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Just minutes into a 2015 game against Memphis, Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma began pulling his best players.
First, he took out Morgan Tuck, a sophomore forward and UConn’s third-leading scorer. Then he pulled Breanna Stewart, a junior forward and the reigning national player of the year.
Tuck played four minutes the whole game. Stewart, just five. Neither saw the court the entire second half.
“In the grand scheme of life,” Auriemma said, “I was trying to send a message.”
The Huskies didn’t need Tuck or Stewart that day — they beat Memphis by 46 points — but Auriemma was adamant. It wasn’t about their play; it was about their body language and what it signaled.
“I got the sense that these guys weren’t really that committed that day, that they knew it was going to be easy,” Auriemma said. “They knew it wasn’t going to take a lot of effort.”
A year later, at the Final Four, Auriemma was asked a question about the enthusiasm of UConn’s bench players during games. His answer not only went viral; it also referenced the 2015 Memphis game as an example of his core philosophy.
“We put a huge premium on body language,” Auriemma said. “And if your body language is bad, you will never get in the game. Ever. I don’t care how good you are. If somebody says, ‘Well, you just benched Stewie for 35 minutes in the Memphis game a couple of years ago.’ Yeah, I did. … Stewie was acting like a 12-year-old. So I put her on the bench and said, ‘Sit there.’
“I’d rather lose than watch kids play the way some kids play.”
Ten years later, Auriemma, now 72 and once again in the Final Four, is still a proselytizer of body language. He believes that it’s a shortcut to what’s going on inside a player and how that affects the team. That it signals one’s mindset better than dialogue can. That if you let poor body language slide in a winnable game in February, it will come back to haunt you in the biggest games in March and April.
“Let me ask you a question,” Auriemma says on the phone. “You walk into work, or you walk into your team practice, and you go, ‘Hey, how you doing?’”
I’m all right.
“Right away, you’re like, ‘Oh, what the f—, man? Like, right away? This is how we’re going to start?’ As opposed to: ‘I’m doing great, man. Could not be better. Let’s go.’”
For Auriemma, it’s a small example of what he believes: that negativity and positivity are contagious, and that little interactions like that set a tone.
In Auriemma’s eyes, there are two kinds of people in the world: energy givers and energy suckers.
An energy giver is like a battery — someone who can charge others around them when they’re struggling or in a funk.
Energy suckers are players who pout after their teammate makes a great play because they’re not in the game. They are more concerned with their situation.
“There are times where we all need an energy lift, and you want people on your team that can be those players that give you that,” Auriemma said. “But it can’t be every day. You’re taking, taking, taking, and you’re never giving energy. You’re not going to have a championship team if you’ve got that.”
That was the point Auriemma wanted to make to Tuck and Stewart. Yes, they could beat Memphis, but winning isn’t enough if effort and attitude aren’t there; actions and body language have real consequences.
“Talking about it doesn’t necessarily get the point across,” he said.
Seeing it does. He’ll show players film of their body language — not just the bad, but the bad compared to the best versions of themselves.
“Look at you here when you are at your best,” he’ll say, then pull up a clip when their body language dipped. “Now look at the way you’re behaving. Are you proud of that?”
The response is almost always the same. “They’ll look at it, and they’ll feel bad, and they’ll go, ‘No, that’s not me.’”
For younger players, the gap between who they are and who they think they are is often wide. When players are young, everything leaks in: emotions, distractions, mistakes. Auriemma doesn’t expect consistency from an 18-year-old the same way he does from a senior. Even great players like Stewart, he said, didn’t show up fully formed.
“But you want them to grow from freshman year to senior year,” he said. “I pay attention to that stuff, because if I don’t point it out, then they’ll never know what they’re missing. What they could be.”
To Auriemma, a big part of his job as a coach is pointing that out to players.
When he watches game film, he studies what’s happening on the bench the same way he studies what’s happening on the court. He also asks his players questions to challenge them.
This is when you’re at your best. What do you do to get yourself in that situation?
When you start acting like this instead, what is going on in your world that’s making you act like this? Because this is not acceptable.
How do we fix that? Just letting that behavior go and saying it’s just having a bad day is not enough. Because what happens when we’re playing in the Final Four?
UConn’s standout senior Azzi Fudd recently emphasized the payoff of that mindset. “If my shots aren’t falling, I’m not going to be sad and be upset and frustrated and be into my self-pity,” Fudd told CT Insider, “but I’m going to be, ‘OK, what can I do to help the team now?’”
Understanding body language’s impact is simple, but embodying it every day is not. Even for Auriemma.
Some days, he walks into the gym with a bad attitude himself, his body language not up to standard. And then, as practice starts, he’ll get mad at his players for their attitudes.
That’s when his assistant calls him out: “That’s not acceptable, man.”
“You need teammates to call each other out,” Auriemma said. “You need your coaches to call you out. It’s everybody holding each other and themselves accountable. It’s not just one rule for the players, one rule for the assistants, one rule for the head coach. It’s everybody.”
