Editor's Note: Dick Weiss, a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame, has covered college sports in Philadelphia and New York for more than 40 years. He will be providing regular commentary for the American Athletic Conference during the 2014-15 season.
NEW YORK-- The masterpiece Geno Auriemma is painting at the University of Connecticut has a John Wooden-like aura to it.
The Huskies' Hall of Fame coach has become the most successful coach in this, or any era of women's college basketball.
Auriemma has coached UConn to nine NCAA tournament championships, seven in the past 12 years; and has taken his teams to 15 Final Fours since 1991. His overall record is 879-133, including five undefeated seasons in 1995, 2002, 2009, 2010 and 2014 when his team was 40-0 and he has broken Wooden's NCAA record with 90 consecutive victories.
Wooden won 10 national championships from 1964 through 1975 before retiring. But the idea of any men's team establishing a dynasty like that again has evaporated, drifting into the either once great players began leaving early for the NBA on a regular basis. Parity is much more prevalent in March Madness.
"If the one and done doesn't exist, if players had to stay two years, let's say, how many times do you think Butler gets to the Final Four, or Wichita State, or VCU,'' Auriemma said yesterday at the American women's annual media day at the New York Athletic Club. "If all those guys would stay, it would be the same six or seven teams every year fighting for the Final Four. The reductions in scholarships to 13 and guys leaving after one or two years have a lot to do with it. Otherwise, how do you explain Kentucky winning the national championship in 2012 and the next year, they don't make the NCAA tournament.”
"So I think what's happens in our game is everybody stays for four years and if you are attracting the best players, not only are they staying but you're getting more of them every year and the same schools end up competing for the Final Four.''
Auriemma, a six-time winner of the Nasimith National Coach of the Year award, is traveling through uncharted waters with his elite program. When he arrived at UConn in 1985, the school's women's basketball team had just one winning season in its history. Auriemma has coached the Huskies to 20 conference championships since 1989 and produced 12 Olympians and eight National Players of the Year-- Rebecca Lobo (1995), Jen Rizzotti (1996), Kara Wolters (1997), Sue Bird (2002), Diana Taurasi (2003, 2004), Maya Moore (2009, 2001, 2011) Tina Charles (2011) and current 6-4 junior Breanna Stewart (2014).
And he enters this season with a team that returns three starters, including Stewart, a two-time Most Outstanding Player the Huskies' last two title teams; and two other pre-season first team all-conference choices--senior forward Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis and junior point guard Moriah Jeferson-- to go with the nation's top ranked recruiting class and 6-3 transfer Natalie Butler from Georgetown, the Big East Rookie of the Year in 2014, it should be no surprise the Huskies start the season ranked pre-season No. 1 in the AP women's poll.
This is the best team in the country.
But Auriemma is not ready to reserve a spot in the throne room yet because he is still hasn't figured out how to replace the competitive juices two graduated All Americans-- center Stefanie Dolson and guard Bria Hartley-- brought to the court with them every day last season.
"Our sport is getting better,'' he admitted.”You know what I think parity is, it's the same thing as parity in a conference. What makes a great conference isn't the top four teams in a conference. It's the teams from five through 10 or 11 that if you lose Saturday you can drop from fifth to ninth. The top five teams in any conference are good. The bottom four are always going to be bad. Okay, there are still 10 in the country teams that are head and shoulders over the others. But, you know what 11 through 30, there's a huge amount of competition.''
Auriemma, who has coached Team USA to a gold medal in the 2012 Olympics and two gold’s in the 2010 and 2014 World championships, has been one step ahead of the crowd because his program has become a magnet for blue chip prospects and Auriemma can select those he feels have the best character traits.
"I try to go out and get team guys who are superstars instead of going out and recruiting superstars and trying to make a team out of them,'' he said. "Once you recruit team players, chemistry comes easy because the players came to win championships so they have already admitted, "I'm willing to give up a little bit of myself."
"A lot of times men's coaches are forced say to kids, 'Look I can get you to the NBA, not necessarily win a national championship.'"
Auriemma's roster is filled with McDonald's All Americans and one special Canadian, freshman guard Kia Nurse, who has already played for her country's 2014 World Cup team. "If I had my druthers, I would have 10 foreign kids on my team every year,'' Auriemma said. ”There's no doubt about it. ... I think we need to adopt a lot of the rules they have (in Europe), but we don't want to, for whatever reason. We don't want to widen the lane. We don't want to move the 3-point line back. If we widen the lane, Stefanie Dolson and Tina Charles would be negated; their big kid could handle my big kid because they are farther away from the basket. If they pushed the line back, only really good shooters would be able to shoot three’s. They do so many things over there better than we do, and I don't know why we're so late in changing some of the rules. That's why their kids are better players and more fundamentally sound.
"One of the reasons our country has succeeded in international competition is because other countries don't have the talent we have, one through 12. At least one or two players we play against could probably play on the U.S. national team. The problem is, we have 12 of them. They have two. The games might be close and they practice a lot. I heard Gregg Popovich of the Spurs say that our players want to play games. Their players like to practice. They practice a lot and work on their game a lot. They are solid every area of the game. You get a foreign player and they say, 'What can they do well?' They can probably pass it, dribble it, shoot it.
"It doesn't matter what they are 5-10 or 6-10. Unfortunately, we can't develop that kind of mentality in this country.
"Every coach wants a team that has versatility, where you have three of four players on the floor who can play multiple positions—good players who can do a lot of things. You can't be one dimensional. I've learned this from coaching internationally: don't put anyone on the team because they are a great defender or a great rebounder. Can they score? If not, you're playing five on four. In Europe, unless you can score, they don't put you on the team.''
What makes Auriemma such an intriguing study is that he has outspoken opinions on a variety of subjects and is not afraid to share them. Auriemma has worked with so many great players at UConn-- five of them were on Team USA's 2014 World Cup team-- on so many high profile teams at UConn, he realizes most incoming freshmen are works in progress.
"Any kid I'm recruiting that has a personal (basketball) trainer, I know when they come in as a freshman they are going to suck,'' he said. ”Because the first time you put them on the floor with four other players, they have no idea what to do. All they've learned is about themselves. All they've learned is how to do something that involves them. That's the world they live in. They live in a world of me, me, me. When you get them and they've got to learn how to play 'we,' they don't know how to do it."
Gifted players like Taurasi, Moore and Stewart are rare exceptions.
"Their talent could overwhelm whatever they were lacking in other areas,'' Auriemma said. "They weren't smart enough to play as freshmen. They weren't mentally tough enough. Maybe they weren't emotionally ready to play as freshmen. But they had so much god given ability that it would mask what they don't know. These other kids, what they don't know is out there for everybody to see and they get exposed.''
With that, Auriemma left us with one last pearl of wisdom when he was asked whether players should be paid.
"I think there's a sense of entitlement in college,'' he said. "It's all about the welfare of the student-athlete. What about the welfare of their coaches? It's all about the welfare of the student-athletes. 'What can we do to make their experience better? How much money can we give them? How much more food can we give them? How many more resources can we give them?”
"What are they giving back? They show up for two hours and they go home. I think the emphasis needs to be on, 'Listen, we're giving you guys a lot of money to go to school here; we need you to get better every day, every week, every month, every year.' This whole idea of paying athletes; I'm all in favor of paying athletes. I'm all in favor of them being employees. I'm also in favor of firing them if they're not any good."