Geno Auriemma Players Quotations

No one ever talks about our defense. Our defense has always been good. But when you have great offensive players like I've coached the last 15 years, it's hard to concentrate on our defense. But our defense has been pretty good.

Obviously in the long term, as the season wears on, there's no way you can be as good a team without someone who is, I think, one of the best five players in the league. Meg can put up 20 points every night, and that has to be comforting. But this West Virginia team is still one of the best that I've seen. That team is very difficult to play against.

Right now, it seems like Will has made a commitment to herself to be one of the better players at her position in our league. And certainly it's not beyond the realm of possibilities for will. If you think about it, she's got all the ingredients.

She is assembling a really great cast here. She is taking young players and playing them. Once they are older they will know how to play together. Pitt accomplished more (yesterday) then we did.

She's one of those impact players that makes them when we need them. I can't think of anybody we'd rather have shooting the ball.

Having a senior athletic enough that she can play inside and outside and can move some of their players away from the basket, not having that allowed them to pack it in. It made it difficult for us to get anything going, but at the same time, Pitt's defense and how physical they were had more to do with it than Turner not playing.

I think players sometimes don?t understand fully the amount of responsibility on their shoulders. As a senior, you have to take on that responsibility every day -- practice, games, travel, locker room, you name it. I think in the Big East tournament, they really, really, really did that. They took it to heart and made sure all the little things that lead to winning were taken care of. I really admire them for that.

We were lousy. I told the players the one good thing that game out of this was we won the game. Other than that I can't think of really anything that came out of this that was good.

There are a lot of good players back, a lot of good teams. I'm anxious to see how this plays out.

There are a lot of players who score a lot of points and they get them whether their team is winning or losing. Ann's always been more about timing and not about how many.

We want everybody to be one of the top players in the league, and it's not out of the realm of possibly to do that. We've got all the ingredients. It's just a matter of doing it.

As I look at stuff like this I say to myself, it's kind of odd because you always think of coaching as an opportunity for your players to stand up their on that podium and put the net around their neck and celebrate winning championships. You never think of yourself as being in that situation. You're only as good as the people that you get to direct, and if you're fortunate enough to have the best people to direct then you're one of the lucky few. I think that's kind of what this is all about. So it's hard for me to put it into perspective from a personal perspective.

Duke has more good players than any other team in the country right now. You can say (North) Carolina is talented, Tennessee is talented and Maryland is talented. But look at Duke's roster, the size and speed and quickness and shooting and experience and depth. You name it, they've got it all covered.

Fair or unfair, at Connecticut it's not good enough just to win. There's a perception that if we don't go to the Final Four, it's a bad season. I want the players to understand that the one constant in our program, is that we want to make sure we play hard and have fun.

This time of the year, it's individual players who make the difference. Your style of play, your system as a program gets you to this point and then individual players end up deciding the outcome of the game. Ann stepped up and made some huge plays.

This time of year, a team's systems don't matter. It's individual players that end up deciding the outcomes of the games.

I knew we would find a different Notre Dame team than the one we played at their place. I knew we would have to play a lot better than we did there. Our post players came up really big. It went exactly the way I thought it would except for the last five or six minutes, considering the kind of week we had.

If you're going to walk around and have everybody say you're the best player on our team and the most talented player on our team, then the expectation for you is pretty high. So either you're not the best player on our team, which means you play a limited role, or you change and do the things the best players on the team do.

I'm glad that the realization has hit that this is it, that this is your last go-around and you've got to get things done. Right now you'd say that Will has really made a commitment to herself to being one of the better players at her position in our league.

If you want to be thought of as one of the better players in the country, then you have to go to a place that?s really, really difficult, tough to play and play really well. Most good teams play good at home, but the really good teams, the way they separate themselves is they play well on the road.

Because of some of the things that we did, the way my players did it, an awful lot of basketball programs decided they wanted to try to be like that. That's probably the thing that I'm most happy about ? the impact that the players at Connecticut had on a lot of players that are playing today.

Any time like you have a really good point guard like they do, you have a chance to have a really good team. Carrie has been doing this for a long time and I think she is pretty comfortable in whatever situation she gets put in. She has a really good group of players that are pretty versatile.

You can't gang up on the post players because they have so many good shooters on the perimeter.

It's not like you ever lose confidence or give up on people. I think players sometimes don't understand fully the amount of responsibility on their shoulders. As seniors, you have to take on that responsibility.

There's 12 really good reasons (to stay), the 12 players on my team, ... And that's always going to be the case. You always coach for the players and you always coach for the enjoyment that you get out of it. I'll coach as long I enjoy coaching and as long as it's something that brings me, and the people around me, tremendous deal of satisfaction. When that's not the case any more I won't coach anymore. Here or anywhere else.

It's kind of odd. She coached players who won national championships. She made women's basketball acceptable. And yet, she's not in the Hall of Fame. People say it's because she didn't coach long enough. I don't care whether she coached three years. When you win three national championships, you're in the Hall of Fame. So there's a lot of people that aren't in that should be.