Getting to Us

by Seth Davis

  Surprisingly, Auriemma’s demands for excellence extend to the classroom, even though by his own admission he was a lazy student. “That’s what teachers do,” he says. “We always expect more out of our students than we ever did from ourselves.”

  There is, alas, a fine line between being demanding and being unreasonable, between possessing drive and suffering from impatience. Between a confident stride and an insecure strut. That was the tension that broke Auriemma down that day in practice, leaving him distraught, dysfunctional, and hiding under the bleachers. He had finally lost his swag. His drive had driven him crazy.

  The breakdown also added to his knowledge. “It was a real lesson for me. Like, What are you doing?” he says. “All this internal pressure, all this angst and beating yourself up. What’s that getting you? I don’t know if I’m so much better now, but I think I understand it more because I know there are a lot of things out of your control. I used to think I can control the outcome, but I learned that I can’t. I can only control how we prepare.”

  Auriemma eventually crawled out from under those bleachers, returned to practice, took a deep breath, tapped into his well of persistence, and resumed teaching. The episode didn’t cause him to lose his strut. It just taught him to step a little more carefully.

  * * *

  • • •

  If Auriemma was being authentic that day under the bleachers, he was also being empathetic. By letting his players see just how badly he could lose his confidence, he was showing he understood what they were feeling when it happened to them. He doesn’t get to Us by teaching his players not to feel scared. Rather, he strives to convince them that the only way to persist through the fear is by relying on each other.

  “I live with self-doubt every day, so I can empathize with the players I’m coaching,” Auriemma says. “I know these guys are filled with self-doubt. How can they not be? You’re putting yourself out there in front of thousands of people. You’re being judged and you’re eighteen, nineteen years old. So you’re thinking, Am I good enough to do this? What happens if I play shitty? So this is a part of daily life. I try to tell them, ‘It’s good for you to have self-doubt, because it forces you to look at yourself objectively.’”

  Auriemma’s players don’t typically arrive with a lot of insecurities. They were all among the best high school players in the country. They are used to being feted and featured. The way he sees it, his job is to put them in situations where they have to deal with failure. Oftentimes this will happen organically as they move up to face tougher competition. Other times, Auriemma will look to manufacture the stress himself. “Kind of like tossing a rattlesnake onto the middle of the court,” he says. “I want to see how they react.”

  For example, when Diana Taurasi, a 6´0˝ All-American guard from California, was having a particularly good practice her freshman year, Auriemma ordered her into a drill that required her to defend two players at opposite ends of the lane. Taurasi shuttled back and forth as each offensive player caught a pass and tried to score. The only way to get out of the drill is to get two stops in a row. It is a diabolical exercise, because the longer it takes, the more tired the defender gets, and thus the more unlikely she is to get a stop. As Taurasi failed again and again, she started fouling more blatantly. Finally, Auriemma told her to step out of the drill, making sure to let her know she had failed. Taurasi was angry, but she fought her way through the rest of practice.

  Auriemma didn’t have to throw a rattlesnake at Breanna Stewart. The Baylor Lady Bears did it for him. It happened during a game in Waco early in her career. Stewart, who would go on to become arguably the best player Auriemma ever had, played just seven minutes off the bench that night. During that time, the woman she was guarding scored twelve points. UConn lost by six. Auriemma prodded her as they talked about it afterward. “Stewie, you’re scared. I know you are. Just come out and say it,” he said. It took a while, but she finally admitted it. She realized Auriemma knew what she was feeling better than she did.

  The blunt talk starts at the very beginning of the relationship. When Auriemma first called Shea Ralph, a highly coveted guard from Raleigh, North Carolina, she asked him how much playing time she would get. “I don’t know,” Auriemma replied. “If you come here and you suck, you’re not gonna play.” Ralph hung up the phone and told her mother she wanted to go to UConn. “To that point in the recruiting process, I couldn’t remember coaches and their names because they all sounded the same to me,” Ralph says. “They all said how great I was and what I could do for them, but I knew in the back of my mind that it wasn’t that easy. I knew that I wanted to be challenged.”

