"Geno's Game": Geno Auriemma (UConn Women's Basketball coach) profile on 60 Minutes - March 7, 2004

His name is Geno Auriemma The name of his

game

is

women

's

basketball

Not long ago the sport was little more than a fad in the greater college sports industry and Auriemma was just another anonymous assistant

coach

working his way up the

basketball

ladder. of the minor leagues at that time 18 years ago a modest offer came from a backward team at a backward school yukon the university of connecticut and

geno

have not been the same as there are some better in the

game

than the yukon huskies the four times and current national champions and with a million more a year, Gino is the highest paid

coach

in the sport, the record of 167 victories against eight defeats in five years speaks for itself and on the court no one speaks louder than judo, we cannot stay here waiting to get trapped. understand we're done with that come on it's time to attack him now let's go together one two three he's the

geno

shows a whale in what was the puddle of

uconn

women

's basketball the national champions have brought four national championships and millions of dollars in revenue for a mid-sized state university that rarely made headlines, the Connecticut women's basketball team has built a virtual cult following among these otherwise undemonstrative swamp Yankees, every game a sellout, 16,000 rabid fans and beefy under one roof, hey, this is very difficult. true, if it were easy everyone would be undefeated as number one this is very difficult it's supposed to be the relentless daily drills are a hallmark of gino's basketball program that's just incredible there is no trace of sensitivity in the evidence i said this a hundred times some of you kids have to cheat in school you have to cheat because you can't make that many wrong decisions sarcasm how many times do I have to say it look that's my impatience takes the place of gender awareness wait wait wait wait wait wait wait you're very hard on the players, to what extent, uh, that in itself is an act, never what you really are, since it is not a marked act as you seem to be mm-hmm, because if it were an act.

I think they would have read it, so it's real, it's absolutely real, come on, players and people break down mentally before they break down physically I think, so you're not just training them to run and jump and you're training them. I expect them to think under pressure and to do that you have to practice a certain kind of chauvinistic philosophy. I think women are at this level, but I also think women in general have this burning desire to please, like she wants to do what you want her to do. like if you're a coach you want me to do this I really want to do that so if you tell me I didn't do it well enough it bothers them personally here we go gino look for the best high school athletes who can handle his verbal assaults seemed unnatural the fiercely competitive game of college recruiting he plays a choir choreographer here comes the ball I've tried to use the Broadway analogy with a lot of kids you're a performer and in women's basketball this has Become Broadway, it's where most fans get more attention, so why would you want to apply your craft anywhere other than Broadway and what do other coaches tell you about why you shouldn't join, why you shouldn't come to Connecticut? uh, you're not going to like that guy, he's an idiot, the winningest idiot in Connecticut history off the court, a wife, two daughters and a son, a respectable member of the community on the court, the idiot emerges , I'm not talking about that, we already screwed it up. above, I'm talking about why you would leave that guy open, you're the coach everyone loves to hate, right, why, because we win all the time, simple as that, among other things, well, I'm not exactly the right face For that. would you like to put on women's basketball he plays the villain says things he knows will irritate women's coaches he knows don't like them sports illustration writer and yukon fan frank deford says gino isn't exactly a model for women's basketball if If you were casting for the coach of a women's basketball team you wouldn't cast Gino, this handsome, smart dad, you know, with the whole curly thing, there's no way they're bringing him in and Deford says Gino. he plays his role well to the core, he starts with his tie untied, you know, loose, but perfectly untied, like he had a valet and he did it in advance, that's part of it, hands on hips, this type of pose. walking up and down screaming and then the assistant coaches will come in it's almost almost choreographed like wrestling he has the act under control and he's the only guy there usually he's the only guy it's this man in the sea of ​​femininity gyno Heyema came to this country from Italy at the age of seven he learned about basketball and about life the old-fashioned way of immigrants speaking in English No, so what did you do pretend pretend that I learned through sports? on the playground, you learn it quickly and the nuns and teachers at my elementary school taught me a valuable lesson in elementary school and told me: look in June, the kids who are really smart go to third grade, the kids who They are not, they stay in second grade and my aunt was an interpreter for me and she told me: you understand, I told her absolutely that there was no English as a second language, there is no stay after school and we will work with you, you either understand it or you try again next year.

Lead this team the same way the nuns led you at school. I try to direct it like you would if you had 12 kids and you said, "It's okay now." Should I let it go? Whatever happens or I have certain rules and regulations that everyone can agree on that would make this work. I'll talk to you guys, so let me know what you think about it. As long as you tell him how great he is and all he'll listen to, Gino treats his star Major Diana Taurasi the same as anyone else. Gino understands women that he understands and you know we always say he's probably a woman too. you know he has mood swings like a woman too, you know he has a little girl in him I guess, but coach, he understands women, you know what he understands, what bothers them the most, I think that's what It helps him the most, it's psychological. he gets into your head, he knows how, he knows what to push what buttons to push to get what he wants from his players and sometimes you don't like it, the line that a coach should follow is: does your team right now need to do it? be inflated individually and collectively even if it's artificially or your team you have to tell the truth and bring them down and sometimes you say something to a player and today you're right and tomorrow you say the same thing and tomorrow you're wrong and I mean we're talking about 12 women here, so you could be right at 11 o'clock in the morning and wrong at 12:30 in the afternoon when we paid a visit to

uconn

for the first time at the beginning of This season, the Huskies played their usual role, undefeated in their first nine games, the kind of perfect performance their fans had become accustomed to and then the unthinkable after leading Duke by 14 points with less than four

minutes

left in the game Connecticut collapsed.

I've mentally been saying that for three months and it's vague right now with only five seconds left. Duke fought back and tied the game, then Taurasi put her team back up by two, but it was too late. Duke hit the basketball equivalent. of a grand slam home run with two outs at the end of the night the final buzzer a triple and a total shock to lose what it's like to lose it just doesn't seem right to me it's not right it's inexplicable I really mean, in a way it is It's very easy to explain, but in other ways it is inexplicable.

This is a big turn of events and now he is ready to strike again and a week later it happened again, another loss this time and he also ran away from Notre Dame. Wow, I haven't seen this. Jesus, I've never seen Gino this way. It's not just pressure on the team and on Gino to win, it's winning every time, yes, never losing, that's a difficult thing. He has created a monster where people expect Uconn to win every game and they don't. just to win every game they expected to win every game by 20 or 30 points, I mean when they have close games and they only win by 10 or 12, you know, people in Connecticut said what happened last night, what's going on or are they losing it? ?

It means that when they lose a game it's like the universe has turned upside down it happened in 1999 1999 we had a terrible year we were 29 and 5 years old. now you laugh everyone was devastated they expect perfection right they hope you'll never make him lose right how do you deal with that? It drives me crazy, but that's just how I am, so I'm kind of a tortured soul here, so I just handle it well, that's why they pay me a lot of money, we're going to win. every game don't worry about it and you keep your fingers crossed and you keep your fingers crossed and you say a nearly silent prayer tonight it's just another game for us to avenge them the ladies volunteers of tennessee gino calls them the evil empire their ladies beat them in last year's national championship, so it's a grudge match, Tennessee on its own turf in Knoxville is out for blood and Genos carefully drinks the scalp, he let the game start very close for a while, but then the spectacle Geno took over his huskies and ran away with him 81-67.

Good job, how much of the victory is in the head? Everything first, you win the game in your head, then you win it on the court with your body, first you see it and then you do it, so yes, Yogi was right, 90% of the game is. half metal