“She says ‘I wish I was born 20 years later’”: When Geno Auriemma shared Sue Bird’s impossible desire 

UConn coach Geno Auriemma marks his 40th year of coaching the Huskies this season. He has seen the rise of NCAAW since the first women's college basketball championship in 1982. At the time, Auriemma was an assistant coach with the Virginia Cavaliers.

In the past two years, women's college basketball has seen exponential growth in terms of viewership, ticket sales and coverage. During an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle in June 2024, Auriemma was asked if he was disappointed that it took so many decades for people to tune into the sport.

"No, I'm not one of those people," he said. (2:44). "People did what they did back then for whatever reason that they did it. I'm not going to go back and rewrite history and I'm not going to judge people on what they did and what they didn't do."

Geno Auriemma added that expanding teams or the sport itself required people willing to buy into it, which was simply not the case at the time. He used the example of UConn's legendary player, Sue Bird, who played for the Huskies from 1998 to 2002:

"People are going to do what they're going to do when they feel like it's time to do it. Every time I talk to Sue Bird, she says, 'I wish I was born 20 years sooner or later rather.' I should say later. But you weren't.

"So I'm not going back there and I'm not going to be these people that complain about why didn't we. But it is important to remind people that there was something going on back then and it just didn't have what we have today because what we have today didn't exist back then." (3:17)

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Geno Auriemma-led UConn's game against USC sets viewership record

Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes broke multiple viewership records last season, but now the UConn Huskies have taken over. Their game against the USC Trojans before the Christmas break averaged 2.23 million viewers, making it the most-watched women's basketball game of the season. It peaked at 3.76 million viewers in the first fifteen minutes of the broadcast.

Geno Auriemma and the UConn Huskies (11-2) are the center of attention as they attempt to end their championship drought. With this being Paige Bueckers' final college season, there is added pressure on the team to help her bid a good farewell to this chapter.

The Huskies will visit Marquette for their game on Wednesday.

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