Geno Auriemma Quotes

The NBA is all about winning, but at this level (college basketball) winning doesn’t make you happy. You can win, and play lousy, and in my program, feel lousy. To me it’s about: How good can we be.

Everything goes in cycles. There isn’t anything that lasts indefinitely.

With the absence of pressure, it’s hard to do great things.

I don’t hire good coaches, I hire good people. If they turn out to be good coaches, too, that’s a plus.

So, yeah, I’m going to try to win the national championship next year. But I’m not going to kill myself doing it. I’m not going to kill my players either. You really start to realize there’s a lot more to what we’re trying to do then winning games

It’s about doing it in a way that it can’t be done any better. That is the goal every day.

Bottom line, you’re either a risk taker, or your not, and if you don’t take risks, you’ll never win big.

I’ve had the privilege of coaching the best basketball team in the history of the world, and that’s the USA national team. I’ve had a chance to coach them for eight years. If you were to ask me if I could end my career only coaching one team for the rest of my coaching career, I don’t think it could get better than that, especially with the players that I’ve had during those eight years. When you’ve coached at that level, you know, you’ve coached those players, it’s pretty hard to say, I would rather coach anybody else.

If you are getting into coaching right out of college, you’re not one of the coaches because you’re not really, like, a coach yet. You’re someone who’s in limbo all the time. Navigating that is not easy. If you try to be too much like a player, then the coaches are like, You’re not too serious about coaching. If you’re going to be too much like a coach, the players are not going to confide in anything.

Barbara said she knew it was in as soon as she shot it. She’s told me a lot of lies over the last four years, but that was the biggest one I’ve ever heard.