Geno Auriemma Quotes (268 Quotes)

I'd like to see her shoot the ball more from the foul line. She's a good shooter from 15 feet out. And she still gets ahead of herself every once in a while, which is natural. Slowly, but surely, it's going to come. It's just going to look ugly at times. As long as she keeps making progress, that's all I care about.

I thought in the second half our defense was a little bit better. We tightened up some things and changed a couple of things.

The alternative would be that you're dealing with this thing all year long. A week she's good, a week she's bad, and back and forth. I'm hopeful that by keeping her out those two weeks that we got to the root of the problem and fixed it. But, again, we'll never know. We'll just keep our fingers crossed.

I would venture to say the other eight times we either had the best player in the tournament or the best team in the tournament - or close to it, at least, the eight times that we won. I don't know about tonight. Do we have the best team Well, we have to hope so, because I don't know that we have the best player, although someone could emerge tonight to be the best player.

As long as we play defense like that and keep people in the 50s we'll be all right. Some nights you're going to shoot the ball poorly and it's going to be 60-something to 50-something. Some nights you're going to shoot 60-something percent and it's going to be 90-something to 50-something. But you've got to be able to play with the game on the line, which I think we showed (Saturday).

She's making a real case for being the starting point guard, ... She makes shots and she makes plays. She's assertive. Part of being a really good player is acting like one. She acts like a real good player. She walks around and talks and acts and carries herself like, I'm really good.'

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.

Offensively I think we're doing a lot more things, and a lot better, than we've done them in a long time. But that first half left some things to be desired. No question about that.

I don't know which team we're going to see the team that we've known in the past that plays really well or the one we haven't seen before that's backed into a corner and in danger of not making the Big East tournament.

I thought that we executed our game plan pretty well for about 30-some minutes. This was as much of a complete game as we've had in a long, long time and I'm really happy for our guys.

Watching them play kind of brought back memories of when you spring an upset. I don't remember the last time we had a chance to spring an upset on somebody. It's a great feeling for them.

Sometimes you think things and you hope they don't happen. But you kind of know that it's coming. You come off some of the games that we just had and you come home and you walk around like you're feeling pretty good. You're playing a team that's missing their best player, and probably physically we're not 100 percent coming out of that trip. So if you put all those things into the mix, it made for one really lousy performance by us.

When you look at the total work that Strother has done in the four years that she's been here, her and Diana are the only ones who have been able to accomplish some things that she's accomplished.

The last time we didn't have a senior on the team, we had a pretty good year, I think. We were (37-1) and we won a national championship. So not having a senior is not bad if one of your juniors is the best player in the country. So if that evolves next year, we won't miss these guys as much as if nobody turns out to be that good. Then we'll miss them a lot.

It's easier to fix the plays at the end because they are one-shot deals. What got us 13 down is a little bit harder to fix. I'd have disappointed if it went from 13 to 20. The fact that it went from 13 to two, that's a positive. But getting down 13 on your home court against a Rutgers team that we knew coming in was going to be hard to guard in the perimeter, I'm just really disappointed in the way we came out and played the game.

I'm glad that they set it up the way they did to where it's the last game of the season. Ironically it ends up being for the Big East championship. If that's the way they had it planned, obviously it was pretty good planning.

Whereas before, we didn't know whether we could go on a run like that and get up big on some teams. Now we know that. And we also know that if they come back, we've got what it takes to finish the job. Whether we do or not next time we're in that situation, I don't know. I don't think anybody comes through 100 percent of the time. ... As long as we have a chance to win with three minutes to go, I like our chances.

She's very, very good under pressure. She doesn't get bothered by anything. That's why she's kind of hard for me to coach because when I talk to her, she don't listen because she's not affected by anything. I knew she was going to make the free throws.