Geno Auriemma, the practiced problem-solver, must figure out his next step at UConn
PHOENIX — In four different decades, Geno Auriemma has led the UConn women’s basketball team to national championships. Through an evolving game and landscape, there has been one near consistent power at the top of the game — Auriemma’s Huskies. He got there by being an expert problem-solver, and he has remained at the top because of his maniacal drive to fix the problems he sees — both ones that have happened on the floor and ones that could happen on the floor.
It’s why UConn has 12 national titles and six of the 10 undefeated seasons in women’s basketball history. It’s why this season’s team, one with significant flaws, was still good enough to be 80 minutes away from a national championship and an undefeated season. He knows what it feels like to get steps away from the mountaintop and the bitter cold of being up there alone, and in four decades of coaching, he has responded to both with the same dogged intensity — looking for everything that could go wrong, and then trying to fix it preemptively.
After one of the Huskies’ undefeated seasons, on the way home from winning yet another national title, his longtime assistant Chris Dailey found him on the bus watching film, pondering what the team could do to be better the following year. They had beaten opponents by 30 points a game that season. This season, the Huskies had a similar win margin but it didn’t end the same.
And the offseason will be different in some significant ways. Because on Friday, Auriemma became one of the problems the Huskies couldn’t avoid. In his 25th appearance in the Final Four, he added to the lengthy catalog of his and Dawn Staley’s shared history that will help fans organize him into the hero/villain categories of the game’s history.
Auriemma doesn’t care where he falls on some random person’s ranking or that he has become the ultimate Rorschach test in women’s hoops. Whether you see him as a genius or an arrogant jerk probably depends on the color jersey you wear. What he does care about is the fact that his frustrations became a problem for his team in the Final Four.
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