Everything UConn coach Geno Auriemma said ahead of Sunday's top-10 matchup with South Carolina women's basketball

UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma spoke with the media on Friday to preview Sunday’s top-10 matchup with South Carolina. Here is everything he had to say.

Do you think the players understand that this is not a one-and-done game and that it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out the right way?

No, I mean, I think you have to, I always try to point out, always, that the majority of the teams don’t really necessarily like playing these games. I don’t either. I mean, I think playing two of these games in February, when every other team is getting a bye, and you’re getting three or four days off that weekend. But we play them because I believe that they’re necessary for a lot of reasons, and they’re helpful for a lot of reasons.

And there’s a bunch of games after that. The only games that really, really, really, really matter is when, if you lose, you have no games left. That’s when it matters the most. Everything else, yeah, I mean, who doesn’t want to play great? Who doesn’t want to win? You wouldn’t show up if you didn’t want to play great and play to win. But the object is to try to do both, play really, really well, win the game, and then move on.

You know, with UCLA finally losing the game, what do you see when you look at the top 8 or 12 or 15 teams in the country? It seems like there’s a lot of good teams. I don’t know if there’s one really great team. I mean, it used to be there’d be such a drop-off from like the top 2 to the rest, and then such a drop-off from the top 10 to the rest. It seems like there’s a lot of solid teams.

That’s probably the natural progression of things, you know. I do think that the landscape is littered with a bunch of really good teams. And more than a few, maybe, very good teams. And I don’t know if any of us feel like we’re coaching a great team, which is probably the way it’s supposed to be, you know, where multiple teams have in their mind a chance to go deep in the tournament. Probably some teams that we’re not even talking about right now, that two weeks from now, we will be.

And just because you lose one game to one of your biggest rivals in a league game doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have a hell of a team that can win the whole thing. Maybe those days when teams are undefeated, you probably appreciate it more now than you did back then, because it’s hard to do, you know. It’s really hard to do.

So that’s why I think the NCAA tournament, each and every year, is going to get even more and more and more unpredictable, you know.

What did you just learn about your team these past two games, heading into Sunday’s game?

You know, by this time of the season, you pretty much know what you’ve got, you know. So, have we been better defensively? All of January and February, I think, we’ve been pretty good defensively. And our offense has been unbelievably good, and been average, and been okay. So, I don’t know. I just try to, you know, did we do enough to win the game? Yeah. And are we getting better? Yeah, I think.

The players talked about taking the Tennessee loss personally, more so than, you know, Notre Dame or USC. Have you seen that kind of manifest over the last week or so?

Well, it’s interesting, you know, because every loss should be personal, right? I mean, you think about it. When you don’t play well and you don’t win a game, it is kind of, you know, personally, it’s on you as a coach, coaching staff, players. Maybe for some of them, that was the case, you know, that they really took that one to heart for whatever their personal reasons are.

But we have had really good practices. We have had very productive practices since that Friday, right? When we played Thursday? Yeah. So, so far, it’s been really, really good. There’s been, you know, there’s been a lot of things that we’ve been able to go over and do, which I really, really like.

And if that continues, then that’ll – my whole thing, you know, is about building habits, you know. You can’t wait for the next big game to think you’re going to do everything you need to do to win that game if you’re not building the habits every day that are going to help you in that situation. So I think every game that we play, you know, gets us closer to that. Whenever that is you end up playing the absolute perfect game you’re trying to play. Whenever that is. But it’s been different. It’s been different. I’ve noticed it.

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But you know, fair or unfair, the perception is that these handful of games against South Carolina, Tennessee, Notre Dame, etc., they kind of define your season. It’s almost like these out-of-conference games really are your conference, that this is the league you have to win, right? So, how do you present that to the team? You know, it’s not a win-or-go-home game, but in a lot of ways, you’re defined by this game.

Yeah. I try not to go down that road, because I’ve seen so many times, last year being one of them, right, where at one time we were, what, 4-3? Something like that? And the three losses were all to really, really good teams. And you run the risk of that’s who we are. Well, that’s who we are at that time. That’s who we are at that point in the season.

And you can’t change the league you’re in. You can’t change your schedule. Your schedule is your schedule. So to me, I see them more as these are opportunities. These are great opportunities. What would they mean in the long run? That, I don’t know. Hell, I remember Tennessee coming here one year and beating our ass at Gampel (Pavilion), and we beat them in the national championship game. So I think it shows you what your warts are, what your faults are, what your strengths are.

