Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  He was blown away. The rolling, leafy campus, the classic redbrick buildings, the aura of Thomas Jefferson, the passion and spirit of ACC basketball—it was as if a brand-new world had opened up for him. Geno returned home from the trip sky high. Kathy didn’t need much convincing that they should make the move.

  From day one, Ryan gave Auriemma responsibilities that touched every aspect of the program. He was an eager learner and a relentless assistant. “Geno was the type who was always challenging you,” Ryan says. “If you wanted to do something, he’d say, ‘Why?’ He really made you think about what you were doing.”

  Though he was living in the South, Auriemma stayed in touch with his old Philly crew, traipsing up to the Poconos to work camps each summer. He’ll never forget the day Jim Lynam came up to him while he was working a defensive drill station and said, “I really like what you’re teaching over there.” For the first time, he was starting to believe he could really hang.

  As it happened, Auriemma’s career arc was dovetailing with the ascent of women’s college basketball. Nine years before he got hired at Virginia, the U.S. government passed Title IX as part of a package of amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That law effectively forced universities to offer equal opportunities in athletics for men and women. It took ten years, but in 1982, the year after Auriemma got hired as an assistant at Virginia, the NCAA finally decided to begin holding its own national championship in women’s basketball. (The men’s version had been around since 1939.) Virginia qualified for the tournament in Auriemma’s third and fourth seasons there. As the team kept winning, and as Ryan leaned on him more heavily, Auriemma became increasingly confident that he was ready for his own gig. Following his third season, he was interviewed for the women’s head coaching position at DePaul. He didn’t get it, but the experience emboldened him. At the start of the 1984–85 season, he predicted to Kathy that in one year’s time he would have his own team.

  Sure enough, at the end of that season, Auriemma got a call from the University of Connecticut. The school’s search committee was hoping to hire a woman, but it was having a hard time finding any takers—and for good reason. The university was located in the small town of Storrs, thirty miles east of Hartford, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The program had only been around for eleven years and had yet to produce a winning season. The outgoing coach had won just nine games in each of her previous four years. The team played in the Hugh S. Greer Field House, a shabby facility that could not even hold 5,000 fans, though size wasn’t much of an issue since the games were so sparsely attended.

  Where others saw squalor, Auriemma saw potential. He saw a chance to return to his northern roots and run his own program. He strutted into that interview, sized up the room, and blew away the committee. The school’s athletic director, John Toner, took him to a local Dunkin’ Donuts and offered him the job at a salary of $29,000. Auriemma accepted. Then he told Kathy the news and flew home to pack up and start a new life. He raved to his wife about the people he met at UConn but added, “The gym must be a piece of shit, because they never showed it to me.”

  How in the world was he going to win at a place with no facilities and no tradition, with no head coaching experience to draw from? Hell if he knew. He would just get there and strut around like he knew what he was doing. One way or another, he would have to figure it out.

  * * *

  • • •

  One of the ways Auriemma convinced UConn’s search committee that he should get the job was by promising he would bring in a prominent young assistant named Chris Dailey. She was working at Rutgers, where she had won an NCAA championship as a player in 1982.

  There was only one problem. Auriemma never told Dailey his plan.

  They weren’t even all that close. Sure, they had hung out on the recruiting trail and served on a coaches’ committee, but they had never talked about working together. Auriemma called Dailey shortly after he got hired and offered her the job. “What are you going to accomplish at Rutgers that hasn’t already been done?” he said. “Come work for me and we’ll build this thing together.” Dailey was intrigued, but she made him wait until later that summer for her boss, Theresa Grentz, to return to the country from her stint coaching for USA Basketball. Eventually, she succumbed to his persistence. “He challenged me, which is one of his great assets,” Dailey says.

  Auriemma was right: The gym was a piece of shit. His players had to share locker room space with the men’s soccer team. Auriemma and Dailey were crammed into a tiny office, where they used a rotary phone and shared a line with the track coach. If he was on a call, the basketball coaches would have to wait until he was done before dialing.

