UConn women’s basketball head coach Geno Auriemma tied former Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer for most all-time wins Friday night at 1,216, as the No. 2 Huskies defeated No. 14 North Carolina, 69-58.
Auriemma’s legendary Storrs-based program is attempting to capitalize upon astronomic women’s basketball growth nationwide, unwilling to palate the bitter taste of rival schools using the sport’s momentum to pass it by.
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So far, UConn fans are embracing the ride, encouraged by Auriemma signing a contract extension after flirting with retirement, superstar guard Paige Bueckers leading the 2024-25 roster after she could have bolted for the WNBA, and heralded newcomers like Sarah Strong shining in nonconference action.
UConn sold out its home games at Gampel Pavilion for the first time since 2004-05 after recording a 17-year high mark in sellouts at the venue last campaign with six. The most successful women’s basketball program ever is showing signs it can remain a market leader, even after its NCAA title drought stretched to eight years in April.
The team earned $2.8 million in ticket sales in 2022-23, according to Sporty’s college sports database, the highest total among all public schools by a significant margin. UConn women’s basketball is also a formidable merchandise machine. Bueckers is the NIL Store’s top-selling active female athlete, according to the Mark Cuban-backed company that sells NIL items across 88 schools nationwide.
Generations of fans cultivated through 11 national championships have passed on their support to younger online audiences.
As of Friday night, UConn women’s basketball has 461,000 followers on Instagram, compared to Iowa’s 306,000; LSU’s 260,000; South Carolina’s 257,000; USC’s 81,000; Tennessee’s 77,000; Stanford’s 70,000; Baylor’s 56,000; and Notre Dame’s 59,000. The Huskies also lead those programs in followers on the social media platforms TikTok and X, and only Iowa holds an edge over them on Facebook.
Bueckers’ social media reach, with 3 million TikTok followers and 2 million Instagram followers, approaches that of all the top women’s basketball programs combined. The Nike-sponsored guard is the projected No. 1 pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft. She will bring a legion of fans to whichever franchise picks her.
Given UConn’s status as a feeder for next-level talent, Bueckers will likely become teammates with an ex-Husky in her first WNBA season, continuing Auriemma’s stellar reputation there.
Among the teams capable of winning Sunday’s draft lottery, the Los Angeles Sparks have ex-UConn star Azurá Stevens, the Dallas Wings have Lou Lopez Sénéchal, and the Washington Mystics have Stefanie Dolson and Bueckers’ close friend and 2023-24 college teammate Aaliyah Edwards. (Of course, rosters and potentially entry draft positions are bound to shift before the 2025 season tips off through trades, free agency and the expansion draft.)
The UConn system could have ended this year. Auriemma could have walked away after reaching the Final Four last season with the most injury-ravaged roster of his 40-year tenure. He repeatedly insinuated he would retire from the iconic program he helped build—and claimed it would have been an easy choice if Bueckers left.
“I mean it’s gonna be my 40th year,” Auriemma told supporters at a community breakfast in March. “It only would have been 39 if (Bueckers) wasn’t coming back.”
Over the summer, he pushed aside his public grumblings about the new era of college sports and potential concerns from outside his program that UConn could soon fall behind. That had not been an abstract worry. Before the Huskies made a Final Four run, they spent much of the regular season playing below program standards, dropping to their lowest ranking in 30 years when they fell to No. 17 last December.
Nonetheless, Auriemma signed a five-year contract extension, dipped into the same transfer portal he once lambasted to acquire guard Kaitlyn Chen, and added Strong, one of the top high-school recruits in the nation, in a three-month span.
Auriemma did so during a stretch in men’s and women’s sports when many legendary coaches are quitting. Among the notable departures are Stanford’s VanDerveer, Lisa Bluder (Iowa women’s basketball), Tony Bennett (Virginia men’s basketball), Jay Wright (Villanova men’s basketball) and Nick Saban (Alabama football). Some, like Bennett last month, explicitly cited new stresses in college sports as a reason for retirement.
“I was equipped to do the job the old way,” Bennett told reporters at his retirement press conference.
Yet in a town where basketball, not football, carries the pressure of being the biggest draw, and where women’s hoops received widespread attention well before it did elsewhere in the country, the 70-year-old Auriemma is still working to preserve UConn as a national power.
Keeping UConn sustainably elite would contrast the devolution of Auriemma’s onetime arch-nemesis, Tennessee, which is onto its third head coach since Pat Summitt retired in 2012.
The Volunteers regularly competed for NCAA titles under Summitt. Now, they are among hundreds of teams without an Elite Eight appearance since 2016.
While UConn committed a total of $18.7 million in base pay to Auriemma through 2028-29—equating to about $3.7 million annually—Tennessee will only spend $750,000 per year on new head coach Kim Caldwell, significantly less than her predecessor, Kellie Harper.
The university, like most college programs, sees football as its top priority, with basketball in a much lower stratosphere. Its modest women’s basketball spending relative to UConn and South Carolina has arguably been a factor in its slippage and could continue to affect results.
Conversely, UConn is a college sports outlier because of its focus on the hardwood. It is the only public FBS school to spend more on its basketball programs than it does on its football team.
One day, someone will face the pressure to replace Auriemma at UConn, and after Friday, the point of comparison for the next Huskies head coach will be the all-time wins record. It doesn’t get loftier than that.
However, with its athletic department financial commitment, Auriemma’s determination to keep UConn relevant nationally in the NIL era, and Bueckers’ bankable stardom making the Huskies must-watch television during her farewell season, a framework may be in place for that next coach to shine.
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