If you try to make it way more than that, I think your players then start to question themselves, doubt themselves, start to believe that whatever. Same goes true if you win. Let’s just say if we would have won the last three or two out of the three, and now you get this euphoria like, wow, nobody can touch us. That’s probably just as bad in some ways. So I’m trying to keep it real for them and keep it, because there’s still a bunch of young guys out there that have to learn from all this stuff, how to navigate all this.

I know when you lost this game last year, you really didn’t have the spare parts to plug in and fix anything. What you had was what you had. Now you could kind of look at these games, Tennessee game, this game, and say, well, okay, we need to change this or fix this, but we have somebody that we could plug in. So, in that sense, the game could be very useful.

It’s always. It’s always. And I think that that’s absolutely true. Coming out of games where you are really, really challenged and where they really put the mirror up in front of your face, you do have to go home, and you can pretend you don’t see that picture in the mirror of who you are.

Or you can be realistic and say, man, if we don’t take care of this, if we don’t, you know, address this, like right now, you’re not going to be able to address it come March. So every one of these games is a mirror to your face, it really is. And, but it can’t be, it can’t be more than that, you know.

And you can’t look back at the season, you know, and you go, well, you guys beat Creighton, but they’re not, they weren’t a top-20 team, top-25 team. Well, they are now. Well, and you didn’t beat any other top-25 teams. Well, Ole Miss was, Louisville was, Iowa State was in the beginning of the season. So you put all these games on your schedule thinking, wow, these are great opportunities for us to go. And then, you know, you got to take what comes, you know, you got to take what comes.

Oh goodness. Yeah. Yeah, it gets, I get a headache thinking about it.

Other than TV, why do you play these kind of games? And will you be able to with 20 Big East games?

Well, there’s a couple of reasons, like I stated. The TV networks want you to play these games at this time of the year because it’s a big non-conference game that attracts a lot of attention and gets a lot of people watching. So, I get that part.

Does it come at a great time for both South Carolina and for Connecticut? Probably not, probably not, you know, but you got to do it. You got to do it anyway. And now, when we go to 20 conference games next year, will it be as easy as it has been to fill in this many non-conference games of the magnitude that we had this year and how many of them were on the road and all that other stuff?

Certainly, it’s going to get a little more difficult. Yeah. And some decisions are going to have to be made about, you know, where do you go? And, you know, we’ve always been pretty good at trying to spread our brand around, you know, not get stuck, you know, just playing regional type games, you know? So we’ve got the USC thing, right? So that’s a new one. And you want to try to keep adding new ones. So yeah, a lot of decisions are going to have to be made about how many you can keep, when in the season can you.

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I remember in the old days, the Big East used to be pretty good about getting your early game so that you could fit in.

Well, you know, when I think back to when we had the best league, probably ever, maybe, we were getting nine and 10 teams in the league in the NCAA tournament, you know, every year. We still played those non-conference games that we didn’t necessarily have to play. You know, back in those days, we didn’t have to play Tennessee. We didn’t have to play Stanford. We didn’t, you know, we didn’t have to play all those teams that we ended up, you know, whether it’s Texas or Ohio State, whoever it was back then, that we were playing non-conference games.

So even then, you know, you want to, you want to, you know, I think players want to be in this game, games like this. They want to be in these games, you know, and you want to play these games. It’s just, sometimes the timing is not great.

Speaking of plugging parts in, do you have an update on Morgan (Cheli) and Ice (Brady)?

Ice looks pretty good. I’m not sure exactly when, you know, she started working out. Morgan, nothing yet. She’s got her boot on and going through a whole bunch of tests and stuff. So I can’t give you any update on that. (Neither player will play on Sunday versus South Carolina.)

Given the tightening of the non-conference schedule coming next year, is South Carolina a team that you’d like to continue playing?

Um. Yeah. I think we’ve tried to do it more by conferences, you know? And try to spread it around. So, if we can keep some ACC schools, some Southeast Conference schools. We got some Big Ten schools. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s gonna, yeah. I mean, in a real world, I’d like to keep all of them. But there’s not, there has to be enough time so that we don’t have to do, you know, two of these in February.

We all saw Azzi’s performance on Wednesday. How is her three ball gonna play a factor in this weekend’s game?

