FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

The UConn Huskies Get a Reality Check

After four historically unrivaled years of college basketball, University of Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma faces more common challenges this season: building up a young team, and possibly even losing.
Photo by Melina Vastola-USA TODAY Sports

Geno Auriemma, as the case so often gets made, is the John Wooden of this era, with 11 national championships exceeding Wooden's ten with UCLA. When Wooden won his tenth in 1975, at age 64, he retired. Auriemma is 62, but he shows no sign of slowing down. Last March, he coached the Connecticut Huskies to their fourth national title in four years, and 11th since 1995. The championship game wasn't even close.

Advertisement

This season, Auriemma faces more common challenges. He is tasked with building up a young team that, while not unskilled, is bereft of the trio of stars who terrorized the rest of college basketball for the past four years: the generational talent that is Breanna Stewart, perhaps the greatest point guard in program history in Moriah Jefferson, and a legitimate top-15 UConn player of all time in Morgan Tuck. They went 1-2-3 in the WNBA draft this summer.

Read More: Meet This Year's College Basketball Stars at the Champions Classic

And so it came to pass that the Connecticut Huskies were actually ranked third in the AP preseason poll this year, behind Notre Dame and Baylor. Implicit in the voting is an expectation that a team that has won 75 in a row will lose this year, that the program with four straight national titles will not get a fifth in a row.

UConn's new reality was driven home in their season opener on Monday night: a 78-76 win over Florida State, captured by the narrowest of margins. There's every chance the multi-year win streak comes to an end Thursday against Baylor.

"I don't think I'm any more or any less [excited]," Auriemma explained last month about his emotional expectations for the upcoming season, but he acknowledged that it would be different. "It hasn't been a lot of fun right now, saying, 'You know, [freshman guard] Crystal Dangerfield, if you could do these three things, even a little bit, then we wouldn't have to worry about missing Moriah.' That's no fun. What's fun is looking back down the road, and realizing that yeah, now she can do some things she couldn't do."

Advertisement

He paused. "It's a different kind of fun."

Auriemma during the close game at Florida State. Photo by Melina Vastola-USA TODAY Sports

There is no cruelty in how Auriemma calls out his players; Husky alumnae speak of their coach reverentially, and their accomplishments reflect the success of his "tough love" approach. His Philly putdowns of in-progress players and teams have been a mainstay at Connecticut for 31 years, but last season Auriemma, by his own admission, found himself marveling at what he'd created. He allowed his emotion to show often, as when he sat glassy-eyed with Stewart at the Final Four to receive Associated Press Coach of the Year honors while Stewart took home player of the year. His unfamiliar public expressions of unchecked pride toward his own team's play led many to wonder whether he was about to call it a career.

In retrospect, these were not early-warning signs of a departure. They reflected a man who understood that even from the high perch where Connecticut women's basketball sits, he had found territory he isn't likely to reach again.

"This is a much more realistic picture of what it's like in the world of team sports and coaching," Auriemma said of this year's team. "We've lived in a world that very few people get to live in, and they get to live in it once, maybe twice in their careers. And certainly, some people who have been very fortunate, more than twice. But never in a row, 1-2-3-4."

"Tell me one world that stays the same," he added. "Things change rapidly."

Advertisement

Auriemma has got a roster with returning players like junior guard Kia Nurse, junior forward Gabby Williams, and sophomore forward Katie Lou Samuelson—players who'd be stars at other programs, but were asked to play secondary roles while Stewart, Jefferson, and Tuck were on the floor.

"It's a different kind of fun." Photo by Melina Vastola-USA TODAY Sports

That the Huskies are ranked as high as third has less to do with the talent assembled, however, or even with Auriemma himself, than with observers betting on the system in place at Storrs paying dividends by March. In the meantime, Auriemma is content to conduct his dialogues with reporters, acknowledging a new, more competitive basketball landscape that exists, and to push his young team to its forefront.

"He's accomplished so much, maybe everything one could accomplish, but he's only concerned with making us the best players and people we can be," Samuelson said before the season began. "And I trust him, that was one of the main reasons I came here."

When Connecticut played their final tuneup of the preseason earlier this month, Samuelson was the last of 11 Huskies to step on the court, with 5:20 left in the third quarter. Auriemma knew reporters would ask about it after the game—a 95-32 rout of Pace University—and he had a ready answer. "Sometimes players like Lou, they just kind of coast through things in the exhibition season," he explained.

There will be much less room for coasting during the regular season, as Monday's opener showed; whatever uncertainly lies in store for the Huskies, that, at least, is something Auriemma knows all too well.

"From a coaching staff perspective, it's going to be how we maintain that same level of expectation at UConn, don't lower our standards, but understand it's a new world we're entering into," he said last month. "It's hard to know how some people will perform until there's no safety net. And maybe they don't know. It's our job to help guide them through this… So now that there's no safety net, and they have to figure it out, how will they respond? I'm as anxious as anybody to find out."

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.