It moved him past the late Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, who had been 1,098-208 from 1974 to 2012, and into second spot for wins in Division I women’s basketball.
Leading the victory list is Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, that has 1,105 wins.
“I wish she was with us training,” Auriemma said of Summitt, the winner of eight NCAA titles. She expired in 2016 in the ramifications of early onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type. “And I want I needed to work a lot harder to catch her. I didn’t think I would be training long enough to be in this position. That wasn’t my goal. There have been times once I have felt as though it does not matter to me personally.
“It still doesn’t, whether I get to a particular number or do not. However, having accomplished a milestone like this, it is more of an opportunity to reflect on nearly four years of coming here every day and doing the identical thing, and attempting to do it the best that you can get it done. The simple fact that it’s been at one college is probably more significant to me than the actual number.”
Auriemma, 66, is in his 37th season at UConn, where he’s won 11 national championships and participate in the Women’s Final Four 20 occasions, including the previous 12 in a row. He gave attention to his assistants, too: associate head coach Chris Dailey, that has been with him since he began at UConn in 1985, and Shea Ralph and Jamelle Elliott, that are both former UConn players.
He’s also the fastest to reach 800, 900 and 1,000 successes.
The simple fact that they were all born within two years of each other — Summitt in June 1952 (at Tennessee),” VanDerveer at June 1953 (Massachusetts) and Auriemma at March 1954 (Italy) — and fought against each other from getting to the top few spots on the success list stands out to Auriemma also.
“You probably couldn’t find three more different folks growing up in 3 different surroundings, right?” Said Auriemma, whose family moved into the Philadelphia region when he was seven. “To converge at the location is really improbable.”
Auriemma and Summitt needed a sometimes contentious relationship as the show between their teams raised the women’s match from 1995 to 2007, when they met 22 times. That comprised UConn victories from the 1995, 2000, 2003 and 2004 national championship matches.
“We’ve got a very long history,” Auriemma said earlier this month. “If that did not exist, I do not understand that we would be discussing it in this way. We’d be talking about,’Hey, you’re not that far behind Tara.’
“Back when Pat was alive and winning championships, everyone would talk about Pat in 2 ways. One,’I admire her so much, she wins so much, she does it the right way.’ Then you had the other portion of the population that goes,’Man, I want to beat Tennessee so bad.'”
Auriemma said the Huskies then found themselves in precisely the same position.
“The more games we win and the further we go, the further admirers we bring and the more people that don’t need us to win anymore,” he said. “I respect Pat for the way she handled that all those years, because I do not think I’m handling it as well as she did. She had a lot more restraint and much more sense than I do. That is probably what I miss about her. She was always able to check beyond all the trivial stuff and concentrate on the big stuff”
