38 Geno Auriemma Quotes About Success, Coaching, Basketball, And Life

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Top Geno Auriemma Quotes About Success And Winning

1. "Success respects success. Regardless how it’s achieved. The great ones know this. They know how hard it is to accomplish. They focus more on self-improvement. They are called 'Winners.'"

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

3. "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."

4. "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."

5. "What those 11 national championships mean to me is how many great players I've had the opportunity to coach, how many great people have come through our program."

6. "This is just another class for you guys, basketball is. If you just want to be average, then you do average work. If you want to be a little bit above average, then you do a little more work. If you want to get A's in basketball, then you've got to do stuff that other people aren't willing to do."

7. "We've won a lot of national championships and we've never taken any of them for granted. Every one is special."

8. On winning 1,000 games: "I think it’s a number that, it’s significant because so few people have been able to do that. There’s just so few opportunities to coach that many games. So you feel incredibly fortunate that you’re one of a very, very, very select few and they’re some of the great coaches that have ever coached."

9. "I just know that in our sport, from 1995 to today, what we've done against our peers is as good if not better than anybody else has done in their sport against their peers, I don't care whether it's harder in that sport."

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

11. "They say you really don't understand what winning is. You really don't appreciate what winning is until you've had your share of losing. I think the opposite is also true. I think you can't quite fathom how much losing hurts when you have had as many chances to win, that we had, over the years."

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Geno Auriemma Quotes About Coaching And Leadership

12. "Your philosophy in basketball will get you to a certain point. After that, you need individuals to take you to the next step."

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

14. "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."

15. "Fair or unfair, at Connecticut it's not good enough just to win. There's a perception that if we don't go to the Final Four, it's a bad season. I just want the players to understand that the one constant in our program is that we want to make sure we play hard and have fun."

16. "Coach Wooden got the absolute best players in America every year. We get the best players in America every year. That's what everybody thinks. The things we fall back on are, I'm sure, the same things that every successful coach falls back on, is that every day we try to live up to that potential."

17. "As a head coach you're probably only as good as your players and your assistants."

18. "I'm a hardass, but we wouldn't have had all the accomplishments we have as a basketball program if that's all I was. Players would have stopped listening to me, and I would have been run out of coaching if that's all I was. So I think we win because I am, because I demand sometimes more than they can give. But I don't know what that is until I find out you can't give it."

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Best Geno Auriemma Basketball Quotes

19. "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."

20. "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."

 21. "At this time of year, everything is about confidence—about your ability to make the play that needs to be made at the time it needs to be made."

22. "If you want to be thought of as one of the better players in the country, then you have to go to a place thats really, really difficult, tough to play and play really well. Most good teams play good at home, but the really good teams, the way they separate themselves is they play well on the road."

23. "This time of the year, it's the individual player that makes the difference. The things you do as a program get you to this point. Then individuals decide the outcome of the games."

24. "What happened last season is exactly what needed to happen, not because we needed extra motivation to win. I just think we needed to lift all the stuff we’ve been carrying around with us the last couple of years and just play free and clear and be like everybody else."

25. "I was happy for the kids today because Im not usually one to think in these terms, but if you do what we did on Monday anywhere else in the country, its not a big deal. But what we did on Monday can really scar you for a really long time if you play in this program because youre going to hear about it every minute of every day, everywhere you go from everybody. You have to have pretty tough skin to survive in this environment."

26. "I don't want to be afraid to run and afraid to lose and worry about it. I just want to go and run and up down the floor and make some plays and see what happens. That's when we're at our best."

27. "No one ever talks about our defense."

28. "I've never lost sight of the fact that it is just a game—it is a bunch of people trying to get together to accomplish something that individually you can't do by yourself."

29. "Our defense has always been good. But when you have great offensive players like I've coached the last 15 years, it's hard to concentrate on our defense. But our defense has been pretty good."

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Coach Auriemma Quotes About Life

30. "Everything goes in cycles. There isn't anything that lasts indefinitely."

31. "If I can be part of a team the rest of my life, then I'm going to be a lucky guy. I've tried to do that all of my life—be part of a team. And I was fortunate enough to work with people that allow me to do what I love to do—and that is teach and coach."

32. "I'm always leery of someone who tells me how hard they work. Hard workers just work hard and let their results speak for themselves."

33. "They're allowed to get away with just whatever, and they're always thinking about themselves, me, me, me, me, me. 'I didn't score, so why should I be happy?' 'I'm not getting enough minutes; why should I be happy?' That's the world we live in today, unfortunately. Kids check the scoreboard sometimes because they're going to get yelled at by their parents if they don't score enough points. Don't get me started."

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Other Motivational Geno Auriemma Quotes

34. "Pressure is when somebody asks you to do something you can't do. To me, that's pressure."

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

36. "All I ever wanted from anything—this game, friends, acquaintances—was respect for how I do things and how I represent my family, my school, my program. And this is the ultimate sign of respect, and I want to thank all of you that made it possible."

37. "She's a reminder of how fortunate we are to do what we do with our God-given talents and opportunity."

38. "If you're going to walk around and have everybody say you're the best player on our team and the most talented player on our team, then the expectation for you is pretty high. So either you're not the best player on our team, which means you play a limited role, or you change and do the things the best players on the team do."

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