Geno Auriemma d’Uconn over its 40 years at the top and how the NCAA has evolved

Geno Auriemma has been a female university basketball pillar for four decades, the success of which most coaches could only dream.

In 1985, he resumed a UCONN program with a single winning season and has since brought to 11 division I titles of the NCAA – the most from the history of the NCAA.

He also has the most victories of any NCAA head coach after exceeding Ta Vanderveer last November. But the fire inside the 70 -year -old man remains as fierce as when he arrived in Storrs 40 years ago, like his The Huskies beat the reigning champions in South Carolina 87-58 on the road last weekend.

In the latest episode of “The Athletic Women’s Basketball Show”, Auriemma joined Zena Keita, Chantel Jennings and Sabreena Merchant to trace how the game changed during her four decades at the top. Here are some protruding facts of the conversation, you can listen to the full interview on the flow of podcast.

Jennings: I am curious to look at the current state of female university basketball and the changes we have seen in recent years. How would Geno Auriemma 2025 explain the university basketball landscape at the 1985 Geno, which took the post at Uconn without even seeing what the gym was like?

Auriemma: Yes, it is like trying to explain in 2025 what it was to live in the Roman Empire. It is an ancient story and difficult to describe to anyone who was not there because you had to be there to believe the landscape now relative at the time. In Connecticut, we just tried not to finish eighth or ninth in our league. There were nine teams in the Big East, so we were trying to make sure that we did not finish eighth or ninth because that is where they finished each year. It was the game game to enter the Big East tournament. And we achieved this goal because we have not finished eighth or ninth. Teams like Providence, Villanova, Syracuse, British Columbia (Boston College) and Saint John’s were good teams at the time, but none of them were national players by imagination in the national landscape. I do not even know if there was a Top 25 survey at the time by Mel Greenberg (the journalist who was the first scandate after top 25 for the women’s basketball in Division I of the NCAA in 1976). It is the age of this thing.

There may have been Tennessee, Old Dominion, Louisiana Tech, Virginia, NC State and Maryland. Everything was very regional and there was a very non-national vision of women’s basketball. The NCAA tournament was 32 teams, I mean. Just to give you an idea, we went to the Final Four in 1991, which meant that we were the first team in the north of the Mason-Dixon line to go to the NCAA Four. The first team in the north of Philadelphia at least. There were 8,000 people in the Final Four played in Lakefront Arena in New Orleans, and there was a television camera that I know came from Connecticut. So, compared to today, it was intramurals compared to what is now a new major, major coverage and major interest. And it was only 40 years old.

Merchant: Where was the Big East tournament on these days when you were trying to get out of the eight and nine game games?

Auriemma: The Big East tournament was running in each member school, so each school was able to host it, which is crazy. We just played at Seton Hall last night – it can accommodate 1,800 people – and it was the first Big East tournament that Connecticut won in 1985. I’m sorry, 1988-1989 was our first Big East championship, and C ‘was in Seton Hall. The game was not even on the radio, I think it could have been on the radio station of the campus Whus which could have broadcast the game. Then, the tournament returned there 10 years later in 1995 and everything had changed . We were undefeated, we were favorites to win the national championship, and it is still the Big East tournament played in front of 1,800 people. And 1,700 of them were Connecticut bus.

Many things have changed, and in many ways, the world is different. There was no way to communicate in 1985, there were no phones (cells) (laughs), so you discovered the next morning how everyone had done. Each child who was part of our team was distance by car. The child who lived the furthest from our team in 1985 was New Jersey when I started. My mother was a teenager during the Second World War living in the hills because the Germans resumed their house in Italy. Then the day she died in 1992, she had a mobile phone. Thus, Uconn’s women’s basketball and the rest of basketball live in a place that did not exist in 1985, not even in the imagination of people.

Jennings: How would you have explained Nile, the transfer portal and the share of income to this guy who played Seton Hall in front of five people and a bunch of journalists with writing machines? Because that’s what it looks like.

Auriemma: It is difficult to explain. I should not say that it is difficult to explain, but it may be the case. Anyone who doesn’t want to understand will not understand. But training in 1985 and training today, at least the level we lead to university basketball, is the difference between driving a tricycle and the piloting of a jet plane. You can’t even imagine the difference, the landscape, how it has changed and why so many coaches die from wanting to get out of the game because it is unmanageable. … It’s unfair for halfjors. It is unfair for schools that have no money. It is unfair for everyone, except the 40 or 50 schools in the country which can afford to live in this world. It is unfair for the rest of university sports. But it is also unmanageable. You cannot manage it because there are no rules, and no one can work when there are no rules. We try to have rules on our team, but it is difficult for these children to understand the rules of the team when in the rest of their university experience, there are no rules.

Whatever you want to do or have the ability to do in your school, that’s what you do. No one is worried about ramifications, so it’s unmanageable. Each year, it lasts (it becomes more difficult). The unmanageable part of this – and I am not saying that children should not be paid, I do not say that they should not earn money on their ability to play basketball – but their ability to pack their bags And to leave at any time it is unmanageable for coaches. Everyone will say: “You have parity because more players move from one place to another”. But in reality, this parity will disappear when the teams that can spend the most money end with the best players, so that parity will begin to disappear. They say that there is parity in university football – it is the biggest joke in the history of sport that there is parity in university football. There is only one sport that has parity and it is the NFL. Everyone is mistaken that there is parity. So let’s see what’s going on.

This article originally appeared in Athletics.

Connecticut Huskies, Women’s College Basketball, The Athletic Women’s Basketball Show

2025 The Athletic Media Company