STORRS, Conn. — UConn ladies’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma handed Tara VanDerveer as school basketball’s all-time winningest coach with the Huskies’ win over Fairleigh Dickinson on Wednesday night time in Storrs. Auriemma earned his 1,217th win.
The Huskies’ depth, a rarity the previous few seasons attributable to a rash of accidents, was on full show within the 85-41 victory. UConn used 11 gamers, together with Azzi Fudd, who missed the start of this season and all of final season after struggling a knee damage in November 2023. Regardless of the snug win, Auriemma spent the sport pacing the sideline, throwing his arms up at missed layups and turnovers. In that manner, it felt much less like a historic victory and identical to some other Huskies’ win.
“That is yet one more excellent milestone in a profession crammed with them for Geno Auriemma,” VanDerveer mentioned in a press release. “The extent of success he has maintained at UConn over 4 many years won’t ever be duplicated. However his super legacy extends far past any variety of wins.
“It lives within the lives of the numerous younger ladies he has positively influenced all through his profession. Congratulations to Geno and Chris on this unbelievable accomplishment.”
Auriemma, 70, is in his fortieth season as a head coach — all at UConn. He has led the Huskies to 6 undefeated seasons (the remainder of ladies’s school basketball accounts for 4 whole), 11 nationwide titles and 23 Last Fours. Alone, he has extra NCAA Event wins than any program in males’s or ladies’s school basketball. Auriemma has gained the Naismith Coach of the 12 months award eight occasions, and he skilled only one shedding season — his first at UConn.
The Huskies have produced 26 All-People (together with 17 multi-time honorees), 27 WNBA first-round draft picks and 5 No. 1 picks, with UConn senior Paige Bueckers anticipated to go No. 1 to Dallas within the 2025 WNBA Draft.
Understanding that Auriemma would surpass VanDerveer with a win over Fairleigh Dickinson, UConn deliberate to have fun the anniversary of Auriemma and longtime assistant Chris Dailey’s hiring. Greater than 60 program alumni — together with Sue Chicken, Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore and Napheesa Collier — attended the sport. Auriemma and Dailey had been honored at halfcourt with a tribute video and glass-blown basketball engraved with “40 seasons of excellence” earlier than the sport.
The sheer variety of alumni at Gampel Pavilion, and the way well-known so many are due to their storied school and WNBA careers, speaks to Auriemma’s longevity and consistency. He reached the document by successful 88 p.c of his video games up to now. VanDerveer, who retired from Stanford after final season, gained 82 p.c throughout her profession whereas former Duke males’s coach Mike Krzyzewski, who held the document earlier than VanDerveer, gained 77 p.c of his video games.
Auriemma arrived in Storrs as a first-time coach in 1985. UConn’s program had skilled only one successful season in its 11-year historical past. Auriemma thought he would stay for a few years till a extra well-established program got here calling. After the Huskies’ first journey to the Last 4 in 1991, Auriemma didn’t obtain any calls, however by then, his ideas on this system had modified and he believed that he and Dailey might construct sustainable success in Storrs. With the dedication of All-American Rebecca Lobo in 1991, this system’s fortunes started to show. In 1995, Lobo’s senior season, UConn gained its first nationwide title.
That nationwide title run put the Huskies on the map and allowed Auriemma’s recruiting to enhance considerably. In 1998, he signed a category that might nonetheless be argued as one of the best recruiting class in ladies’s basketball historical past — Sue Chicken, Swin Money, Ashja Jones and Tamika Williams. That core gained this system’s second and third NCAA titles and people 4 gamers had been drafted within the prime six of the 2002 WNBA Draft.
By the early 2000s, UConn had formally established itself as one of many nation’s blueblood packages alongside Tennessee and Stanford. Taurasi, Tina Charles and Moore carried the Huskies’ success by means of the remainder of the 2000s, ushering within the Breanna Stewart period and essentially the most dominant stretch in school basketball. From 2013 to 2016, the Huskies gained 4 nationwide titles and set a university basketball document by successful 111 consecutive video games.
Together with his success within the school ranks and with so many UConn gamers within the nationwide workforce pool, it wasn’t a shock when Group USA tabbed Auriemma as coach in 2009 to guide the U.S. for the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Video games, turning into the one coach in ladies’s Olympic basketball historical past to guide the workforce twice.
Required studying
- Geno Auriemma never planned to stay at UConn — 40 years later, he’s about to set another record there
- ‘I couldn’t see my way out’: Geno Auriemma’s year of reckoning
- Paige Bueckers vs. JuJu Watkins: How UConn, USC stars will keep women’s basketball in spotlight
(Picture: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Photographs)
Chantel Jennings is The Athletic’s senior author for the WNBA and ladies’s school basketball. She lined school sports activities for the previous decade at ESPN.com and The Athletic and spent the 2019-20 tutorial yr in residence on the College of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalists. Comply with Chantel on Twitter @chanteljennings
