(Mar. 23) – “I don’t coach women, I coach basketball players. Let me tell you a story: I was practicing with his team before a game when the opposing team’s female coach came out on the floor. “I’m telling my players how to play man-to-man defense. The other coach says: ‘You can’t say that. It’s person-to-person defense.’ I said, ‘You’re shittin’ me.’ She says, ‘But it’s women playing it.’ I say: ‘Yeah, but it’s man-to-man. They’re just pawns, without gender. I’m a gender-neutral coach.” This is Geno Auriemma. the most successful women basketball coach ever. Born in 1954 in Montella, in the province of Naples, he lives in the USA since he was 7. His Italian is not smooth, and he’s almost forgotten it but he knows how to coach. Geno Auriemma invented women’s basketball as it is played today, or rather he reinvented it so that it resembled men’s basketball as it was played in the ’60s and ’70s. He took women’s basketball back to the future. In the process he took it from a specialty sport – a novelty, an amusement, the girls running down court as if wading through water – and made it respectable. Since 1985, the Italian is head coach of the University of Connecticut, which he has lead to seven Division I NCAA Championships. In 2009 he reached 800 career wins faster than any coach in the history of college basketball, at any level men or women, in just 928 career games. (Peg)