  Ralph got a little more challenge than she bargained for. Like many players, she did not enjoy practice. This created considerable tension with Auriemma, but Ralph thought she was doing okay. During a game her freshman year at Rhode Island, however, she sat for the entire first half, even though UConn was winning by more than 40 points. Auriemma even put in a walk-on while leaving Ralph to stew on the bench. By the time she got into the locker room for halftime, she was fighting back tears. Auriemma walked in and immediately called her out in front of everyone. “Shea, how many points did you have in that half?”

  Ralph shook her head, indicating she had none.

  “How many rebounds?” he asked.

  She shook her head again.

  Auriemma continued to go down the list. How many assists? How many steals? Then he made his point. “The answer is zero, because that’s exactly how you’ve been practicing the last two weeks. And if you don’t learn to practice better, you’re not gonna play in games.”

  The words were harsh, but Ralph knew he was right. More important, she knew he was saying them because he cared about her. “How many people do you have in your life that will tell you the truth no matter what? Not many,” she says. “It’s not easy to hear all the time, but it’s exactly what you need.”

  Auriemma was equally direct when it came to the delicate topic of Ralph’s issues with food. But he was also discreet. Ralph had battled anorexia when she was in high school, which everyone knew because she had discussed it publicly with reporters. Auriemma made it clear to her that there was no way she could be a successful player at UConn if she was severely underweight. “You will eat, or you won’t play,” he told her. When Ralph fell back on bad habits like eating a bagel and a couple of diet sodas to get her through the day, Auriemma would walk by her during practice and say quietly, “Yeah, I guess those diet sodas didn’t work so well for you today.” On the few occasions when he was more concerned, he called her into his office and let her know what he was seeing. He never once said anything in front of her teammates. “I don’t know that I would have heard it the right way, had he not done it like that,” Ralph says.

  It is remarkable enough that Auriemma is this intuitive with players of a different gender. He also pulls it off without delving into their personal lives. “You hear some players talk about their coach like, ‘He’s like a dad to me.’ I’ve never heard anyone say that about Coach Auriemma,” Cash says. As a rule, Auriemma is willing to discuss personal matters with his players, but only if they ask him to. Otherwise, he respects those barriers. But whenever one of his players finally does buckle under all the stress, Auriemma unleashes all the dimensions of his PEAK profile. “That’s when I do what I think I’m really good at, which is blow so much smoke up their butt that they feel like they’re the king of the world,” he says. “So by the time we get into the NCAA Tournament, it’s a done deal.”

  Like all highly successful coaches, Auriemma is a skilled tactician, thanks to the expansive basketball knowledge he has accumulated over the years. He is compulsively fearful of stagnation. Ralph, now an assistant coach at UConn, will sometimes get text messages from her boss early on a Sunday morning in June with ideas about something they can add to the offense. Even when he is coming off an undefeated championship season, Auriemma fig
hts the urge to “stick with what’s working.” He is always on the lookout for new things to try.

  Auriemma knows that there is no single system that gets a team to Us. What matters is whether a coach can tailor his tactics to his personnel, and then get his players to follow his instructions with total belief. He won his first NCAA championship in 1995 using the triangle offense made popular by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls teams. Five years later, he claimed his second behind a perimeter-oriented offense that emphasized three-point shooting, which he had installed because his tallest player was only 6´5˝. After the Lady Huskies made the 2007 Final Four, Auriemma scrapped his offense and implemented a “drag screen” series, which begins with a big man setting a ball screen for a guard early in the shot clock. Auriemma got a thick playbook from then–New York Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni and worked on it throughout the preseason. The players were awful the first time they tried it in a game, but Auriemma stuck with it, and the Lady Huskies went undefeated and won the 2009 NCAA title. “We’ve had years we won a national championship, and we’re on the bus afterwards and he’s asking me, ‘Okay, how are we going to be better next year?’” Dailey says. “It’s not about, ‘How can we win more games?’ It’s about, ‘How can we get better?’”

