A Legend Among Us: The Man Behind the UConn Women's Hoops Dynasty Loves His Avalon Summers
Geno Auriemma, the all-time winningest college basketball coach in NCAA Division I history – men or women – grew up outside of Philadelphia with dreams of becoming a professional baseball player for his hometown team.
After moving to the U.S. from Italy with his family when he was 7, Auriemma was raised in Norristown, which sits about 20 miles from Philadelphia, and he was a huge baseball fan in those days.
“When I was growing up, I wanted to play for the Phillies,” Auriemma tells the Seven Mile Times. “I was a diehard Phillies fan. I played baseball every day. I had my little transistor radio, listening to the Phillies every night when they weren’t on television. I ended up buying season tickets to the Phillies right when they moved into Veterans Stadium [in 1971]. Me and a bunch of friends went in on a package and sat right on the third-base line. I loved baseball. It was the first sport I ever played when I came to America.”
Fast forward about six decades, and Auriemma, 71, just completed his 40th season as the coach of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, leading the Huskies to their 12th NCAA national title in a dominating 82-59 victory on April 6 over Philly native Dawn Staley’s South Carolina team.
Auriemma, who owns a home in Avalon and spends much of his summers here, has coached some of the best players in the history of the game. They include Breanna Stewart, Sue Bird, Tina Charles, Rebecca Lobo, Maya Moore, Diana Taurasi, Kara Wolters, most recently Paige Bueckers, and many more.
He has accomplished just about everything you can in sports. In addition to those 12 national titles, he’s coached the U.S. Olympic team to gold medals in 2012 and 2016; he’s in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame; he’s compiled a record of 1,250-165 (a .883 winning percentage, which is an NCAA record with a minimum of 10 seasons), and he’s coached his teams to six undefeated seasons. He has taken his teams to 24 Final Fours.
He notes that the Final Four is “not something that we took for granted, but I think it did become almost expected every year by everybody.”
The Starting Point
Once he was in high school, he still had a love for baseball, but Auriemma’s focus was more on basketball, although he was cut from the team as a freshman.
He didn’t graduate from Bishop Kenrick High School with thoughts of coaching.
“It [coaching] kind of just evolved,” Auriemma says. “It just kind of happened … It was a series of events that conspired to get me into coaching.”
Auriemma says another “Philadelphia guy,” fellow Hall of Famer Jim Foster pulled him into coach. Auriemma was at Montgomery County Community College when he met Foster, who later coached women’s basketball at St. Joseph’s, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, and Chattanooga. Back then Foster had gotten the coaching job at Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote, Pa.
“He kept badgering me, ‘Come help me coach,’” Auriemma says. “I just did it as a favor to him. I had never coached before. Next thing you know, he gets the coaching job at St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia. I went with him to St. Joe’s. It was all part-time. I spent two years there. That’s when I met Phil Martelli.”
Martelli and Auriemma both worked the well-respected Cathy Rush Basketball Camp, named for and run by the famed Immaculata College women’s basketball coach who was someone Martelli looked up to. His wife, Judy, had played for Rush at Immaculata.
“At the time, that was the No. 1 [girls’] basketball camp in America,” Auriemma says. “Every college coach, every good player, that’s where they would go every summer to recruit players. I had the opportunity to work the camp. Through that, I met a lot of coaches, learned a lot.
“Phil watched me coach and said, ‘Why don’t you come coach with me? I just got the job at Bishop Kenrick High School in the Philadelphia Catholic League.’ It’s where I went to school. I left St. Joe’s and women’s basketball and went to coach with Phil, coaching boys’ basketball at Bishop Kenrick. This was in the late-’70s. We were really good. We ended up playing in the Catholic League championship game.”
Word came that Debbie Ryan, who was the women’s coach at the University of Virginia, was looking for a fulltime assistant.
“Phil gave her my name,” Auriemma recalls. “I went down there and got a great opportunity from Debbie to do a lot. Met a lot of great coaches in every sport.”
On his podcast “Make a Difference with Phil Martelli,” Martelli, who coached St. Joe’s men’s basketball team for 24 years, said his friend is “the greatest builder of a program in history ... he’s the greatest women’s basketball coach of all time. I heard somebody this morning say, he may be the greatest college coach, any sport any gender.”
