Let’s get one thing out of the way right from the jump: UConn Huskies coach Geno Auriemma says he isn’t retiring anytime in the “foreseeable future”. That may come as a relief to fans of the program who have never known anyone else to be at its helm. Though he declined to promise an exact timeline, Auriemma made one thing clear while speaking to the Guardian last week: he’s going to be sticking around.
At this point, and for decades prior, Auriemma and UConn have been synonymous. The history is well known, but let’s indulge: he began his coaching career at Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. By 1981, he was an assistant at the University of Virginia, and he took over the head coaching job at the University of Connecticut in 1985.
Auriemma was competing against many highly qualified women for the UConn job. One of those was Chris Dailey, who has coached at his side for the past 40-plus years. In that time, the Huskies have become arguably the most successful sports teams in the US.
The town of Storrs, Connecticut, and Huskies basketball, provide the backdrop for Apple TV’s three-part docuseries, The Dynasty: UConn Huskies, which premieres on Friday. The project was made with the full participation of Auriemma, who is shown in all his forms: emotional, frustrated, borderline angry, happy, thoughtful, but never reticent. Auriemma’s decision to take part in the documentary wasn’t due to a looming sense that the end of his time at the program is near, though that’s certainly a theme that’s woven throughout, and a question that’s asked.
And it’s something Auriemma clearly wanted to shut down. I think maybe the fact that it was Paige’s senior year, there were a lot of things that happened in the three or four years before that that we had to try to overcome. And no one knew at the beginning, ‘Hey, if you do it this year, you’re going to follow us and win the national championship’.
Nobody knew that.” Not only did the Huskies win the national championship – a feat the third episode of the series heavily focuses on – they did so with a 37-3 record. But the documentary is about much more than one season, and it was a challenge to attempt to condense 40 years of a truly singular story into something bite-sized and appealing to a broad swath of viewers, from UConn mega-fans to those who have never heard of the team. So in that respect, I think it was pretty on point.” Dailey is featured in the series but perhaps not as prominently as someone who has led the Huskies alongside Auriemma this entire time.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
