Ok I'm taking the bait and risking violating my status as a casual fan by overstepping. There are a few open practices throughout the year every year. This isn't a PR stunt because of a losing season. They are invite only based on donor level/season ticket holder status. These are real practices with a handful of spectators and can happen in Werth or Gampel. There are also occasionally open practices like they had for the students which are basically an open gym and a glorified version of first night.
For those looking for a profound reason this program has collapsed, there will be virtually nothing to report from practice. A UCONN practice is comparable to every other basketball practice I have ever seen from high school to college. They do the same drills and work on the same things and stop practice and drills at teachable moments like all coaches. To paraphrase Chief, this game is not that complicated. There are only a finite number of things you can do at practice. If anything is unique, I would say KO stops practice to teach far more than the average coach and it's enlightening how far back on the fundamental spectrum he actually has to go with this team vs. past teams. The only thing relative to practice I will say I differ with philosophically from KO (and 90% of the coaches that I know disagree with me) is that he doesn't spend as much in season practice time as I would on individual skills vs. team concepts. Like I said though, 90% of of the coaches I know from college to high school disagree with me on this and believe this work is done on players' time and in the off season.
The problems with this program have nothing to do with X's and O's or teaching ability. This program is a mess because of a complete lack of ability to identify, recruit and retain mentally tough talent that fits together to make a competent team. I'll leave the speculation as to whether that's a result of apathy, ability, or bad luck to those more in touch than me.