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Dan Wetzel
multiple authors
They’re not any tougher than Don Staley – especially mentally. She did not, by mistake, take her path out of North Philadelphia to become an All-American, All-WNBA and Olympic gold medal-winning player and then a respected, hard-working national championship-winning coach.
So here’s guessing she’ll get better, or is already fine, it doesn’t matter. weird and wild explosion She lost to Geno Auriemma on Friday, when her South Carolina Gamecocks defeated her UConn Huskies 62-48 in the national semifinals.
“We move on,” Staley said on ESPN, still sounding stunned by what actually happened.
Indeed, he and his team move on to bigger and more important things, namely the national championship game against UCLA on Sunday, where Staley can win his fourth title as a coach.
Staley shouldn’t take a second to look back.
It’s Auriemma who needs to figure out how to deal with this. Not just trying to make amends – he Issued an apology on Saturday (in which he did not mention Staley by name) that he should have delivered immediately. More importantly, he needs to prevent this from happening again, because he has too much to lose if he doesn’t.
To recap, Auriemma barked at Staley during a post-game handshake, which was supposed to be a congratulatory gesture but instead turned into a confrontation. There these two were shouting in each other’s faces, being restrained by the assistant trainers.
It was like some WWE cartoon (after all, it’s not like Staley was going to back down). And it’s over, what exactly?
Auriemma continued to try to avoid the question after the game and finally said that he was upset that Staley did not shake his hand before the game (he actually did) and that he stood there for “three minutes” waiting for him to meet him at center court.
“I just had to say what I had to say,” Auriemma said.
Except it didn’t need to be said. Whatever Jeno felt had to be internalized. He would never accept that a player should be thrown out of the game because of such a small incident.
Instead, in a huff, he came across as petty, personal and downright rude as he always was.
By Saturday afternoon some of that sanity was gone.
“There is no excuse for how I handled the end of the game versus South Carolina,” Auriemma said in a statement. “It’s different from what I do and what our standard is here in Connecticut.
He added, “I want to apologize to the staff and team at South Carolina.” “The way I reacted was inappropriate. The story should be about how well South Carolina played, and I don’t want my actions to detract from that. I have a very good relationship with their staff, and I want to sincerely apologize to them.”
Auriemma is an absolute legend in women’s basketball; A Hall of Famer, a gold medal winning coach, a 12-time NCAA champion. Perhaps most notable is that he is as good as ever in his 41-year career. UConn, at least as of Sunday, is still the defending national champion. The loss to South Carolina ended a 54-game winning streak.
That’s more than all these wins combined – 1,288 of them, at a .886 clip. In this way he won them over.
An Italian immigrant herself who grew up in Philly, Auriemma did it with intensity, bravery, charisma and unapologetic competitiveness. He took no quarter. She never accepted that women’s basketball should lag behind anything.
He was never there for everyone. His tenure over the years featured contributions from NCAA administrators to arch rival Pat Summitt and even UConn colleague Jim Calhoun, who created a dueling powerhouse on the men’s side in Storrs.
She, along with Summitt and others, helped redefine women’s sports by ignoring society’s view of female athletes as weak and instead simply trained them as athletes, thus pushing them to levels that no one had seen possible.
In the process, he elevated the entire game by redefining greatness, raising the bar every year and doing so from the Northeast, to the backyard, to the national media.
You can’t write the history of women’s basketball, or basketball at all, without Geno Auriemma. The entire operation is his.
That’s what makes Friday disappointing for even his biggest fans.
At the age of 72, he needs to be especially careful about his actions. He needs to be supportive, not irritable; Kind, not sentimental. He is a big politician, not an arrogant young man. Fighting is an act of arrogance and immaturity. He is better than such actions.
He needs to lift others up even after bitter defeats, and not try to tear them down.
He’s done too much, accomplished too many things, impacted too many people in a positive way for his legacy to be tarnished in the final chapters of what is otherwise one of the greatest stories ever told.