  Of course, an offensive system is only as good as the players who run it, and Auriemma is the first to acknowledge that he has great players. Then again, he also points out that he is not the only coach who can say that. After all, there are twenty high school players good enough to be named McDonald’s All-Americans each year, and he routinely signs about three of them. “So what happened to the other seventeen?” he asks.

  That remark represents his PEAK profile in full bloom. Auriemma struts persistently despite being racked with self-doubt. He empathizes with his players even as he is crushing their spirits. He is unapologetic about who he is and where he came from, but he is always on the lookout for ways to bust up what’s working and try something new. He was an unmotivated student who barely found time to graduate college, yet he insists his players go to class and get good grades. His thirst for knowledge is never quenched. He loves to win, yet when a shot goes in to beat his team in the most dramatic way possible, he is able to laugh at the absurdity of it all. That’s because he knows something the rest of us don’t: Getting to Us and winning aren’t the same thing.

  * * *

  • • •

  Not everyone cottons to Auriemma’s bluntness, of course. Over the years, he has provoked many feuds with the media as well as the sport’s most prominent names, from Boston College coach Cathy Inglese to Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw to the iconic, late Tennessee coach Pat Summitt. As a man coaching (and dominating) the women’s game, Auriemma is subject to a lot of petty grievances. He doesn’t suffer them gladly. “I did a lot for these people that resent me. I’m one of the reasons why they make so much money,” he says. “I don’t say that in an arrogant way, but the bottom line is that we’ve done more than anybody ever, ever has [for the sport].”

  Indeed, during his three-plus decades at UConn, Auriemma has never hired a male full-time assistant coach. Instead, he has given jobs mostly to his former players, affording them opportunities that many women did not have when he first got into the business in 1985. “I wish other men would do what Geno has done in developing women for jobs,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer says. “He mentors a lot of women and helps them stay in the game.”

  Dailey, for one, has turned down several offers over the years to run her own program. She and Auriemma are arguably the most successful head coach–assistant coach combination in the history of college sports. Cash says they’re like a “functioning married couple,” but it’s not always clear who wears the pants. More than anyone, Dailey knows how to cut through Auriemma’s skin-deep arrogance by questioning the tie he is wearing. When I tease Auriemma that working as his assistant for more than thirty years should earn Dailey an automatic pass into heaven, he replies, “And when she gets there, she’s gonna tell Saint Peter everything he’s been doing wrong for the last two thousand years. It’s a running gag up here in Connecticut. Everybody knows Chris Dailey is the brains behind this outfit. Women take all the credit, trust me.”

  As Auriemma’s career blossomed, he also engendered the enmity of UConn’s men’s basketball coach Jim Calhoun. It wasn’t long before their sniping spilled out into the public. Their clashes were great fodder for Connecticut’s newspaper writers. Calhoun’s disdain gnawed at Auriemma because it was of a piece with the most constant dig he has heard over his career. “It’s this whole bullshit about, well, I’m a guy coaching women’s basketball. ‘If you were any good you’d be coaching men,’” he says. “You know how many times I’ve heard that?” He raises his voice and repeats, “You know how many times I’ve heard that?”

  It was only natural that Auriemma would fall prey to that line of thinking. Maybe people who asked that question had a point. He found himself at a crossroads in 2006, when he all but said yes to an offer from a university—he won’t say which one—to coach its men’s team. He eventually passed, however, because his daughter Jenna, who had just taken a teaching job near UConn, was heartbroken at the prospect. “Kathy has always been a big believer that you don’t move away from your kids. Your kids are supposed to move away from you,” Auriemma says.

  Rather than being haunted by regret over turning down that men’s job, Kathy believes the decision settled her husband in a way he wasn’t before. “He knew that he could have had a men’s job if he wanted one, but he didn’t,” Kathy says. “Not that it legitimized him, but in a way it took the edge off what he was doing.” In many ways, the decision to stay at UConn, to stay in the women’s game, marked the completion of Auriemma’s immigration, the realization that he was living out the American dream. It forced him to acknowledge that he had taken two worlds, braided them into one, and made it authentically his own.

