Mon, Jan 03, 2011 page18

• FEATURE: Auriemma was brash from the beginning, players say

  • NY Times News Service, NEW YORK
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  Once upon a time, for a very brief time, Geno Auriemma was not simultaneously blessed and burdened by championship expectation and regular-season perfection. A quarter-century ago, long before anyone in Connecticut could fathom Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore, Auriemma set sail in the shallow waters of women’s college basketball with Audrey Epstein and Peggy Walsh.

  When Walsh — now Peggy Myers — was the star forward on Auriemma’s first Connecticut team in 1985-1986, about 50 people passed for a crowd at the old campus field house.

  “That included the parents of the local players, the girls from Connecticut and the people running around on the track above the court,” she said.

  

  University of Connecticut’s head coach Geno Auriemma smiles during a team picture on Dec. 21 after defeating Florida State in their NCAA women’s basketball game in Hartford, Connecticut.

  PHOTO: REUTERS

  However, one day in 1990, Auriemma stood in an aisle of the gleaming-new Gampel Pavilion and told Myers’ husband: “Someday, I’m going to fill this place.”

  Norm Myers, who had played football at Connecticut and was often one of the 50 at his future wife’s games, said: “You’re kidding me, right?”

  During a dynastic run that has produced seven national championships, four undefeated seasons and the 90-game win streak that was snapped on Thursday night at Stanford, Auriemma more than delivered on his promise. His program outgrew Gampel’s 10,000-plus capacity and plays its more competitive home games at the larger XL Center in Hartford.

  None of that seemed likely or even possible when a 31-year-old Auriemma walked into the gym in October 1985 and took inventory of the team he had inherited from Jean Balthaser.

  “We had been led to believe that they were going to hire a woman,” Peggy Myers said. “But in walks Geno, and I remember thinking: ‘What does this little Italian guy know about basketball?’ We soon found out.”

  Auriemma had come after serving as an assistant to Debbie Ryan and her budding power at Virginia and arrived at a program that had won 27 games against 57 defeats in the previous three seasons and to players whose work ethic — at least by Auriemma’s standards — was a reflection of their record.

  “How many times that preseason do you think we heard: ‘Are you freaking kidding me?’” said Epstein, a guard on that team who now goes by her married surname, Polinsky. “He probably threw us out of practice more than we practiced.”

  Yes, she testified, young Geno was every bit as brash, driven and demanding as the 56-year-old version already enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  “But to me, he was a breath of fresh air,” Polinsky said. “He had us riled up to the point where it was crazy. We had a practice once where I went after the ball and wound up jumping over the benches and falling over on my back.”

  Living one flight up in a campus dormitory, Myers took to riding the elevator after practice and sleeping on the floor rather than climbing into her upper bunk.

  “That’s how sore I was,” she said.

  Myers, Polinsky and Diane Poletti (now Poletti-Metzel) were the seniors on Auriemma’s first team. He made them the captains, with the responsibility of meeting with him after he threw everyone out of the gym.

  “The years before that, we were out there because we just wanted to play,” Poletti-Metzel said. “None of us had ever experienced that kind of intensity.”

  That season, the Huskies’ schedule was a manifestation of modest ambitions. Their out-of-conference road games were at Long Island University and Iona. Nonconference home games included clashes with Marist, Hartford and Georgia State.

  In retrospect, the seven victories they opened the season with were a pittance compared with what would become routine.

  However, as Myers said: “We thought we were hot stuff there for a while — at least until the Big East games.”

  The Huskies’ 4-12 conference record cost them a winning season — the only time in 25 years that an Auriemma team would finish under .500 overall (12-15) or in a league in which the Huskies have finished first in 19 of the past 22 seasons.

  It is not the distinction for which the captains prefer to be remembered, but apparently Auriemma, most of all, does not consider them losers.

  In his 2006 book, Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection, he called his 1985-1986 players “the kind of kids you would recruit to a school that has a lousy record with no facilities and what appears to be no commitment from the university.”

  However, he cited Myers as a ferocious game competitor whose 25 rebounds against Pittsburgh that season remain a team record, and Polinsky as a brainy 173cm overachiever. Victories over Syracuse and Massachusetts, Auriemma added, were “the closest I ever get to being really satisfied as a coach.”

  He added: “We win some games we have no business winning. That never happens anymore.”

  Polinsky took issue with Auriemma’s assertion in the book that there were no Division-1 caliber players on their team.

  “I would never even have been recruited to sit on his bench,” she said. “But I think Peggy was one — probably the only one.”

  Noting that Auriemma quickly raised the quality of the standard Connecticut recruit and that the evolutionary gains have been exponential in the last 15 years, Myers said: “I’m flattered that Audrey would say that, but I’m not even sure Rebecca Lobo could play for Geno at this point.”

  It was when Lobo was anchoring Connecticut’s first national title and unbeaten season in 1994-1995 that Auriemma approached Myers and suggested that she return to the program.

  “We were living in the area and I had just given birth to my son, already had my daughter,” she said. “I was looking for something to do part time. Geno said the women’s basketball office was overwhelmed with fan mail for Rebecca and could use someone to sort through it.”

  For the past 15 years, Myers has had an insider’s view, a ringside seat. She attended all the Final Fours and has developed an enduring friendship with Auriemma.

  “You hear people say: ‘He’s so cocky, so arrogant,’” Myers said. “That’s the part of Geno that I love. He was that way when he was making US$30,000 a year.”

  She and her former teammates attended Auriemma’s 2006 Hall of Fame induction. They remain rabid Connecticut fans, as are their children.

  “But I can’t just walk into Geno’s office and sit down the way I used to,” Polinsky said. “He’s protected now. The simplicity is gone.”

  However, success has not diminished Auriemma’s sarcasm. After the Huskies’ inexperience around Moore was exploited by Stanford on Thursday and the Huskies settled for bettering the longstanding UCLA’s men’s record by two games, he said: “This losing stuff is getting old, man; I hate it. I just wish we could catch a break every once in a while so these kids can have some success.”

  Maybe what was a rare or even first encounter with failure for the Huskies will put Auriemma a little closer to coaching satisfaction, the possibility of winning something when they are not expected to. Or at least a little closer to memories of 1985-1986, when he might have said something like that and really meant it.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Typhoon Usagi expected to brush past Taiwan

  • 2

    Land warning issued for Typhoon Usagi

  • 3

    China blocks news after deadly attack which killed 35

  • 4

    Storm weakens, but warning still in force

  • 5

    Hawk missiles US’ decision, Koo says