UConn's rise to national prominence

By CHRIS ELSBERRY
Staff writer

Updated: 01/02/2009 06:02:56 PM EST

Click photo to enlarge

UConn women's coach Geno Auriemma watches his team play.

John Toner sat in the booth of a Dunkin' Donuts near the University of Connecticut campus, sipping a cup of coffee, nibbling on a doughnut and wondering if Geno Auriemma would sign the contract that was burning a hole in his jacket pocket.

Auriemma was his choice, the man Toner had decided would change the fortunes of the UConn women's basketball program, in existence for 11 seasons with only one winning record. Auriemma had honed his coaching skills working for Debbie Ryan at Virginia. Toner, the UConn athletic director, needn't have worried about the contract. Auriemma was 31 years old and eager to be a head coach. He didn't care what kind of hardships might be ahead. He wanted the job.

He signed the contract on May 17, 1985.

A year later, Toner was looking to hire another coach.

As much as he felt Auriemma was the As much as he felt Auriemma was the one to rebuild the women's program, he was certain Jim Calhoun was the one to do the same with the men's program.

The program needed a jump-start. Dom Perno had just resigned after four straight losing seasons, and Toner wanted Calhoun. He had known Calhoun, who had just turned 44, as the coach at Northeastern in Boston. Toner loved the way Calhoun's teams played, seeing them firsthand when Northeastern played UConn. No one, Toner felt, worked as hard as Calhoun.

All he had to do was persuade him. On May 15, 1986, he did.

Toner's two hirings forever changed the

face of UConn athletics.

"I call it," said former men's basketball coach Dee Rowe, "the miracle in Storrs."

Entering his 24th season as women's coach, Auriemma has won 657 games and five national titles, leading UConn to 16 Big East regular season and 14 Big East tournament crowns. And in 2006, Auriemma was inducted into the Naismith National Basketball Hall of Fame.

On the men's side, Calhoun has won 526 games at UConn as he starts his 23rd season (he is closing in on 800 wins overall in 37 seasons), has two NCAA championships and can boast of 10 Big East regular season and six Big East tournament titles. In 2005, Calhoun was elected to the Naismith Hall of Fame.

And that success hasn't been limited to basketball or athletics in general. Between 1995 and 2005, applications for freshmen enrollment at the university have almost doubled. Since 1995, 928 high school valedictorians and salutatorians have enrolled and, according to figures supplied by UConn, 40 percent of the freshmen entering the Storrs campus in 2007 were ranked in the Top 10 percent of their high school classes.

In addition, the state Legislature in 1995 passed UConn 2000, a 10-year, $1 billion plan to "rebuild, renew and enhance" the UConn campus. In 2002, it continued that rebuilding plan by passing 21st Century UConn, a second 10-year, $1 billion project.

COMING TOGETHER

"All the pieces of the puzzle sort of came together at the right time," former Athletic Director Todd Turner (1987-90) said. "Some wonderful seeds had been sown by John Toner, who was my predecessor, in bringing both Geno and Jim into the department. They were extraordinarily high achievers and they just put everything together at the right time. It's a miraculous story."

"Within the span of 12 months, John Toner makes arguably two of the greatest hires in the history of this state and maybe the history of college athletics," added Tim Tolokan, UConn's former sports information director and now the university's associate Director of Athletics/Licensing and Athletic Traditions.

"Do-able," was what Calhoun said when he was hired.

The university, nestled in Storrs in the state's northeast hills, was basically "¦ a cow college. When it first opened its doors in 1881, it was known as the Storrs Agricultural School.

In 1899, it became Connecticut Agricultural College before becoming Connecticut State College in 1933 and, finally, the University of Connecticut in 1939. In the early '80s, undergraduate enrollment was about 12,000. The running joke was that UConn was "a safety school" for students who weren't accepted by their first choice.

"The big question that I always had was, why would they let a resource like this flounder to the point where every kid in the state says, 'I'm not going to UConn unless I absolutely have to,' " Auriemma said. "Why would you let that happen? So the mentality of the people making those decisions had to change."

Calhoun took it a step further. "I thought [UConn] had an inferiority complex," he said.

On the basketball side, the men's team was pretty good, winning 16 of 20 Yankee Conference titles between 1950 and 1970 but they were no more than a regional program.

"We didn't have any players of color. We won on a regional level and that was it," Dee Rowe said. "We were basically a bus league."

As the story goes, Auriemma never saw the fieldhouse when he came to campus for his interview in 1985 for the women's head coaching position. Not that it would have made a difference. He wanted to be a head coach. Besides, he didn't expect to be at UConn that long anyway.

"My goal when I took this job was, 'Look, if I can prove that I can coach, that I can recruit and that I can win and build a program, there was no way I was going to stay at Connecticut,' " Auriemma said. "Because it didn't have the things that you would want as resources to help you win a national championship. There was no commitment. Competing at the Division I level costs a lot of money and when I got here in 1985, I didn't see that.

"But it wasn't surprising because I didn't see it in the university either. The university itself didn't act like a Division I university, a big-time university that expected to be talked about among the best universities in America."

When Auriemma was hired, his office -- if you could even call it that -- was a shared room in the fieldhouse with the track coaches. The coaches shared one rotary phone. There were two small desks, one for Auriemma, the other for his assistant, Chris Dailey. Auriemma's other assistant had only a chair.

The men's office was no better.

"I sat next to Dave Leitao, another assistant," said former men's assistant Howie Dickenman, now the head coach at Central Connecticut State University, in an earlier interview. "It was tight city. You could hear every word the other guy was saying. I'd call a kid and I'd put my finger in my open ear so I couldn't hear Dave. When I was talking, Dave would leave the room. He said he couldn't think."

