Auriemma keeping women focused on another basketball crown

LONDON - The question with his team isn't whether it is good, or even whether it is great. The question for Geno Auriemma is whether the U.S. women's basketball team is too good.

Too good to be seriously challenged. Too good to make the Olympic tournament even remotely sporting.

"I don't want to coach the underdog," Auriemma said Thursday. "It's like cards. I don't want to win the seventh hand because I got lucky. I want to have four aces right from the start and kick everyone's [butt]."

Hey, you can take the kid out of Norristown . . .

As the coach of the University of Connecticut, where he has won seven national titles, Auriemma is used to having the best team with the best players. But even by his standards, Team USA is on a ridiculous streak of domination.

The Americans have won 33 games in a row. They have won the last four Olympic gold medals. A fifth, which is a virtual certainty, would be the most consecutive gold medals by any women's team in Olympic history. The quest begins with Saturday's game against Croatia.

That's the kind of success that backfired for the U.S. softball team. It was so dominant for so long, the International Olympic Committee took the sport out of the Summer Games entirely. The rest of the world just couldn't compete.

"They don't drop Wimbledon just because Federer wins it every year," said veteran guard-forward Diana Taurasi. "Don't you want the best team, the best person to win? To me, the feel-sorry thing is just pathetic. I don't feel sorry for anyone."

There is one major difference. The rest of the world may not embrace softball the way Americans do, but basketball is huge all over the globe. If anything, the women's game is even more popular than it is in the States. It's just that the best players, by far, are Americans.

This will be the fourth Olympics for Taurasi, who won three national titles with Auriemma at UConn, as well. So she can be excused if she doesn't quite get the problem here.

"I don't think that should take away from how hard it is to get there," Taurasi said. "In Athens, we had two really close games, against Russia and Australia."

Auriemma understands it from a different perspective. After coming to Norristown at age 7, unable to speak much English, he fell in love with watching the Olympics on TV. And those Games provided indelible images and memories.

"My greatest Olympic memory?" Auriemma said. "If I could be anybody in the history of the Olympics? Franz Klammer going down that mountain 110 m.p.h. and being alive to talk about it. I sat there watching. It was like watching a guy land on the moon."

It is those moments - Klammer skiing, Bruce Jenner winning the decathlon, the U.S.-Soviet gold medal basketball game in 1972 - that defined the Olympics for Auriemma. And now that he is getting his first chance to coach in the Games, he knows that such moments will be very hard to come by for his team.

The only Miracle On Hardwood would mean the U.S. women lose.

That doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned from those great moments.

"That's kind of the spirit of the Olympics," Auriemma said. "You might be the best in the world. But when you need to be the best in the world for those five minutes, that's a hell of a thing to be able to do that. That's what I'm trying to impress upon our players. They're the best in the world, but now they have to be the best in the world eight times."

It is, of course, about the players. Auriemma gets that, too.

"Really," he said, "think about it. How many mornings did I have to train to get here? Somebody just said, 'Hey, we think you'd do a great job coaching the team.' So you try to keep the focus on the athletes and you kind of live vicariously through them. Because you know you, yourself, would never have an opportunity to compete in these Games."

That doesn't mean he hasn't earned it. Auriemma graduated from West Chester University and started his coaching career as an assistant at St. Joseph's. When he was hired at Connecticut in 1985, there was no mention of the school's women's basketball team on any map. Auriemma put the program there.

Indeed, half the current national team - including Taurasi, Sue Bird, Swin Cash, and Maya Moore - played for Auriemma at UConn. They learned to win there. They just didn't stop after they left.

And now they are reunited with Auriemma with nothing on the line except an Olympic gold medal and the continuation of a remarkable run of dominance.

"You couldn't have imagined this," Auriemma said. "To take a program that didn't exist in 1985 and now to be such a huge part of USA Basketball - I pinch myself every day."