Geno Auriemma joined an elite group of faculty basketball coaches on Wednesday night time.
The longtime UConn girls’s basketball coach picked up his 1,two hundredth profession win after the Huskies cruised to a 67-34 win over Seton Corridor. He’s now simply the third coach in historical past, males’s or girls’s, to achieve the 1,200-win mark. Solely former Duke males’s coach Mike Krzyzewski and present Stanford girls’s coach Tara VanDerveer have hit that milestone. Auriemma can be the quickest to get there.
Krzyzewski received 1,202 video games earlier than he retired, which made him the winningest males’s Division I coach in historical past. VanDerveer surpassed Krzyzewski and grabbed her 1,203rd victory final month. Auriemma and VanDerveer are the one two lively coaches on the ladies’s facet who’re even near the 1,200 wins mark. Iowa coach Lisa Bluder is the subsequent closest Division I girls’s coach, although she has 871 profession wins. Coastal Carolina coach Cliff Ellis is the closest lively coach on the lads’s facet. He has 831 profession wins.
Auriemma, 69, is now in his thirty ninth season with the Huskies. He first landed at UConn in 1985, and he rapidly turned them right into a powerhouse in girls’s basketball. He’s received 11 championships there, reached the Remaining 4 22 occasions and has solely missed the NCAA match thrice. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame in 2006.
No. 11 UConn had no concern beating the Pirates on Wednesday night time. They held them to single digits in all however one quarter and led from begin to end. Aaliyah Edwards led the way in which with 18 factors and 15 rebounds, and Ashlynn Shade dropped 17 factors after capturing 5-of-10 from behind the arc. Seton Corridor shot 22% from the sphere as a staff, didn’t have a participant hit double figures and went simply 2-of-23 from behind the arc.
The win moved UConn to 20-4 on the season. They’ll journey to No. 1 South Carolina subsequent on Sunday.
Auriemma is certain to cross Krzyzewski within the very close to future, which is able to put him in a decent race with VanDerveer by the remainder of their careers for the all-time mark. As of Wednesday night time, VanDerveer has received 1,206 video games in her time as a head coach. To Auriemma’s credit score, he’s each hit the 1,200 wins mark in a shorter timeframe than VanDerveer and he’s misplaced greater than 100 fewer video games than she has in her profession.
Regardless, Auriemma had already solidified himself as top-of-the-line school basketball coaches of all time. Now, he’s reached one other milestone to show that.