The fieldhouse was the only place athletic teams at UConn could practice. The basketball teams worked out there, but so did the track and baseball teams. A net was strung around the basketball court to keep out errant baseballs and shot puts. Starting guns went off during track practice.

"It was a bad classroom," Calhoun said.

For years, there had been talk of a new athletic facility. Tolokan will tell you that there had been plans on the drawing board since the mid-1970s. But every time those plans got put on the front burner, something more important would come up. "It would always get pre-empted by good causes, a library or whatever," Tolokan said. "And because of the money situation, only so much could get done."

The "money situation," according to former Speaker of the House Tom Ritter, was this: the state would give the university money for specific projects, but when funds ran tight, the governor would call the university president.

"Unfortunately, a lot of times, the [university] president would just give back the money, thinking he had no political clout," Ritter said. "There were other times when UConn would get money but have no vision of what to do with it."

Big East or Big Least?

In the meantime, UConn had joined the Big East Conference. In 1979, former Providence basketball Coach Dave Gavitt's dream of a powerful Northeast basketball conference came true with established programs such as Syracuse, Georgetown, St. John's and Villanova.

And right in the middle was Connecticut.

"We didn't know what the Big East was going to become," Tolokan said. "We knew Dave Gavitt was a visionary; we knew it could be something special, but we just didn't know. But John [Toner] says yes and we join. What if he had said no?

"Now, we join the Big East and, suddenly, we join these programs "¦ John Thompson at Georgetown, Jim Boeheim at Syracuse, Lou (Carnesecca) at St. John's. We have perhaps our best team ever. Players like Mike McKay, Corny Thompson, Chuck Aleksinas "¦but we had changed leagues. Now we're playing against Patrick Ewing and Pearl Washington and Chris Mullin. We weren't ready."

In its second year in the Big East, UConn won eight league games. Then that number dropped to seven. Then five. Then three. The competition kept getting better. The Huskies simply stayed the same.

The women's side was even worse. In its first season in the Big East (1982-83), the Huskies won one game. The next year, none, then three, prompting Coach Jean Balthaser to resign.

But over that cup of coffee in the spring of 1985, Toner decided that Auriemma would be his next coach.

"Geno and I went out for a ride and we stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and the only thing I said was, 'Can I trust you?' " said Toner, UConn's athletic director from 1969-87. "I knew all his credentials. We had the search committee and the results of that and the only thing I was concerned about was whether he would be the kind of guy I envisioned.

"He's been every bit of that and more. Geno was a street basketball player from Philadelphia. And he was very good-looking, [with an] attractive kind of personality and at that time, politically, the women wanted to learn how to play the men's game and there weren't too many women at the time who coached that way.

"So picking a male coach wasn't that bad. And picking a guy like Geno, you've got to recognize that Geno and his whole family contributed greatly to the comfort level of the kids they recruited because they knew they would have a home away from home."

What Auriemma sold in those early years was trust. And himself.

"I never sold the

university. I never sold the basketball program. There wasn't anything to sell," Auriemma said. "The kids we were trying to attract back then were the same kids that Boston College, Villanova, Providence was going after.

NOT MUCH TO OFFER

"And when you looked at our facilities, when you looked at [the athletic] complex, the campus layout, the whole physical plant, we had nothing to offer a kid that coming here was a better situation than going to those schools would be. So it became like, 'Trust me. I promise you that you'll get something out of this that you won't get from those other schools.' "

It worked. In Auriemma's third season, he landed Kerry Bascom, a 6-foot-1 forward from Epping, N.H., a Parade magazine fourth-team All-American. She believed the sales pitch, believed she would get something from Auriemma that she wouldn't get at another school.

"He was the only one that didn't promise me anything," Bascom said in a 2006 interview. "When I asked him what the program had to offer, he said, 'Whatever you put into it.' And that's exactly what I was looking for, someone who wasn't going to give me anything."

From that moment, as far as the women's basketball program was concerned, everything changed.

In Bascom's sophomore year (1988-89) the women won their first Big East regular season and tournament championship.

In her senior year (1990-91), they went to the NCAA Final Four for the first time. After Bascom, Auriemma was able to recruit Rebecca Lobo and Jen Rizzotti, Nykesha Sales and Kara Wolters, Svetlana Abrosimova and Shea Ralph, Swin Cash and Barbara Turner, Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, Renee Montgomery and Maya Moore, building a program that has won five national championships.

"We wouldn't have gone to that first Final Four without Kerry," Auriemma said. "We wouldn't have established ourselves as the dominant program in the Big East. She gave us something to build on."

Likewise, Calhoun didn't sell the basketball program.

"What we did, truly and definitely, was sell the Big East, not UConn," Calhoun said. "UConn is part of the Big East. Playing in Madison Square Garden, playing in Boston Garden. You will get to play in these places.

"We took the banner of what the Big East had done, the most powerful league at the time, and we sold a dream that kids could become something special here. If they went to St. John's they could be the next Chris Mullin, but if they came here they wouldn't be someone else; they would be them."

For Bridgeport's Chris Smith, that was good enough.

Coming Monday: The Miracle in Storrs, Part II: Gampel Pavilion is built, the men realize a dream and the women win a national championship.

Athletic Dept.

donations

1989: $800,000

1990-91: $2 million

1991-92: $2.15 million

1992-93: $2.7 million

1993-94: $3.4 million

1994-95: $3.7 million

1995-96: $4.7 million

1996-97: $5.4 million