Oh, it’ll be a big factor if it goes in. Yeah. For us, there has to be a, at least, I think, at least a three-pronged attack, you know? You have to be able to score inside. You have to be able to make enough threes. And you gotta get, you know, free throws, mid-range things, you know?

So, because we’re not the biggest team in the country, we don’t necessarily offensive rebound like some other teams do. So we may give up more twos. So that means we have to make up for it by maybe making more threes, hopefully getting to the free-throw line more down the road. So adding, you know, adding somebody that could go out and make six or seven of them, you know, that could change the whole thing. And we’ll see, you know? We’ll see.

That’s, that’s always the big thing. Can, can offensively, can you get what you normally get out of your players? Because in games that are played against really good teams, especially on the road, you have to, you have to be able to get your offense to where you need it to be.

You know, everybody talks about, you know, defense, defense, and it’s, it’s true. I mean, you gotta be able to get stops when you have to get stops. But if you get stops and don’t score, yeah, you still have a chance to win. But it’s hard to get stops, stops, stops, stops. At some point, you know, you know, our best teams back in the day, yeah, we played great defense. We were hard to play against, but we were hard to play against because you couldn’t keep us from scoring.

You know, like we went in such long runs over and over and over again that people talk about defensive pressure. Yeah, but the offensive pressure that you, you have to score because you know we’re going to keep scoring, keep scoring. That’s hard for teams to put up with.

So yeah, you add another shooter that can put that kind of pressure on the other teams. It’s golden, you know, but we can’t afford AZ to come out and go seven for 10 from the three-point line and a couple of guys go 0 for 12. So we need, you know, a good balance from everybody.

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There’s been an issue in big games where you guys just haven’t been able to hit threes consistently. And I think even like, we had a graphic up the other day about like the open threes in the Tennessee game. That like just weren’t falling.

Not just that, and shots around the basket. I forget what the stat was. Something like, I don’t know, what was that, a 19 for 35 or something like that? Some ridiculous number, you know?

Yeah. Getting open threes is not easy against a really good team. Getting stuff around the basket, 10 feet from the basket, it’s not easy. But when you get them and you’re open, you’ve got to shoot a better percentage than that. And what, you say, well, you’re too smart to ask this question. Well, what are you going to do to fix that? I love when people say, what are you going to do to fix that? I have no idea.

You know, just keep getting them and keep putting them in those situations. And go from there.

Man, it’s funny when you’ve been around as long as I’ve been around and you’ve seen teams that were up, down, sideways, inside out, whatever, and you’ve seen it all. And even to this day, you can’t figure out why they are what they are. Why they are what they are.

Coach, when you look at your strengths and weaknesses on the team, do you feel like your players have played up to their full potential?

I don’t think anybody during the course of a season can play up to their full potential for the entirety of the time. You know, we’ve played 26 games. I think it is. We’ve played 26 games. I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to play up to their full potential in every one of those games.

Have we had some people that have played pretty darn good? Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. But the key is, you know, how many players can you get to play at that level when it really matters come the end of the season? But, no, I don’t think anybody can do that for 26 games in a row.

Is there room for a player and a team to surprise you with their performance at this point?

I mean, what would be a surprise? Because each and every one of them has taken turns having huge games. So if all of a sudden Sunday one of them did that, it wouldn’t be like, wow, I didn’t know they could do that. You know, so it’s can you do it when you need to do it, you know, and that’s what competition is all about, right?

How important is it to have Aubrey back now? In that now she’s healthy again in these kind of situations where she’s been in these big games before and she can rebound, she can score?

Yeah. Yeah, I think from a rebounding standpoint, I think it’s a huge asset for us because the one thing, Aubrey, you can count on, she’s going to get you more possessions on the offensive end. That’s for sure.

And, you know, being able to, in the open court, you know, put the ball on the floor and put us in a position to score in transition without having to pass the ball, you know? She can just get it and go.

So those two things, they do a lot to the defense, you know? One, they think they got to stop. You get an offensive rebound, boom, we got an extra possession. There goes a three that we wouldn’t have gotten. Two, everybody’s having a hard time completing passes, but we don’t have to pass it. She’s got it and she’s going to the basket.

If you remember last year’s South Carolina game or the Texas game, you know, so she’s had those moments where, you know, her speed and her quickness and all that have really, really impacted the game. So, yeah, absolutely, to have that is another added bonus.

