UConn Enters the Season with a Target on Their Back

Jose Fernandez is entering his 17th year as the South Florida women's basketball coach. He's won 285 games, made the NCAA tournament three of the past four years, and last season produced a WNBA first-round pick, Courtney Williams.

And yet, for all the progress his program has made, it's still measured against the same yardstick as the rest of women's college basketball: Geno Auriemma's Connecticut Huskies, winners of the past four national championships and 11 since 1995.

Fernandez's Bulls received the lone first-place vote in the American Athletic Conference 2016-17 preseason poll that didn't go to Connecticut (coaches cannot vote for their own team). But unlike the past four years, when Connecticut's unstoppable trio of Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson, and Morgan Tuck led opponents to seek moral victories like keeping the game close for a half, there was a sense of possibility in the conference room at AAC Media Day earlier this month. Remote possibility, sure, but players and coaches still dream of—and more important, prepare for—the day they can supplant Connecticut at the summit of the sport.

"It's a little different," Fernandez said of the upcoming season. "But I think everybody, not just in our conference, is still chasing Connecticut. So for us, that's going to happen in January. Everyone's going to talk about, with Connecticut, what they lost, but they're also bringing back a lot of talent."

It is a tribute to the program Auriemma has built that he could lose the top three players in the WNBA draft in Stewart, Jefferson, and Tuck, and still enter the season with his Huskies in the mix for a national title, if not outright favored to win it again.

It isn't just blind belief in Auriemma, either. Connecticut will feel it star trio's absence at point guard, where talented-but-inexperienced freshman Crystal Dangerfield will start. But junior guard Kia Nurse, who was voted as the AAC's preseason player of the year, has already shown she can be a dominant lead scorer: she led Canada in a win over the United States at the 2015 Pan American Games. And in Katie Lou Samuelson, a 6-foot-3 sophomore, the Huskies have a player capable of doing many, if not all of the things Breanna Stewart did on the offensive end.

Samuelson exemplifies why Auriemma's teams succeed so often. She entered school as a knockdown three-point shooter, but rather than keep her in that role, Auriemma and his staff worked with her on every facet of her game, turning her into an inside-outside threat by the end of the season. That made her a luxury on the roster last year, someone who allowed Stewart to grab some rest occasionally. This year, she'll have to replicate much of Stewart's production; such is the faith most have in Auriemma's methods that few doubt her ability to at least approach doing so.

"Last year, I was so concerned about my shot and making them, but now I feel like I could go a whole game, never shoot a three, know that I'm a good three-point shooter and other people know that as well," Samuelson said. "So as long as I'm contributing in some type of way, I don't have to take any outside shot to do that. The next step for me is getting comfortable in the post. To know that I can go down there and my teammates can rely on me to get a foul, kick out for a shot, or score."

So while the Huskies should still be at the head of the pack this year, the roster changes leave other teams at least a sliver of a chance to climb their way to the top, too. Last season, three of the Final Four teams were first-timers—Oregon State, Washington and Syracuse.

"There's lots of examples out there of people who have gotten really good," Auriemma said. "I'll bet you if you looked through those programs, there are common threads through all of them. A lot of it is getting good players, having a good feel for what your philosophy is going to be as a coach. It's not hard to get good. It's hard to stay good, but it's not hard to get good."

One common thread at many AAC schools is Auriemma himself. At Temple, head coach Tanya Cardoza served as his assistant with Connecticut for 14 years before taking the job. Her close friend Jamelle Elliott is Cincinnati's head coach after spending 12 years as an Auriemma assistant. Central Florida hired Katie Abrahamson-Henderson away from University of Albany, where she won five straight America East titles and drew comparisons to Connecticut's success. Abrahamson-Henderson, incidentally, then brought on former Auriemma standout player Nykesha Sales as an assistant.

Even SMU's new head coach, Travis Mays, got the job after Auriemma made a call to the school on his behalf.

But back when Pat Summitt's Tennessee was the power rival to beat, Auriemma didn't raid her staff for coaches or try to emulate everything she did. So is the best way to topple Connecticut really to try and be them?

"It's OK to be a copycat as long as you copy the right cat," Mays said. "And I think Geno Auriemma is the right cat, because he's dominating the women's game right now. But then again, when you watch Notre Dame, they started doing what he was doing. You had two teams that were about making reads rather than sets, teaching their players how to play the game. And I think that's what separated them."

For Cardoza, Connecticut shows that no detail is too small when you want to compete with the country's best teams.

"From day one when I stepped on Temple's campus, it was everything that I learned at UConn, to the point where my players would get annoyed sometimes," Cardoza said. "But I think they understand now. And trying to compete with them, you have to pay attention to the little things. Whether it's communicating on defense, just open up your mouth and talking, they see that it helps. Whether it's everybody has to look alike, the way that you dress, your shirt has to be tucked in, you can't walk around with headphones on. Those are all things I got from UConn, and for someone else, it may not be a big thing, but for us, it's how people perceive you."

The AAC may lack the pedigree of the Big Ten or the Pac-12, but there are still players who should create matchup problems, even for Connecticut. Players like SMU's Alicia Froling, an inside-outside threat who scored 33 and grabbed a school-record 22 rebounds in a game against Cincinnati last year, and USF's Kitija Laksa. All of them have dreams of taking down the best. As McKenzie Adams, SMU's top returning scorer, put it, "It would be a lie to say we didn't visualize that every single day."

And what does that victory over Connecticut look like?

"I think just playing as a team, because one person isn't going to beat Connecticut," Froling said, closing her eyes and considering. "That's never gonna happen. They play an awesome team game, they're really well coached. So everyone's playing as a team, everyone's doing the little things." She opened her eyes. "And then we'll see what that amounts to. If we win, that'd be awesome."

Even if this is not the year an AAC team dethrones Connecticut, or another national power ousts them from the NCAA tournament, everyone has their eye on the Huskies .

Auriemma is well aware of it, but he doesn't seem to mind.

"There's hope for more teams now," he said. "And just because there's hope, there's a chance for everybody based on what's happened in the past year. The fact that no one is sitting here saying, 'If that team doesn't win the national championship, something happened.' The talent is being spread out to the point where nobody's that good that they can mail it in. And that's a good thing for everybody."

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