Latest / Coaches Corner / Geno Auriemma Pre Elite 8 Presser

Transcript

Geno Auriemma Pre Elite 8 Presser · Coaches Corner

• 0:01
  Joe's own CBS Hartford, Connecticut, GINO, is there any way now to
• 0:07
  mitigate the stress of minutes players at this stage of the game, whether it's
• 0:12
  coaching style or resting style, whatever that might might be. They let us
• 0:23
  go into portal and get some people here tomorrow, which I don't see happening.
• 0:29
  We get a forty point lead after the first quarter and we can rest,
• 0:33
  but I don't see that happening either, So no, there is no
• 0:37
  way to mitigate it. It is what it is. This is what we
• 0:40
  got, this is how we got here, and this is how it's going
• 0:46
  to end, either for the better or for worse. So luckily there's a
• 0:52
  day in between. Luckily the game is later in the day tomorrow. I
• 0:58
  think what time is the game tomorrow? Six, So it's not a noon
• 1:03
  game or something like that. But there's no Uh, there's no alternative,
• 1:14
  and our players know that. I wish there was another way, but there
• 1:22
  isn't. And sometimes you find a lot of strength that you didn't think you
• 1:30
  had when you're forced in this situation. So you know, we tried it
• 1:37
  yesterday. We tried to slow the game down, and that backfired. So
• 1:41
  I think we just gotta keep our foot on the gas pedal for as long
• 1:45
  as we can and hope it's enough. Lexa Lexaphil dot ESPN. Do you
• 1:53
  know Lindsay was telling us stories of how you guys go way back when you
• 1:57
  were recruiting Hillary and trying to use to get Hillary to come to Yukon.
• 2:01
  What do you remember from those days? What have you seen from Lindsay over
• 2:05
  the years. And she also mentioned an interaction you had maybe at the Final
• 2:08
  four and twenty thirteen when she was with cal And and you're getting your ring
• 2:12
  size and you said her like, you can enjoy this once you've been here
• 2:15
  like ten times or something like that. I don't know if you remember that
• 2:17
  either. Yeah, yeah, you know, so much has transpired in the
• 2:28
  last you know, forty some years. I actually forgot that they were in
• 2:35
  the Final four and we played them, if I'm not mistaken, No,
• 2:38
  we might have played them. Yeah, we played them. I don't remember
• 2:45
  a lot of what happened that long ago, but I do know that when
• 2:53
  she and Hillary would would come to camp, and I knew Hillary wanted to
• 3:00
  really wanted to come to Yukon, and and and Generosity was going to be
• 3:06
  graduating, and I was hoping that Hillary would end kind of step into that
• 3:09
  role. And and Lindsay and her were best friends, and you know,
• 3:16
  so I tried to charm up Lindsey and try to help us get Hillary.
• 3:25
  So I hope she doesn't hold it against me that I didn't think she was
• 3:28
  good enough to play for us. But she did all right. She went
• 3:31
  to Brown and everything. You know, she lived happily ever after, And
• 3:35
  here she is now with one of the best teams in the country and great
• 3:42
  moments, incredible who you who you run into, and people that passed through
• 3:49
  your life when you've been doing this for so long, and it's it's exciting
• 3:53
  to see them kids like that get into the coaching profession have the success that
• 3:59
  she's had. You know, her life has been a tremendous journey, and
• 4:08
  you know, she's she's at an age where she can probably sense that maybe
• 4:17
  there's a few more of these in her future, you know. So it's
• 4:26
  an exciting time to be to be her, and I'm happy for I'm proud
• 4:30
  of her. H Hopefully it's some things she learned at our camp that helped
• 4:39
  her along the way. Don't come over here, uh Luke Evans, Orange
• 4:45
  County registered GINO asked Paige this yesterday and wanted to get your your thoughts on
• 4:48
  it. Just with how much Juju does for USC you do you think Paige,
• 4:54
  with her competitiveness, will want to take on that that one on one
• 4:58
  matchup at times? Defensive leet tomorrow or from a game planning standpoint, are
• 5:01
  you as a coach more thinking about how can we kind of slow down their
• 5:05
  entire kind of perimeter threats. How do you think Page will kind of buy
• 5:10
  into the defensive game plan there? You know, I don't know how other
• 5:18
  coaches approach this, but my approach has always been what do they have that
• 5:28
  we're going to have a problem with? And then it just becomes obsessive of,
• 5:33
  you know, how can we solve that problem? How can we solve
• 5:36
  that problem? And then all of a sudden it dawns on you that,
• 5:45
  yeah, we've got a problem that we may not be able to solve and
• 5:48
  that's all there is to it. And then the other thing that hits you
• 5:54
  is they've got a problem that they may not be able to solve, and
• 5:58
  that's what makes the game, you know, such a beautiful you know,
• 6:02
  intriguing expectation is that maybe neither of us are going to solve the problem,
• 6:09
  and maybe some of the other players on each team are going to end up
• 6:14
  being the difference in the game. I don't know. I don't know.