You’ve done this sort of thing so many times, played a really good team on the road and in a hostile environment. Taking the court in a game like this in an atmosphere like that, does something still give you chills or I don’t know how you feel pre-game?

I don’t know about chills anymore. Just, ugh, I can’t believe I got to do this again. No, it’s always, there’s always a sense of excitement, you know, because if you have a passionate fan base, you know, you expect them to be passionate, you know, and so when you are experiencing that, to me it’s, yeah, I mean, you walk into an empty gym or you walk into a gym where the fans, you know, are only there to see you, that’s not quite the same.

So, my feeling has always been, as long as they’re respectful, that to me, and I hope our fans are like this, I hope our fans, they can be as loud as you want. You can boo as much as you want. You can, you know, show your displeasure for the other team or, you know, whatever. I just think some of the disrespectful things that fans, you know, say to players and coaches, that makes the playing away experience not enjoyable.

I mean, so I think when it’s loud, and it’s crazy, and people are going out of their mind that, you know, I just think that’s an exciting way to coach, and it’s an exciting way to play. You just don’t want to get caught up in anything where, you know, your family or people, you know, it becomes personal. That’s, that makes it no fun.

That makes it no fun, but, you know, they’ve been great down in South Carolina, you know. We’ve gone out, we’ve gone down there and been up 25 at halftime and we’ve gone out there and gotten our butts beat and they’re pretty much the same, you know. They’re, you know, I think they love their team as they should and they love hating us as they should.

When you look at this South Carolina team, what’s the biggest concern or challenge you think you have?

You know, as has been their want the last, you know, three or four, maybe five years, I don’t know how long it’s been, where they’ve had tremendous success, winning national championships, going to the Final Four. I think the depth of their team has been incredibly impressive. You know, obviously, whoever they put in the starting lineup is really, really hard to play against.

But I think they have a group of players coming off the bench that if they changed them and put them in the starting lineup, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t even know the difference. They wouldn’t miss anything. So it’s almost like they have eight or nine starters, not just five. So that makes it, woo, because even if you think we’ve got a handle on this and then all of a sudden, you know, another group comes in, you know, they play hard, they’re well-coached, and they’re aggressive as hell. So they have all the things that, you know, really, really good teams have. And they have more of them. They have more of them.

You were obviously frustrated with Paige after Tennessee. Just in the last few weeks since, what have the conversations been like with her, or do you kind of let her at this point, she knows what she needs to do differently, and do you let her kind of take care of that?

One thing that I’ve learned over the years, I didn’t want to believe it in the beginning because, you know, who cares, I was young. But I don’t think anybody feels worse when they, let’s say a player, when they don’t perform well. So you reminding them every minute of every day that they didn’t play well is just kind of like piling on for no reason.

I think every player of Paige’s caliber expects so much of themselves and expects to be able to deliver in every one of those situations that when they come up short, you have to be careful that the tendency is not to point the finger and blame and say, you know, you’re the reason, you know.

So when I make a comment of, hey, you know, our best players, they just got to really play better. Well, who doesn’t know that? I mean, that’s obvious when you watch us play. And that’s not, you know, that’s not any different than when we go back home and we go and look at film as the coaching staff and we go, yo, guys, we got to coach better, man.

So it’s, but I don’t think the players are going to come in my office and go, yo, you got to coach better, man. Like, we know that, you know. And so I just think it’s mutual that they all know, you know, they all know. And do they need to be reminded of it? No. I’m sure on social media they get reminded of it pretty often.

So then at that point, do you, is it just about instilling confidence?

Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know. Yeah. Criticism and berating and all the stuff that was so much fun 30 years ago, that doesn’t work anymore. You know, I think what the key today is, I think, an understanding that, hey, I understand. You know, that’s it. I understand.

I mean, there’s nothing I can do to fix it, but I understand. I understand why it’s not easy to be that every single game. And, you know, everybody wants you to be that in every big game. I don’t know that there’s a formula for that. Not for human beings, anyway. You know, there isn’t.

And I’ve said this 100 times in other places. We’ve lost more Final Fours than we won, I think. I think we won 11 and lost 12. So I’ll bet you if I look back on all 12 of those, I could point out a whole bunch of examples where I don’t think I lived up to my expectations of how I needed to perform in that. You know?

And you beat yourself up about it all the time. All the time. So with players, it’s just, let’s be technical about this. This has to be different. That has to be changed. This decision has to be different. And just, you know, move on. Move on.

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