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UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma said he regrets how he handled the final seconds of the Huskies’ Final Four loss to South Carolina, acknowledging that his postgame behavior overshadowed the end of his team’s season.
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A little more than a month after South Carolina’s 62-48 win over UConn in Phoenix, Auriemma reflected on the exchange he had with Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley in the closing seconds. Auriemma went toward Staley before the game ended and appeared to confront her before coaches from both teams separated them. After the final buzzer, he went to the locker room without returning to shake hands with South Carolina’s team.
“When I walked into the locker room afterward with the coaches, you are just shaking your head, thinking five more seconds, you couldn’t keep it in for five more seconds,” Auriemma said in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Associated Press reporter Jim Fuller, and reposted by @WNBAGotGame. “I just feel like a dumba** for the way it played out. … We are all human, and we all do dumb (stuff).”
Auriemma’s actions drew criticism after the game, in some cases becoming a bigger part of the public conversation than South Carolina’s performance against a UConn team that had two first-team All-Americans.
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“I didn’t see a lot of it, but that is to be expected,” Auriemma said of the backlash, per Fuller. “I think maybe some of it was warranted, and some of it was people have been lying in the weeds waiting for that moment. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done for the game; it is what you just did.”
Auriemma said he accepted responsibility for the initial criticism but took issue with some of the reaction that followed. He compared the response to what might have happened in 1998, when he arranged for injured UConn player Nykesha Sales to make a basket and set the program’s career scoring record.
“These things that happen, you take them all with a grain of salt, understand them,” Auriemma said. “I did what I did, I apologized for it and I moved on.”
UConn now turns to the 2026-27 season after losing two starters, including WNBA No. 1 pick Azzi Fudd.
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