• 6:19
  I've been in so many of these and seen so many different scenarios. I
• 6:26
  don't think that every time Juju gets a bucket, Page is going to go
• 6:30
  out of her way to make sure she gets a bucket. I think that
• 6:32
  would be foolish on our part. I think we just got to play and
• 6:40
  whatever happens happens. You know, sometimes you just resign yourself that it's like
• 6:45
  the other night against Eyracuse, Right if a kids getting twenty twenty three,
• 6:49
  twenty five every night, you're not gonna go out there and go, well,
• 6:53
  she's only going to get six against US. I don't think that's realistic.
• 6:57
  So we go out, we play U con versus USC, and see
• 7:02
  what happens. Jesse Doherty with The Washington Post, do you know here and
• 7:09
  Lindsay talk about being around you at the Final four. You could tell how
• 7:13
  much it meant to her and maybe how cool that experience was. Who were
• 7:15
  the people for you when you were first starting out that I don't know,
• 7:18
  if they told you you were going to go to ten final fours, you
• 7:20
  would have thought, Wow, that's really cool. Who are those maybe influences
• 7:28
  nobody. There was nobody telling me that we were going to go to ten
• 7:31
  final fours. You know, after my first one, the only question was
• 7:38
  how'd you guys get here? Because we didn't belong there. We didn't look
• 7:42
  like a final four team. We didn't come from a final four conference,
• 7:46
  We didn't come from a final four part of the world. You know,
• 7:47
  we were the first team ever from north of the Mason Dixon line. I
• 7:53
  think, you know, maybe I think Cheney did, but I think,
• 8:01
  you know, in nineteen ninety one, we were We were really an outlier,
• 8:15
  and at that time there was only a handful of schools that really had
• 8:22
  realistic expectations to be in the Final four. However, in my mind and
• 8:30
  in my coaching staff's mind, we came to the realization that if we could
• 8:37
  get to that Final four in ninety one with the team that we had at
• 8:43
  that time, and taking advantage of the new rules, you know, the
• 8:46
  three point line and all that, that if our recruiting got better and we
• 8:50
  started to attract better players that we could get ourselves back to the final four,
• 8:56
  and then four years went by and we didn't, so we thought,
• 8:58
  all right, now that's going on, so now we need to go coach
• 9:01
  someplace where we have a chance to do that. But no, it was
• 9:09
  a different world back then. Yeah, there weren't. It wasn't until we
• 9:20
  won in ninety five and then in two thousand. So I never got like
• 9:28
  a lot of encouragement, Yeah, you guys, you know you're going to
• 9:31
  be back here a lot. But after two thousand, two thousand and one,
• 9:35
  two three, I got a lot of we're sick of you being here.
• 9:39
  So I think that was even better than the encouragement. GEO Michelle Smith
• 9:43
  from the next how do you gauge Page's hunger level to get you guys back
• 9:48
  to the final four and put you in a position to win a championship?
• 9:54
  I don't know. I can't gauge any level on her. Sometimes Page Page
• 10:03
  is a different Page is a different star than maybe any that I've ever coached.
• 10:18
  It doesn't she doesn't show it, she doesn't carry it around with her,
• 10:24
  she doesn't talk about it. Other players that I've had that were of
• 10:30
  that level. They walked around like they owned it, they talk like they
• 10:35
  owned it, they played like they owned it. I think Page keeps it
• 10:43
  all inside and let's it lets it come out when it needs to come out.