After four seasons as an assistant at Virginia, Auriemma got the itch to be a head coach: “I was like, I need to be a head coach at some point. I feel like I’m ready to go.” He interviewed for a few jobs, then UConn had a women’s basketball vacancy. With the help of some Philly connections, he was hired as the head coach in 1985.
“Everybody that I needed that could help me was in place,” he said. “I got the job. It wasn’t like it was a desirable job. The facilities were bad. The team was bad. They had finished last every year. It was the kind of job you’re going to get if you’re an assistant.”
Does Winning Ever Get Old?
His 2025 NCAA title may be the most rewarding.
“I think the uncertainty of it all over the last five or six years where so many kids were impacted by injuries,” he says. “We kept getting to the Final Four and we kept coming up short. We just always felt, wow, if we could ever get to the Final Four with our whole team, once again, that would be amazing. We said we only have one more chance to do it with Paige.
“We were trying to blend in a lot of new players. We just had a lot of uncertainty about how it would play out. When it got to January, early February, that’s when I started to really think that it was a possibility that we could do it. As it turns out, it was a perfect ending. Not all stories end with a happy ending. This happened to be one that ended about exactly how you would hope it would end. From that perspective, this one felt really, really, really good.”
“It’s had its ebbs and flows,” he adds. UConn’s 12th title came after nine years without a title. The previous one was in 2016.
Many people told him that when Bueckers graduated (she was the No. 1 pick by the Dallas Wings in the 2025 WNBA draft), they thought he was going to head off into the sunset. But he’s not quite ready.
“Now we won and it’s like, you’ve got a really, really good team coming back and have maybe the best two players in the country in Azzi Fudd and Sarah Strong, maybe you ought to hang around a little longer and see what happens,” he says. “You’re kind of being held hostage all the time.”
How He Discovered Avalon
When he coached at Virginia, Auriemma and his family didn’t vacation because “we didn’t have enough money to go on vacation.”
After a few years at UConn, around 1989, 1990, as his three kids – Alyssa, Jenna, and Michael – were getting older, he and his wife Kathy were to the point where a vacation was a possibility.
That Philly connection stepped in.
“Phil Martelli and I still stayed in touch and Jim Foster and I stayed in touch; we still do,” Auriemma says. “Somehow the topic came up, ‘Let’s go on vacation, let’s spend the week in Avalon.’ I had never been to Avalon. In high school, we might go to Wildwood for a weekend.”
The trio rented a three-floor condominium on 8th Street in Avalon. Each family had its own floor for the week.
“That was my first introduction to Avalon,” Auriemma says.
He and his family then rented a house on 32nd Street for about nine years.
“My kids fell in love with it, my wife fell in love with it, I fell in love with it,” he says. “It was close to Philly. My mom would come all the time. One thing led to another, and I ended up buying a place on 77th Street. My next-door neighbor was Eddie Stefanski, who at the time was with the Nets.”
As the Auriemmas’ kids grew older, it was hard to get everyone down there. They sold the house in Avalon and built a place on the Connecticut shoreline, but still visited Avalon when they could.
“Then finally we made that jump [to Avalon] full-time,” he adds. “We said, ‘We’ll build a house down there.’ That’s where we love to go and that’s where we’re going to go forever and I’m going to leave it to my kids. That’s the place where they grew up. When my daughter first brought her kids down to Avalon for a week, then it was all over.
“Avalon is so much a part of us. We have a drink we call an Avalon. When we first bought a house down there, we had a party. It was maybe 100 people. We must have drank a thousand Tito’s [vodka], club sodas, and cranberry juice. We just said, we must’ve had a thousand of these Avalons in Avalon.
“We found three or four great restaurants we go to all the time. We go down a little bit in June. We go a lot of July as much as we can. We spend the entire month of August down there and sneak down whenever we can otherwise. It’s something I look forward to. The season ends. If you lose, it’s bitter disappointment; if you win, it’s great.
“But when it’s all said and done, the sun’s shining and I’m going to be in Avalon soon. I’ve met so many great people down there.”