  On more than one occasion that first season, Dailey wondered what she had done—and who she had done it for. In the very first game of the very first season, Auriemma bitched at the refs so much that he was whistled for two technical fouls. That did not warrant an automatic ejection in those days, but it did not bode well. Dailey’s dad was one of the few spectators in the gym that day. He reminded her, and not for the last time, that she was welcome to come home anytime.

  Sure, Auriemma could be hotheaded (not to mention hardheaded), but Dailey noticed something else. “The closer the game, the calmer he was,” she says. “You could see he had a great feel. He has a vision of how it’s supposed to look in his head, and he is unwilling to stop until it looks like that.”

  Auriemma let Dailey handle all the aspects of the program he either didn’t enjoy or wasn’t good at—tickets, recruiting, practice schedules, academics, marketing, community outreach. Meanwhile, it took everyone a while to get accustomed to Auriemma’s temperamental ways. During his second season, he walked into the locker room during halftime and blew his stack. As he chastised his “guys”—that’s how he refers to his players—he slapped his top freshman, guard Kris Lamb, on the elbow. Auriemma didn’t think anything of it until three months later when he learned that the older players, the ones who had been recruited by his predecessor, complained to the athletic director that he had been abusive. If that had happened much later in his career, Auriemma might have been in trouble. In this case, Lamb stuck up for him and the AD backed him. It was a harrowing episode, but it also gave Auriemma an important piece of knowledge. From then on, he recruited players who could deal with his style of coaching. If he failed at that part of the job, then he wasn’t going to last very long.

  It was not in him to sweet talk recruits anyway. That would be inauthentic. When a highly regarded 6´1˝ forward from New Hampshire named Kerry Bascom asked him during a phone call what she would get out of playing for him, Auriemma replied, “Whatever you put into it.” Bascom later said that of all the coaches who recruited her, Auriemma was the only one who didn’t promise her anything. He had, instead, a different message: Don’t come here unless you can hang. She ended up becoming his first breakthrough recruit and left UConn in 1991 as the school’s all-time leading scorer.

  It made no difference to Auriemma that his players were women. He would coach them just as hard as he would coach men. Lots of women’s coaches said that, but in 1985, very few believed it as deeply as Auriemma did. He had learned firsthand that women could be as persistent as men, in many cases more so. He could be as tough and mean as he wanted and still trust they understood he empathized with what they were thinking and feeling. He could also have fun with them, like he did with his boys back in Philly. Just because they were ladies didn’t mean he couldn’t bust their balls.

  For example, early in Auriemma’s career, he was cautioned against criticizing his players if they gained too much weight. He thought this was ludicrous. To be a great player, you need to be in proper shape. He’s not supposed to say that just because they might get their feelings hurt, or perhaps develop an eating disorder? That’s bullshit, man. “What’s hard about playing here is that there’s no looking the other way and saying, ‘That’s all right, sweethea
rt, we’ll get ’em next time,’” Auriemma says. “That pisses me off when I hear that, because they never do that with guys. When a boy screws up in sports and he’s fifteen, there’s no ‘It’s all right, sweetheart, we’ll get ’em next time.’ But for a girl the same age, that’s what they hear.”

  After the Lady Huskies went 12–15 his first season, the wins started coming: 14 in year two, 17 in year three. In year four, UConn went 24–6 and won the Big East championship. Two years later, they broke through and reached the game’s biggest stage, the Final Four in New Orleans, where they lost to Virginia, coached by his old boss Debbie Ryan.

