A great preview in the Courant:
UConn, Geno Auriemma Prepare To Visit John Wooden's Home
Close, in fact, is somewhat of a link between Wooden and Auriemma. While she considers Wooden a mentor and she carries his spirit with her program, she is also an unabashed fan of Auriemma and five years ago she brought her entire UCLA staff to Storrs to watch UConn practice.
“I think Coach Wooden and Coach Auriemma have a very high attention to detail,” Close said before the UConn-UCLA Sweet 16 matchup in March. “And they are always going to be pushing the envelope of your best … I think their styles are vastly different, but that’s something they really share in common is an extreme attention to detail and a consistency to push that envelope, that there’s more, there’s more, even to help their players find gears inside of them that maybe they didn’t even know they had.”
Auriemma's praise for Billings: “I don’t know that there’s many more athletic teams anywhere in the country,” Auriemma said. “Monique Billings, she’s ridiculous. I marvel when I watch her play on tape or in person. … She’s aggressive, she’s athletic, she plays hard, she’s a competitor. She’s a lot of things, and she’s a great free throw shooter, so you can’t foul her. She’s a handful. This will be the first time in a while that Gabby’s going to face somebody that’s right there with her, athletically.”
And for Jordin Canada: “If you don’t get better every year, if you stay the same every year, at some point you’re ineffective in college basketball. Jordin Canada, from her very first game as a freshman until today, the transformation of her game has been unbelievable.” Auriemma believes Canada has turned UCLA into an elite team, “as good as any team in the country.” He joked that he would try to put Canada’s picture on whatever device Dangerfield was using during the cross-country flight so the UConn guard will spend a few days thinking about the matchup.