• 10:52
  But I know that winning a national championship is really probably the biggest reason
• 11:05
  why she went to college and played at Yukon in the first place. That
• 11:09
  she wanted an opportunity to do that, and not that she couldn't do that
• 11:11
  somewhere else. She just felt like, that's the place where I have the
• 11:16
  best chance to do this. And it's not something she talks about every day.
• 11:24
  It's not something that she discusses with her teammates. I just think it's
• 11:28
  there and hopefully it shows in her game when we're in crunch time. Grace
• 11:41
  Rainer with the athletic When you look at both sides of the bracket tomorrow,
• 11:43
  all the star power we're going to see here and in almany Just what do
• 11:48
  you think a day like tomorrow means to women's basketball? You know, I've
• 11:54
  always thought, and I hope the portal doesn't screw this up. I always
• 12:00
  thought what was unique about women's basketball as opposed to men's basketball was in the
• 12:09
  new era of men's basketball, where players play for one year and then they
• 12:15
  have an opportunity to go professionally. We always had the luxury of players playing
• 12:24
  on your team for four years, and you could count on when you got
• 12:33
  to the final four, every team loaded with juniors and seniors that had all
• 12:39
  been together. I mean, I can remember all those great battles we had
• 12:41
  with Tennessee, Notre Dame, you know, Stanford, even Georgia, and
• 12:50
  teams were loaded with WNBA superstars in the making. And I just hope the
• 12:56
  portal doesn't screw that up where everybody moves year to year to year and changes
• 13:01
  that, because tomorrow is a testament really to the young superstars coming up,
• 13:09
  you know, like Madison, Booker and Juju just to name too. I'm
• 13:16
  sure there's others that I'm that I'm missing out on, you know, Wiley.
• 13:22
  You know, there's so many young, young, young players that are
• 13:28
  hopefully they stay where they are and they grow, grow, grow, and
• 13:33
  kids that have hung in there for three or four years and and made their
• 13:39
  mark on their school and on their on their sport. So I think it
• 13:46
  can showcase all that possible if if everybody just buys in and hangs in there
• 13:54
  and grows with their team. But it may be the most fun, you
• 14:03
  know, the fun two days today and tomorrow that we've had in a long
• 14:09
  time. This will lead to be our last question. Lily Crane the Daily
• 14:13
  Emerald, kind of going off that question, talk about the history of these
• 14:18
  two programs, us See and yukon. What kind of extra significance do you
• 14:22
  think it means with these two programs kind of finally matching up in the tournament.
• 14:31
  When I started coaching in in the seventies, you know, when I
• 14:39
  coached at Saint Joseph's with Jim Foster, I didn't even know who the good
• 14:46
  players were. Nobody was on television. I don't even know. I didn't
• 14:56
  know where to found four was, didn't know anything about anything. When I
• 15:01
  got to UVA in the early eighties, you started to see more of the
• 15:05
  who the national teams were, and they all took turns being great. You
• 15:11
  know, whether it's old. Dominyu was great, Louisiana Tech was great,
• 15:20
  you know, Tennessee became great, Texas became great. They all kind of
• 15:26
  took turns and then usc exploded onto the scene in a different way. You
• 15:31
  know, with Cheryl Miller and the McGee twins and all that, and and
• 15:43
  everybody dropped off. And sometimes when you drop off and you are out of
• 15:50
  sight, you never come back, you know, like Old Dominion Louisiana Tech
• 15:56
  for instance. You don't come back for are of reasons. And sometimes maybe
• 16:03
  it takes an influx of new coaches, new players, new commitment and rekindle
• 16:10
  that fire. And you know, and certainly USC it's always had the potential
• 16:15
  to do that, and they've been close sometimes, but this seems like a
• 16:19
  different This seems like a throwback time to USC, you know. And it's
• 16:27
  it's ironic that this is the first time that we're meeting in the in the
• 16:30
  final four, you know, but it goes to show you how long they've
• 16:34
  been away from from the limelight. And yeah, one player, one coach
• 16:42
  can make a difference. And here they are and here we are, and
• 16:56
  I wish we could both win mhm, but we can't. And that concludes
• 17:04
  our time. Coach, Thank you very much, Thank you. We'll see
• 17:07
  you tomorrow. We'll have our Yukon student athletes. We'll have our student athletes
• 17:12
  here in a few minutes.