  Reaching the Final Four was a remarkable achievement for Auriemma’s program. The question was whether he could sustain that success. The answer came in the form of a 6´4˝ center from Massachusetts named Rebecca Lobo. She was a consensus All-American, by far the best player Auriemma had tried to recruit. Lobo’s parents were teachers, and they were enamored with the idea of their daughter going to Stanford or Notre Dame. Yet Lobo was convinced from the start that Auriemma was the man she wanted to play for. During their conversations, Auriemma stressed that she would only play as many minutes as she earned. “I really liked that honesty,” she says. “With some coaches, when you talked to them on the phone, you were kind of waiting to get off. But with him, it wasn’t that way. I actually looked forward to the chance to talk with him. He had something in his personality that made me want to play for him.”

  Once again, Auriemma benefited from some propitious timing. Just as he was starting to recruit Lobo, UConn was putting the finishing touches on Gampel Pavilion, a sleek 10,000-seat arena that began hosting games in 1990. The men’s basketball program was also enjoying a rise to national prominence under Jim Calhoun, who was hired away from Northeastern the year after Auriemma came on board. Aside from the NHL’s Hartford Whalers, the state of Connecticut had no professional teams, so the citizenry was passionate about UConn basketball. It was difficult for fans to get tickets to the men’s game, but tickets to the women’s game were plentiful—and free. And the team was fun to watch.

  With facilities and players finally in place, Auriemma went about fulfilling his vision. When CBS offered him the chance to play Tennessee on national television during Lobo’s senior season, he jumped at it. Tennessee was the premium brand in women’s basketball, led by the brilliant, stern southerner Pat Summitt. When the teams tipped off on January 16, 1995, Tennessee was ranked No. 1 in the country, UConn was No. 2, and both were undefeated. Auriemma’s Huskies won, 77–66. By Monday morning, they were, amazingly, the No. 1 team in America.

  From there, the Lady Huskies completed their historic romp, finishing with a perfect 35–0 record and a six-point win over Tennessee in the NCAA championship game. A few hours after capturing the title, the players, coaches, families, and friends were gathered in their hotel watching a replay of the game. Everybody was hooting and hollering, until at one point Auriemma barked something from the back of the room. He had spied a defensive breakdown and asked the person playing the video to run back the play. He stood up and pointed out the miscue to his players. At first, they looked at each other, unsure whether he was serious. Finally, a reserve guard named Missy Rose spoke up and said, “Hey, Coach, relax for once. We won.”

  The room burst out in hysterics. Auriemma laughed, too. He had to admit she had done a good job of busting his balls.

  * * *

  • • •

  It wasn’t quite a nervous breakdown, but it was pretty damn close. Having run out of words—which is remarkable in its own right—Auriemma stalked off the practice floor in a fit of rage and frustration. He figured he would just keep going and exit the building, but he decided instead to crawl under the bleachers, sit up against a wall, and close his eyes. Dailey continued to run the practice, but the players were confused, and not a little bit worried.

  After about twenty minutes, Nykesha Sales, a former player who had been visiting that day, poked her head under the bleachers and asked if he was all right.

  “Leave me alone,” Auriemma said.

  “Uh, Coach, everyone is getting concerned. Maybe you should come out now.”

  This was Auriemma at his most authentic—driven, exacting, deeply insecure. But he still had much to learn. It was early in the 1998–99 season, four years after that first championship. In the wake of that triumph, Auriemma had strutted too close to the sun. He had convinced himself that the championship resulted from the sheer force of his will, intellect, and creativity. Yet even though the top recruits were now annually lining up to play for him, he could not recapture that magic. Every time it looked like his team was going back over the top, it got hit with a bad injury, and the season would end with a loss.

  Now Auriemma had just brought in what was being called the greatest recruiting class in the history of women’s collegiate basketball. He was grossly unrealistic about how quickly his newbies would make the transition from high school. It was only a few weeks into the preseason, but he was at his wit’s end. His meltdown was not rooted in anger. It was rooted in self-doubt. “I really questioned whether I was good enough to do this,” he says.

  It was a total reversal. When Auriemma first got to UConn, he was convinced that whatever challenge his upstarts faced, they would figure it out and beat more talented teams. Once his teams became heavy favorites, however, he found himself consumed by worry, certain that whatever could go wrong, would.

