out.
By the time he got home and poured himself a glass of red wine, he was already plotting out ways to spend his retirement and what he’d do with his newfound free time. He was going to be great in retirement, he reassured himself. Elite, perhaps. No more headaches. No more heartaches. No more film.
Life is good as a retired former coach, Auriemma knows. A bunch of his friends — folks who came into this business around the same time he did and departed before he did (because they’re all much smarter than he is, he figures) — have left the sideline and don’t miss it at all. Lucky jerks.
Now he was one of them. Lucky him.
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For exactly eight hours … until he got back in his car, drove back to the UConn basketball facility, walked up the stairs to his office for the millionth time and sat down in the chair at his desk to plot out that day’s practice.
Auriemma can’t quit, even though he tries roughly five times a year. Because the problem is whenever he really thinks about it, then his teams go on a run like this one just did, reminding him that the players do hear him, he is getting through to them and they’re not too stubborn to learn. Sixteen out of the last 17 years, they’ve ended up at the Final Four, and he finds himself looking out at the arena as he takes the court a few minutes before tipoff, watching his players live out lifelong dreams, and he knows he can’t walk away.
Before UConn’s 82-59 win over South Carolina in Sunday’s national title game, Auriemma was of two minds. Back in February, after the Huskies had beaten the Gamecocks down at their place, he felt a shift in his team. Players started buying in more and understanding why they were doing the things in practice. As the NCAA Tournament approached, he felt good about his team.
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As the postseason kicked off, the Huskies proved him right. Their big three — Paige Bueckers, Azzi Fudd and Sarah Strong — did enough every game in the early rounds to push the team forward, and Auriemma tried to quiet the voice in his mind that consistently tells him everything will go wrong, that this season will — somehow — end like all the others that didn’t involve a net cutting.
The four seasons before this, during Bueckers’ career, UConn had been snakebitten by injuries and ailments. There was the pandemic bubble in 2021, Dorka Juhász’s broken finger dislocated wrist and Fudd’s stomach virus ahead of the Final Four in 2022, Bueckers’ ACL tear and Ice Brady’s dislocated patella in 2023, Fudd’s ACL tear and Jana El Alfy’s Achilles tendon rupture in 2024.
As UConn’s national title drought extended and other teams took the mantle, Auriemma heard the pundits discuss how the Huskies had fallen off and how they were no longer the hunted, and instead, just a part of the pack.
“All those years, I went home and thought, ‘They didn’t really beat Connecticut,’” Auriemma said. “When we show up with our whole team and you beat us, then you beat Connecticut. The rest of the time? You beat a patchwork of Connecticut players.”
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Coming into their rematch with South Carolina in the title game, even with a full arsenal of Connecticut players, Auriemma was conflicted. This is often how the veteran coach feels. He’ll often lament that, despite being born as an Aries in March, he’s actually a Pisces (“It’s two fish swimming in opposite directions. That’s me. I’m constantly going in two opposite directions,” he once said).
On the one hand, this season reminded him of the 1995 season. That team was 34-0 heading into the national title game against Tennessee, and down six at halftime, he walked into the locker room and said, “This has been a magical season. … If it was supposed to end it would’ve ended by now. The reason we’re here is because this is the fairy tale.” The Huskies won and delivered Auriemma his first championship trophy. This season felt the same way, he thought. His journey with Bueckers to get to this point could only end one way. A national championship, right?
This could be like 1995. The basketball gods did not bring them this far to only bring them this far, he’d tell himself.
But Auriemma is not a man who believes the basketball gods owe him much at this point. Who else gets to coach Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, Paige Bueckers … and everyone else he has had? Who else has a four-decade career at a single school? Who else wins this much?
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So then, Auriemma would come back down to earth, remember they were playing South Carolina, the only team that had ever beaten him and the Huskies in a national title game. He’d tell himself that fairy tales don’t exist. As quickly as he could imagine Bueckers cutting down the nets, he could also see himself sitting at a podium in front of the media, explaining how it all went wrong.
