The Greatest Geno Auriemma Article #1 | The Boneyard

The Greatest Geno Auriemma Article #1

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After seeing Geno so emotional after the USA Olympic Championship I thought of the following article written by Jeff Jacobs in the COURANT April 7, 2009! I know it's long but please indulge me as it's well worth the read! After the article there's a postscript that explains everything!
Geno, Renee: Meeting Of Minds
April 07, 2009|By JEFF JACOBS, jjacobs@courant.com
ST. LOUIS — After a 26-point performance against Stanford that surely will carve her name into UConn legend, Renee Montgomery ran off the court and into the arms of her coach. Geno Auriemma had more than a hug waiting Sunday. He had a message.
"He told me, 'I always wanted you to have the last practice and play the last game the way it was supposed to be played,' " Montgomery said on the eve of her final college game and her first national championship game. "Sitting here now, I know what he meant. Everything he says is starting to make sense to me.
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"Four years and 150 games, Coach finally makes sense. I think he'd crack up at that."
Basketball is a team game, of course, and nothing can be greater than the collective pursuit of a sixth NCAA title, a third perfect season. Still, as the final hours of Montgomery's UConn career tick toward a matchup with Louisville and her friend Angel McCoughtry, it's impossible not to see an extraordinary bond forged between Auriemma and the senior from West Virginia.
He wants this national championship for Renee Montgomery. He wants it bad.
"I don't know that I've wanted anything more than I want this," he said.
There is a point where planning ends and basketball begins, of course, and it meets at a mutual understanding between a coach and his point guard. Ultimately, they must think as one, hear each other's words before they are spoken, speak volumes with one look.
"Any time you have an opportunity to win a national championship, you can follow that trail and it leads right to the point guard or to a guard who can control the game," Auriemma said. "You add to that the special ones who just transcend all the practices, drills, X's and O's, bus travel, air travel, film sessions.
"They're not about just, 'How are we going to guard the pick-and-roll.' That's so insignificant when you're talking about those players, and certainly Renee. I really admire her as a person. Even when she didn't talk to me for a couple of years when Tonya [Cardoza, now Temple's coach] was her coach, I still admired her."
Oh, they enjoy taking playful jabs at each other.
Auriemma talks about how Montgomery, early in her career, ran to his former assistant for TLC. Montgomery talks about how Auriemma yelled so much she couldn't understand him. Clearly, it took much more than getting Montgomery's weight from 115 to 140 pounds - full racks of ribs from Wings Over Storrs helped there - to fill out Auriemma's demands for his lead guard. Jen Rizzotti, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, they've all shouldered the burden, and it was Montgomery's turn.
"I can only imagine how hard it was for him to have a player like Diana and to have to rebuild his program all over again," Montgomery said. "When I was a freshman, he'd say things to me like, 'You need to know what everyone on the court is doing at all times.' I'm thinking this is not possible. He'd go, 'If anybody messes up, it's your fault.' When you're a freshman, it's like, man, this is hard. He's crazy.
"He would just yell so much. It's not that I tuned him out, but I wasn't receiving the message. He'd go, 'Go talk to your mom [Cardoza].' I think he was frustrated that he'd tell me something and it would take her to tell me for it to hit home."
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Montgomery said Cardoza translated for her. He meant look for the backdoor. . . . If Ann Strother is on the left side, you want to go to her side. She had to learn what to do herself before she told her teammates what to do.
CONTINUED...............................
 
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This site won't let me print all I wrote so the end of the story is: postscript

The day before the finals at St. Louis in 2009 the press was meeting with Geno and Rebecca Lobo asked Geno had he seen the Jeff Jacobs article from the day before? Geno said no and Rebecca gave him a copy. He read it and at the end he walked away crying uncontrollably! Rebecca said in all the years she's known Geno she has never seen him react like that!
Everytime I read the article I can't help crying!
 
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"I put my trust in him," she said. "I think that's why he wants me to win. He knows how much I put into wanting to be coachable, a good teammate and good person. . . . Contrary to what he believes, I've liked him ever since I got here.

"Except I love him now."

wow....
 

MilfordHusky

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What else do we have to do until October? Beats the heck out of endless thread about the Orange Princess.
Actually, the players should be on campus soon, as classes start in a week, so a few reports would be good.

Plus, Megatron's announcement appears to be a month away.

And we have the rest of the WNBA season to watch a dozen or so former Huskies. I'll be watching Renee's play, because I think she could take things to the next level.
 

RockyMTblue2

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Plus, Megatron's announcement appears to be a month away.

Yeah, that thread is my number 2least favorite thread. What's new ... a few more grains of sand have fallen. Same last April.
 
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Like you, Rocky, the obsession with high school recruiting feels weird to me. There is no sense crowning the Second Coming before they've played a single college game, and there is the subtle suggestion that a certain program absolutely needs them to win, with all that that implies about current players and coaches. Basketball is a a great, great sport when it's played "right." But it's always played on a court, not by talent scouts and recruiters in the homes of high school students. I do understand the interest in it and can't resist it myself. But it's a second derivative of what we love, so, even in the off season, it should take a very far back seat to the actual game.
 

ThisJustIn

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This site won't let me print all g!

fyi - It's a copyright issue - common etiquette is a paragraph, maybe two with a link. Helps gain the article a click and suggest to editors that folks are actually interested in reading about women's basketball (even though they usually won't pay for the privilege)
 

RockyMTblue2

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That almost translate into what Britney Griner was feeling when she won the gold medal and what her comment about Geno....

You are right. EDD says it was almost miraculous that she got a second opportunity to be coached by Geno. Poor Brittney had a miserable time at Baylor and if Kim ever tried to develop her game it was not evident on the court. I suspect if Brittney was asked who has been your best coach before the Olympics it would be DT. After, we don't have to speculate. I'm sure it has occurred to Brittney on multiple occasions, unprompted, and not pleasant, the thought of what might have been had she spent 4 years with Geno.
 
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