STORRS — Geno Auriemma, long a voracious reader, was well into Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles” by the time his UConn women’s basketball team was preparing to play Southern Cal in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament in March. He found great humor in the coincidence that the Huskies were facing the Trojans and told players, “We know what happened. The Greeks won. So the Trojans are in trouble.”
UConn won that game, of course, and then the national championship a week later in Tampa, marking expiration to the wild misuse of a “drought” designation associated with the nine-year span between the program’s 11th and 12th titles.
UConn was dead, remember? That sentiment hovered over the years between 2016 and 2025. The Huskies went to the Final Four in all but one season and failed to reach 30 victories in all but two during that span, but, still, UConn was dead. Auriemma and a few waves of players couldn’t keep lit a flame that represented an impossible standard, and so UConn was dead, dynasty over, book closed on achievement, contribution to the rise of a sport finalized.
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Some thought that, anyway. Or hoped. Among the programs struggling to reach the bar set by the Huskies through 2016, when Breanna Stewart and that crew departed with four consecutive national championships and a 111-game winning streak, was UConn itself. The Huskies built a basketball mansion in the middle of a Storrs desert and were expected to add another opulent wing with each bounce of the ball, with each passing season, and with ease.
That’s how it is these days. You’re passing or failing. What an impossible time to be judged or appreciated. The Huskies lost three games last season. Maybe UConn should give back the trophy, for it was earned without perfection.
“Going undefeated was never a goal,” Auriemma said. “I don’t know whether it was an obsession with people. I don’t know whether we made going undefeated seem [easy] by doing it six times. I think there’s good and bad in that whatever we do or have done, it has been incredibly appreciated but at the same time it sets the stage for, ‘We want more. What more can you do? How many more times can you do it?’
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“Which I think is a positive and a negative. I think it’s that great people think so highly of you as a program that those are the expectations. And there are programs over the course of history that have operated that way, whether it goes back to the Montreal Canadiens, the Russian Red Army hockey team, the Boston Celtics of the 60s, the New York Yankees of the 40s and 50s, North Carolina women’s soccer. You can go on and on about dynasties in sports, that the expectations are so high.”
Impossibly high.
“That’s a good thing in so many ways,” Auriemma continued. “Back then, it was even a greater thing. Today, because people have a way to communicate instantly with each other, and the way things spread so quickly, is it as much of a great thing? Maybe, maybe not. More people are familiar with your program but now you’ve made that many more enemies of your program. So you’ve made way more of an impact, but the amount of people that want you to fail is way greater in the world of sports, whether it’s one person or one team.”
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A parade took place soon after UConn’s return from Tampa, a ride on a bus down a path of adulation, the culmination of a winding road through a season so rewarding for what preceded it and how it played out. That 111-game winning streak ended on a buzzer-beating loss to Mississippi State at the 2017 Final Four. A year later, UConn lost on another national semifinal buzzer-beater to Notre Dame.
And so began the string of close calls, the complications of COVID, seasons of unprecedented injury waves … and the “drought.”
After it ended with a victory over South Carolina April 6, Auriemma read Homer’s Odyssey, the ancient Greek poem. Soon, a friend suggested he read another poem, this one published in the 1840’s: Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It recounts the journey of Odyssey’s central figure, the Greek hero returning to his kingdom.
“Which I think is really cool because the war lasted 10 years and I think it took him 10 years to get back,” Auriemma said. “It was like a 20-year journey that he was away from home and then all the trials and tribulations on his way back and what he went through. While he was away, his wife was back there and his son went out looking for him. All these suitors are coming and trying to take his wife and inherit his kingdom. It’s interesting that it was nine years between when we won in ‘16 and in ‘25, and people thought we were dead.”
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Auriemma was in his office, sitting behind his desk, in front of various paperwork and a bowl of chocolate candies. The national championship trophies were displayed on a shelf to his left. Cameras were positioned from various angles around him, set to capture Auriemma’s comments to be recorded for vignette’s during the introduction of Sue Bird and Maya Moore at the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame. Auriemma pulled up the text of the poem and began reading aloud.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
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One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
“If you’re trying to kill the king, you better make sure you kill him,” Auriemma said. “Those nine years, all the new people who came around, and maybe if I was on the other side I would have done the same thing, but I think it’s a testament to our relentlessness to try to find a way in the midst of all the changes that are going on, to do it when it was ’95, a world that looking back, is the Stone Age. So you did it in the Stone Age, and you did it in the digital age.”
