STORRS — Just nine months ago, UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma was completely confident that he would never hold the title of winningest coach in college basketball.
Longtime Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara Vanderveer broke the record, previously held by Duke legend Mike Krzyzewski, on Jan. 21 with her 1,203rd career victory. She retired following the 2023-24 season with 1,216 wins after leading the Cardinal to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. Auriemma himself surpassed Krzyzewski for No. 2 all-time with a 75-53 win over Creighton on Feb. 19.
“It’s been my philosophy since the beginning that there isn’t a number that I’m searching for, or that I’m chasing or obsessed over,” Auriemma said back in February. “When it’s over, it’s over and whatever the number is at that time, that’s what the numbers are going to be … but I could probably say with a great deal of certainty that I’ll never be No. 1 in wins.”
When the No. 2 Huskies play their first road game of 2024-25 against No. 14 North Carolina in Greensboro on Friday, Auriemma can tie Vanderveer for No.1 with a victory. UConn is 8-5 all-time in the series but has won its last six meetings against the Tar Heels, including a 76-64 victory in 2023. A seventh straight win over UNC will allow Auriemma the storybook moment of breaking the career record against Fairleigh Dickinson in front of a sold-out Gampel Pavilion on Nov. 20. The game is already scheduled to be a celebration of Auriemma and associate head coach Chris Dailey, honoring the duo’s 40th season at the helm of the most successful program in women’s basketball.
“Everything is (surreal) for me. Everything is,” Auriemma said Wednesday. “When I was 50, and I thought that 70 was old, I said I would never be coaching when I was 70. Now that I’m 70 I think of myself as just older, but not old yet. Perspective changes you a little bit. But at the same time, when I said that, I truly believed that it wouldn’t happen, that at some point I would just walk away and leave it as is, wherever it was. So things have a way of just happening. I think for me, I just kind of do what I do every day, and then I look back and here I am still doing it.”
Auriemma has always loved to win, but always hated the attention that came with it. After he led the Huskies to their first national championship in 1995, he remembers the then-unfamiliar sight of TV cameras and helicopters swarming the bus as the team returned to campus. He turned to former UConn athletic director Jeff Hathaway and asked, “Is there any way that we can do what we just did and not have to deal with what we’re going to have to do?”
“He said, ‘No, there’s no way.’ And it’s been all downhill since, to be honest,” Auriemma joked. “I’ve never been comfortable with it, but I fake it pretty well. I act like I like it, but I think the the overall feeling that I’ve always had has always been that the focus needs to be on the the actual players that are actually playing … We should have had the 40th celebration during the bubble year.”
But Auriemma’s players won’t let him get away with deflecting the accomplishment. The Huskies threw him a 70th birthday party during the NCAA Tournament last season sporting T-shirts with throwback photos of the longtime coach, and sophomore KK Arnold said the team already has a plan in place to celebrate Auriemma in Greensboro if they secure the record-tying win.
“He doesn’t like to talk about it, but we definitely will bring it up. He tries to brush it off, but we always make it a big deal for him,” Arnold said with a grin. “He’s still young. He still has that voice, and he still carries himself like he’s a young guy. I mean, it’s great to have, honestly, a coach with that much energy and at the age of his. I don’t even think about age sometimes, but it’s like, dang, he’s still going at it.”
