When UConn women’s basketball won its first national championship with an undefeated, historically dominant season in 1995, the program decided to collect all its major press clippings. That proved surprisingly difficult. There were enough clippings to fill an expandable 16-by-18-inch scrapbook. And enough to fill a second, and a third, and a fourth, all of which brought them to… mid-February. There was still the entire tournament run to go through. A program aide was still at work on the project as the start of the next season approached.
But the work of documenting that season felt important. It had not been so long since any kind of press coverage was a rarity for them. When a 31-year-old Italian immigrant named Geno Auriemma took over the program in 1985, “we'd get excited about a one-inch column in the local paper,” UConn associate head coach Chris Dailey told SI back in ’95. “Of course, back then we didn't even have our own locker room.” The Huskies went 12–15 in that first year under Auriemma. It certainly did not provide enough to fill a scrapbook. And so a decade later, with a perfect championship season covered at length by every major newspaper and magazine, they wanted to record every last bit of the experience. They would get as many scrapbooks as it took.
This all feels very quaint now. Those press clippings documented a season that was special but ultimately nowhere close to singular. The 1995 title would be just one of almost a dozen championships for UConn and Auriemma. It would be one of several perfect seasons. The great players of that roster would become only a few names in a much larger collection. And keeping a scrapbook of press coverage in the first place would feel charmingly naïve. That kind of media treatment would soon be the standard for UConn. The team would no longer have to explain itself or announce its presence. The country would simply know. It would become something bigger than itself, then bigger than its sport, “UConn women” used as an easy shorthand for dominance. Soon, it would be hard to remember when every newspaper story felt precious enough to save.
Here is what Auriemma has overseen at UConn. The coach arrived on campus for a losing program without its own locker room and made it into a dynasty that headlined decades of the sport. He won enough to fill a few scrapbooks and then outgrew the very concept of scrapbooks. He became one of the faces of the game—and one of its loudest voices—and managed to stay that way even as college basketball changed dramatically. He won in a way that no one else has. And with his 1,217th career victory as a head coach on Wednesday, all of them at UConn, he finally became the winningest coach in college basketball. There is no qualifier here: men’s, women’s, any level of competition. Auriemma has outplayed and outlasted them all.
There was little suspense here. This game had long been circled as the potential record-breaker, and with an 85–41 UConn win over Fairleigh Dickinson, the program won as it had so often in the last few decades under Auriemma: decisively and without doubt. (UConn was up by more than 20 before halftime.) It fit right in with so many of the 1,216 wins that came before.
If that kind of record can be hard to conceptualize, hundreds of wins over decades in a changing game, UConn made it easy to grasp on Wednesday. There were 63 alumnae in the stands to celebrate Auriemma—a living scrapbook of sorts. The group included players from his very first team and some from his last few years. (The oldest program graduate in attendance was Lynne Reif, who played for Auriemma from 1985 to ’88, and the most recent was Aaliyah Edwards, who played from 2020 to ’24.) There were Olympians and WNBA All-Stars. There were players who rarely left the bench. All felt they had to make the pilgrimage for this.
Auriemma was already in possession of a slew of records that will likely never be matched. Who can touch 11 championships and 23 Final Fours (and counting) in the contemporary game? Yet this wins record feels like an especially good bet to remain unbroken. To get here, Auriemma needed to pass other coaches of his generation: Tara VanDerveer of Stanford, Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Jim Boeheim of Syracuse, all of whom retired in the last few years. The game has changed in so many ways—NIL, recruiting, transfers. Meanwhile, 70-year-old Auriemma signed a five-year contract extension this summer and just brought in the best freshman prospect in the game in Sarah Strong, who had 20 points, eight rebounds and six assists on Wednesday.
It’s difficult to imagine the grind of the modern coaching landscape producing another coach who might stick through so many decades. It’s all but impossible to imagine one who could win quite like this.
That required a singular personality. It would be generous to describe Auriemma as a bit prickly. He has always been confident to a fault. (“Geno's natural walk is a strut,” former UConn star Rebecca Lobo once told SI.) He could be an easy figure to hate. That was true sometimes even for his own players.
“He'll pound away at you,” Diana Taurasi told SI in 2003. “There were times I hated to come to practice because it was so mentally demanding. He'd put you in situations where you couldn't win. But it's like he says: ‘You're going to prove me right. Or prove me wrong.’ And I'm always determined to prove him wrong. You see, you hate him in a way you need to.”
Taurasi gave a speech to that effect on Wednesday. Lobo spoke, too, and Sue Bird, and Maya Moore. The dozens of former players in attendance gathered on the court with all the current ones. They spoke about how much better he had made them, as players and as people, how much better he had made this place. You hated him in a way you needed to, but you loved him, too. It was one for the scrapbooks.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Geno Auriemma Has Built an Untouchable Legacy at UConn.
