TAMPA, Fla. — Geno Auriemma’s coaching brilliance is often as much a curse as it is a blessing.
The morning of the 2025 NCAA Championship, he knew his UConn women’s basketball team had a good game plan. He had a roster he knew was talented enough to match up with No. 1 seed South Carolina. He had 40 years, 24 Final Fours and 12 national final appearances worth of experience to draw on.
But Auriemma spent the hours leading up to the game in what he describes as his “crazy mind,” envisioning how he would articulate himself if his Huskies couldn’t finish the job.
“I was thinking, man, what am I going to say if things don’t go our way?” Auriemma said. “How can you describe the emotions that you would feel if it went the wrong way for us when there’s so much riding on this game for a lot of people … So I just kept thinking something good has to happen, because if we were going to lose, it would have been before now.”
Throughout the Huskies’ NCAA Tournament run, Auriemma worried constantly about anything that could go wrong. After a historic rout of Arkansas State, he worried whether the 69-point win would make the team complacent. He worried about whether his inexperienced post players could handle three straight matchups with All-American forwards in their bracket. And perhaps most importantly, he worried whether he could deliver on the promise that he made nearly six years ago to a 17-year-old Paige Bueckers that if she came to play for UConn, she would leave a national champion.
Neither could have anticipated what would happen in the intervening years, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic that heavily impacted Bueckers’ freshman season. The Huskies and Bueckers herself were also plagued by an unprecedented rash of injuries, missing at least one key piece — and often more than one — in each of the following three years. Bueckers returned barely three months after having surgery for a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear in 2021-22 to drag UConn to the NCAA championship against South Carolina, where the Gamecocks delivered the Huskies their first-ever loss in a national title game. Bueckers then missed all of 2022-23 with an ACL tear, and she was forced to play out of position in 2023-24 with six players sidelined by season-ending injuries for much of the year.
Standing at the brink of success with the weight of the last five years on his shoulders, Auriemma dreaded another fall.
“I don’t think the basketball gods would take us all the way to the end — they’ve been really cruel with some of the kids on this team,” Auriemma said. “They’ve suffered a lot of the things that could go wrong in their college careers as an athlete, so they don’t need anymore heartbreak. They weren’t going to take us here and give us more heartbreak. I kept holding on to that.”
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And on a Sunday afternoon at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fla., everything UConn did simply felt meant to be.
Bueckers, ever the unselfish superstar, finished with 17 points, three assists, six rebounds and two blocks, while redshirt junior Azzi Fudd and
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