  * * *

  • • •

  Imagine the look on that nun’s face back at St. Francis of Assisi if someone had told her that the immigrant boy sitting across from her would someday be able to compare and contrast his experiences hanging out with three different U.S. presidents.

  It is an annual tradition for the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball champions to be honored with a ceremony at the White House. Auriemma, a student of history, has paid particular attention to the habits of the various presidents. Bill Clinton came late and stayed late. George W. Bush arrived exactly on time and left exactly on time. Barack Obama was somewhere in between.

  The ultimate highlight came when Auriemma brought his mother on one of the visits. He took her picture under the official portrait of John F. Kennedy, the ultimate honor for a Catholic mother. “Growing up, there were only two pictures in my house—John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII,” he says. When Obama came into the room, Auriemma introduced his mom, and the president of the United States leaned over and gave her a big hug. “Here she was, couldn’t read or write. Came from Italy, lived through the war. The Americans liberated her town. Seeing the look on her face when he gave her that hug, it was a truly great moment in my life.”

  Does it surprise you that he is not a man of vanity? When Auriemma is out and about in his neighborhood or on vacation at his beach house, you will never catch him wearing a UConn shirt. Nor does he have a single picture or piece of memorabilia on display in his home that would indicate what he does for a living. He published a memoir in 2009 recounting his upbringing and his championship seasons, but he vows never to write one of those motivational tomes imparting his secrets of success. “That’s such bullshit, man. I don’t get it. That’s not who I am.”

  Geno never got much closure with his dad. In 1996, when his parents came to visit him for Thanksgiving, he and Donato went for a walk outside. Donato had been fighting lung cancer, so he could no longer smoke his beloved cigarettes. Geno puffed on a cigar and blew the smoke his way so his da
d could taste it. They talked as they strolled. It was one of the few times when Geno felt he and his father had genuinely connected, and he wondered if it might signal a new beginning. Alas, Donato passed away a year later, his son and his son’s country forever a mystery to him.

  If Auriemma puts a lot of pressure on himself to win championships for UConn, imagine how he feels when he is representing the entire United States. In 2010, he was named the head coach of the U.S. national program. His teams won two FIBA World Championships and two Olympic gold medals—including at the 2016 Rio Games, where his squad, which included three of his former UConn players, trounced the competition by an average of nearly 30 points.

  One of the games was a 105–62 victory over China. Even though it was a laugher, Auriemma still insisted that his players chase perfection. They ended up with 40 assists on 46 made field goals. Watching from his office back at Saint Joseph’s, where he has been the head men’s coach since 1995, Phil Martelli marveled at how much had changed—and yet how little. “My brain was racing because I’m thinking he’s the same guy who was standing on the sideline as the jayvee coach at Bishop Kenrick High School,” he says. “Think about that number—forty assists in a game of basketball. I don’t care if it was Connecticut playing a Division III school. Forty assists! So it’s not about women’s basketball with him, it’s about basketball. He wants his teams to play the absolute perfect game. That’s the separation between him and his competition.”

  One of the players on that gold medal team was Diana Taurasi. Auriemma first coached her when she was in high school playing for Team USA at the Under-18 championships. They went on to win three NCAA championships together along with two World Championships and two Olympic gold medals. Like Auriemma, Taurasi is the child of immigrants. Her father was born in Italy, her mother in Argentina. After they won the gold in Rio, they shared a quiet embrace. “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have accomplished nearly as much as I have,” he told her. She told him she felt the same way about him. There they were, two first-generation Americans, speaking the same language, the language of basketball. It was not a moment for strutting, but rather for disbelief and gratitude at the path Auriemma has traveled since he stepped off that boat. It’s remarkable where that bouncing ball has taken him. He certainly never planned it this way.