“How am I going to handle getting our asses kicked? What am I going to say? How am I going to answer these questions?” Auriemma said. “We’re gonna come in here and we’re gonna stink, they’re gonna play great.”
And so went Auriemma’s day, flip-flopping between the two extremes and what felt like the only two outcomes of the day. It was exhausting.
But then the Huskies came out and got the fairy tale. His big three played like they needed them to play, UConn’s defense — while not as perfect as it had been in the Final Four against UCLA — was disruptive. The offense was unselfish and aggressive. They controlled the game from the jump.
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For the first 38 minutes, Auriemma refused to allow himself to smile or celebrate. As his assistant coaches and bench players jumped out of their seats and high-fived one another, he kept his arms folded and his brow furrowed. He rubbed his forehead, and after seeing mistakes, turned to his bench and screamed.
Auriemma is 71. He has three children, four grandchildren and 14 players on his team who test the limits of his patience and his hair’s roots every season as he spends months attempting to rip every strand out of his head. That he still has any hair left is a real testament to his genetics.
With 1:38 to play, and the Huskies up 30, Auriemma subbed out Fudd, Strong and Bueckers. When Bueckers came off the floor last, Auriemma hugged her as she buried her head into him. He’ll often joke that UConn has reached the stratosphere of Disneyland and Disney World — places where the impossible happens and dreams really do come true.
On Sunday, Bueckers stepped off the court one final time, finally as a national champion. Her dream come true.
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Twenty minutes later, Auriemma watched as every player and assistant climbed the ladder to cut pieces of the net until he went up last to cut down the final strands. He swung it around and looked back to his team. Bueckers is going to the WNBA, but Fudd — the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player — and Strong will be back to lead the Huskies next year.
He was joyful, relieved, and yes, hungry for the next one. You could almost sense that even in the celebration, there was a part of him that remembered: Ah yes, this is how it ruins me. This is why I can’t quit.
A few years ago, when Auriemma was reading a book about John Wooden, an anecdote about Wooden recruiting Kareem Abdul-Jabbar struck him. On a recruiting trip to New York, one of Wooden’s assistants asked Wooden if he was being intentionally difficult because he didn’t want Abdul-Jabbar to come to UCLA.
Why?
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Because then Wooden knew if he brought someone in who was so talented, then the pressure to win more championships would grow — from the outside, from the university, worst of all, from himself. After all, how could he see so much in a single player and not elevate them to their best level?
“The pressure to win, the social pressure, the internal pressure that you put on yourself, then what’s heaped on you. … What your players expect from you, what you expect from you to reach that space,” Auriemma said. “Maybe every coach that has won a lot is in that situation, has felt that.”
Auriemma certainly has felt that. He has had more of those program-changing players than anyone else in women’s college basketball. He has won championships with most of them; with some, multiple championships. And every time he has stood at the top of that ladder and turned to his team, he has seen those players who will be back the next year and thought to himself: We’re doing this again, aren’t we? I’m going to fail to quit five times again next year until we’re back here again, huh?
When he took to the top of that ladder on Sunday night, it had been nine seasons since he had last done that, capping a four-year run with Breanna Stewart in which the Huskies won four consecutive titles.
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People tried to talk him into retiring then. But he looked out and saw Napheesa Collier, Gabby Williams, Katie Lou Samuelson, and he knew he couldn’t.
“When Stewie graduated, that would have been perfect. That would have been the story, right? That would have been a fairy tale — riding off into the sunset with the best player ever to play college basketball. You could say ‘The best player and the best coach rode off on the same horse,’” Auriemma said. “But no stupid ass me goes, ‘I can do this again.’
It took nine years, but he did it again. He found another fairytale ending with another group of players in another season. He swung the net around and turned from one side of the arena to the other. Yes, for the 12th time, this place has ruined his life … once again.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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