STORRS, Conn. — A few years ago, UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma returned to his hometown of Montella, Italy, for the first time in years. He was on vacation elsewhere in the country, but a cousin reached out and invited him to a relative’s wedding. The ceremony, he discovered, would be in the same church where he attended kindergarten six decades earlier, so he decided to extend his trip an extra few days.
As a child, Auriemma walked to kindergarten every day, stopping at a field where locals had erected a basketball hoop and created a soccer field. Years later, Auriemma’s mother, Marsiella, often told how that was the first time he saw a basketball hoop.
On his trip six decades later, Auriemma retraced his footsteps from his childhood home to the church. He stopped at the field to take in the view. The basketball hoop and soccer field were long gone. There are more houses now — with running water and electricity, unlike his home as a boy. He’s the oldest living person in his immediate family, the last one who remembers this place clearly.
“We were living in poverty, but we didn’t know it was poverty,” Auriemma said. “As a kid, I thought, ‘Why do I need a telephone?’ No one had a telephone. ‘Why do I need money?’ Nobody had money. ‘Why do I need running water? Why do we need electricity? Everybody helps everybody else get by.’”
Over the years, several earthquakes have ripped through this area, but the people have always rebuilt. Even the tremors couldn’t destroy the belief that the new structures would stand, even if everyone understood that everything could be gone in an instant.
“Obviously, it has changed,” Auriemma, 70, says. “But it’s still kind of the same.”
Such is true for Montella but also for Auriemma.
If there’s a theme to his coaching and an explanation for how he has arrived at this pinnacle, it’s this: He’s a self-described optimist with a worst-case-scenario plan if anything and everything goes south. He has a memory like an elephant, which means his past is never far from his mind.
That mentality has driven Auriemma to this point — one win away from becoming the winningest basketball coach of all time.
Geno Auriemma joins Tara VanDerVeer as the all-time winningest collegiate basketball head coach. #NCAAWBB pic.twitter.com/q7FgrcbXi2
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessWBB) November 16, 2024
When Auriemma came to UConn in 1985 as a 31-year-old, he saw it as a stepping-stone job: Win a bit, grow the program and then move on to a more established program.
Championship basketball wasn’t supposed to emanate from UConn; Auriemma could see that. During his interview, then-UConn athletic director John Toner intentionally avoided showing Auriemma the gym or the locker room out of fear that Auriemma would turn down the job. After Auriemma took the job anyway, he shared a single office with his entire staff. He and longtime assistant Chris Dailey each had a desk; the rest of the staff shared a single couch and used a coffee table as a desk. Auriemma’s and Dailey’s coaching contracts stipulated they teach gym classes to non-athletes. Attendance was so poor at UConn games that they made it a class requirement for students.
In 1991, the Huskies made their first Final Four alongside established programs Stanford, Virginia and Tennessee. “It was all the really, really good programs, great players, great coaches and …” Auriemma said, then paused. “And us. (It was) like, ‘Who are these people?’”
After the Final Four, something changed. No longer was UConn a stepping stone. It was where Auriemma felt he needed and wanted to be. The program’s first Final Four run allowed the Huskies to attract more high-talent players, and when Rebecca Lobo visited campus in the early 1990s, Auriemma knew she could help put the program on the map. The Huskies had gotten to the Final Four with players no other Final Four team recruited, so he figured landing an All-American could help them take the next step.
Lobo’s parents didn’t want her to go to UConn. There wasn’t much infrastructure or community built around campus. The academics weren’t what they are now. (Lobo’s parents called it a “safety school” when they visited.)
“He was the selling point,” Lobo said. “The reason to go there was to play for him. That has stayed consistent, but especially in the early years. This was before it was proven that he would get you to a Final Four or national championship, that he could be the one to usher you into the best version of yourself.”
In 1995, Lobo sat in Auriemma’s office when a fan delivered baked goods to the team and fawned over the star All-American. After the fan left, Lobo — who was seated across from Auriemma at his desk — rolled her eyes.
“Don’t you ever be that way,” Lobo remembers Auriemma sternly telling her. “Don’t you ever take any of this for granted.”
That was 200 wins in with six NCAA Tournament appearances and a Final Four on the resume. The Huskies were on the brink of their first national title. But an eye-roll, to Auriemma, signified what could bring it all crashing down.
Though Auriemma saw potential in Storrs, he also recognized the program’s humble past could return if he didn’t build for the future.
“When I first started, I thought we’d beat everybody because we’re smarter than them and we’re going to outsmart them, even though I knew we couldn’t win,” Auriemma said. “And then when we started winning all the time, all I kept thinking about was, ‘Jesus Christ, we’re going to lose. They’re going to play great. We’re going to play sh—y.’”
Auriemma continued hammering home his points with each new roster, and UConn became the sport’s gold standard. Lobo handed the reins to Jennifer Rizzotti, Shea Ralph and Nykesha Sales. They handed the baton to Sue Bird and Swin Cash. Then Diana Taurasi and Renee Montgomery. Maya Moore, Tina Charles, Breanna Stewart, Napheesa Collier, Paige Bueckers — the list goes on.
The program became a bedrock of sports en route to Auriemma matching former Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer as college basketball’s winningest coach. Through it all, he has been confident that with the right preparation, UConn could continue to compete at the highest level, but he’s also convinced it could all be gone tomorrow.
UConn’s success always felt precarious, with failure always nipping at his heels.
For Auriemma, the past — whether it be that one losing season or how it felt to help his parents acclimate to Norristown, Pa., after leaving the small village in Italy he called home — is always there. None of it’s a failure, but it’s all a reminder of how far he has come. It matters to him that he had to create his own success, and ultimately, he chose to make it at UConn. He never looked for a shortcut, and it’s a reminder that a divergence at any point could have created a very different life.
Friday will mark 63 years since he arrived in America, which means that 63 years ago Wednesday — on the night when he could become college basketball’s all-time winningest coach with a victory against Fairleigh Dickinson — he was a 7-year-old boy somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, surrounded by water and sky, 11 days into a 13-day journey.
His parents never promised him that life would be better here, only that it could be better so long as they didn’t take shortcuts and relied on the people around them. He never forgot that everything could be gone in an instant, which has driven him and shaped him the most from win No. 1 to 100 and eventually 1,217, from turning UConn from a stepping stone into a program that’s synonymous across all sports with success.
As he has said countless times to his players and himself: Don’t you ever take any of this for granted.
(Top photo: C. Morgan Engel / NCAA Photos via Getty Images)
