Six weeks after his team lost to South Carolina in the Final Four, UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma said on Monday that he felt “dumb” for how his postgame exchange with Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley played out in front of a national audience.
“When I walked into the locker room afterward with the coaches, you are just shaking your head, thinking five more seconds, you couldn’t keep it in for five more seconds,” Auriemma said in his first news conference since then.
“You just feel dumb for the way that it played out. We are all human and we all do dumb shit.”
Auriemma sparked a firestorm of criticism after he approached Staley in the final seconds of South Carolina’s 62-48 victory in Phoenix and yelled at her.
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Coaches from both teams had to separate the pair. When the game ended, Auriemma walked off the court to the locker room without shaking hands with anyone from South Carolina.
Auriemma said the exchange was about the lack of a traditional pregame handshake between the coaches. He later apologized in a written statement.
“I didn’t see a lot of it, but that is to be expected,” Auriemma said of the backlash. “I think maybe some of it was warranted and some of it was people have been lying in the weeds waiting for that moment. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done for the game; it is what you just did.
“Unfortunately, that is the world that we live in today and it usually is one-sided. The people who understood what it was all about in a different light, they are not going to go on the air and say it. They are not going to write about it because now they are going against a major internet or media frenzy; they are not going to do that. I brought the criticism on myself. I didn’t bring the [stuff] that came after it on myself.”
Auriemma compared the backlash to what might have happened if social media had been around in 1998, when he arranged for an injured Nykesha Sales to make a basket so she could set the program’s career scoring record.
“Immediately, it was the worst thing to ever happen to the game of basketball and to sports in general,” Auriemma said. “These things that happen, you take them all with a grain of salt, understand them. I did what I did, I apologized for it and I moved on.”