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Auriemma, 71, has a record 1,250 victories and 12 national championships in 40 years at UConn. The Huskies surpassed Tennessee, becoming the model for college sports excellence, and were then was chased by every program in America for so long that the Huskies had to chase themselves, too. The “when” conversations mounted in the meantime. When is UConn going to win No. 12? When is Auriemma going to retire? When will the Huskies of today look like the Huskies of yesterday? When will Paige Bueckers … Scratch that. Will Paige Bueckers win a title in college?
After Auriemma’s first championship in 1995, a perfect season with Rebecca Lobo and Jen Rizzotti leading the way, he felt as much pressure coming out of it as he felt going into it. He worried about being a one-hit wonder. Tennessee remained the sport’s standard bearer and UConn broke through for its second championship in 2000, the first of four in five years that included the Diana Taurasi era. The success for the teams of Moore and Stewart made UConn a national talking point for even casual sports fans.
But then Mississippi State’s Morgan William hits one jumper at the overtime buzzer in the Final Four and Notre Dame’s Arike Ogunbowale hits another a year later. And conversation about UConn not being UConn soon began.
“That’s the conversation I always had with our team was about winning a national championship is life-changing if you’ve never had one,” Auriemma said. “But when you get to the point where [associate head coach Chris Daily] and I have been, it’s not life-changing for us. It’s not. It’s life-changing for Paige, Azzi [Fudd], Sarah [Strong], all those guys. And it was for me in ‘95. There were years in the [late 90s] where we could have won one and we were unlucky and we could have felt sorry for ourselves but that’s not how we approach things. And during those nine years there were only a couple where I thought we were good enough to win. So why drive yourself crazy?
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“You agonize over a couple. The buzzer-beaters. Those are two that, one decision here or there could have changed the outcome. Those you agonize over those because you know you let a couple get away that you very easily could have had. We were the best team in the country both of those years, probably. The other times, you look at your roster and you go, ‘Nah, we’re not built for it.’”
Around the New Year, Auriemma wasn’t sure. UConn lost at Notre Dame in early December and at home to USC a few weeks later in Hartford. Another loss Feb. 6 at Tennessee didn’t do much to UConn’s resume but did everything for its trajectory. Everything changed after that. The Huskies, statistically, were dominant. But coaches’ decisions and players’ execution was off at critical points. “This is who we are,” Auriemma started to figure, a really good team that couldn’t quite hold everything together for 40 minutes against another really good team. The Huskies knew they were a pretty strong, defensively, for instance, based on a few months of play. But could they lock in and be great when necessary?
That day in Knoxville? No.
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For the rest of the season? Yes.
“There was a change of approach by the coaches and the players,” Auriemma said. “We outplayed them by every facet on the stat sheet but we didn’t win because stat sheets don’t win games. Right decisions at the right times wins games.”
Auriemma started thinking aloud about his beloved Philadelphia Eagles, the team he gathered with dozens of friends and family members to watch in the Super Bowl on Feb. 9. The Eagles were good the previous year but struggled down the stretch. They added Saquon Barkley, which certainly helps, much like adding Sarah Strong, but they didn’t blow everything up and start over.
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“One of the comments was ‘What is [Patrick] Mahomes playing for?’” Auriemma said of pre-Super Bowl hype. “I thought to myself, to win the [bleeping] Super Bowl! But they wanted to make it that he’s playing for immortality. Why? He still hasn’t caught Joe Montana. He hasn’t caught Terry Bradshaw. He hasn’t caught Tom Brady. What’s he playing for? His life changes if he only wins three instead of four? What are you talking about? They want to make it that he’s either playing for immortality or he’s not as good as everybody said he was. That’s the world that we’ve created, a me versus you. It becomes an all-or-nothing game, a zero-sum game.”
But Auriemma is back in his castle now, summer vacations over, offseason becoming the next season, kingdom safe, next questions on deck: Can UConn win a 13th national championship in 2026? Or do the Huskies stink?
Sep 15, 2025
Sports columnist and associate editor
Mike Anthony is sports columnist and associate editor for Hearst Connecticut Media Group, providing analysis and feature writing on UConn, college, and professional sports. He joined Hearst in February 2021 after 21 years at The Hartford Courant, including three as the lead sports columnist. He has covered all three major UConn sports beats: men’s basketball (2005-11), women’s basketball (2017-18) and football (2016-18).
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