  This was the price he paid for chasing perfection. It wasn’t enough to win. They had to win by playing the right way. Auriemma wasn’t just facing opponents, he was chasing an ideal—and an unreachable one at that. No practice plan could compete with that vision. Auriemma might schedule a two-line layup drill for ten minutes, but it would go on for well over an hour if his guys didn’t do it exactly how he wanted. His goal was to make those workouts so taxing that the games seemed easy by comparison. “The players know he’s always watching,” Dailey says. “Even when you think he’s not watching, he’s watching.”

  To be fair, Auriemma held himself to the same high standards. He was an eager student of the game, always learning and tinkering in an effort to maintain his edge. He possessed a wonderfully creative basketball mind, especially on the offensive end. He wants his teams to play artistically and selflessly. That’s why they don’t have names on the back of their jerseys, and it’s also why he has resisted the trend toward isolation pick-and-roll offenses that have overtaken the NBA and men’s college basketball in recent years. Auriemma would rather stick with a pass-happy offense that involves all five players.

  Auriemma fancies himself a seat-of-the-pants coach. He doesn’t like plans. He may drive Dailey mad with his penchant for tardiness, but even she has to admit that he has a knack for figuring things out. When I suggest to Dailey that Auriemma must understand women at a level that most men don’t, she brushes me off. “I don’t know that I would say that,” she replies. “Here’s what I would say: Geno gets people. He knows how to read people, he knows how to relate to people, he knows what buttons to push. And it annoys me to no end, because he usually knows when something is amiss with one of our players. He has a sixth sense. He’ll say, ‘Something’s not right,’ and I hate to admit it, but he has never been wrong when he says that.”

  That empathetic instinct, that keen emotional intelligence, provides Auriemma with the blueprint he needs. Sure, he can get under a player’s skin, but he also knows the way into her heart. “He inspires those kids every single day,” Ryan says. “That’s what he does better than anybody else. From the very first day of practice, he inspires them to be better than they think they can be. He would have been great as a Navy SEAL because he can pivot on a dime and go in another direction just like that, and he’s not afraid to give that to his kids.”

  It is not easy playing for this man, but that is what his guys sign up for. During recruiting, he asks them what their goals are. Once they t
ell him they want to be NCAA champions, All-Americans, professional players . . . well, then he’s got ’em by the balls. If they complain, he reminds them that he is only helping them get to where they said they wanted to go. That’s why his players are so loyal to him long after they’re through at UConn. Kara Wolters, who played at UConn from 1993 to 1997, has said that Auriemma is the best coach she ever played for, despite the time her freshman season when he kicked her out of practice by throwing a basketball at her head.

  “He’s like the puppetmaster. If he wasn’t coaching basketball, he would be great at psychology,” says Swin Cash, a 6´1˝ forward from the Pittsburgh area and a member of that vaunted freshman class. “I had this habit that whenever he would start yelling at me, I would always look up at the sky. Nothing’s up there but our banners. So one day I was doing that and he goes, ‘Okay, I guess Swin is pissed off. She’s looking up at the banners.’ I just busted out laughing.”

  Lobo got the full Geno treatment early in her junior year. She had been complaining so much to her mother about Auriemma’s badgering that her mom persuaded her to go into his office and discuss it. When she did, Auriemma pulled out the team’s media guide and read the part where Lobo said she wanted to be an Olympian. Auriemma explained that if he let her standards fall to the point where she didn’t reach her goal, it would be his fault. At the end of what Lobo thought was a private and intimate conversation, she felt much better.

  That is, until two days later, when in the midst of a lousy practice Auriemma exploded and shouted toward Dailey, “She comes into my office complaining I’m too tough on her, and now she plays like this?” Lobo was mortified. But she got the message. “He wasn’t just saying he was going to hold me accountable. He wanted my teammates to hold me accountable, too,” she says. “If you’re playing for him, he makes sure you’re as mentally strong as you can be.”