UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma walked into his pregame press conference on Saturday ahead of his team’s Elite Eight matchup with Notre Dame with one thing to say.
And when the coach with more victories and more national championships than any coach in the history of the women’s or men’s college games speaks, people tend to pay attention.
“I’m going to read you some numbers,” Auriemma said. “Write them down: 4-for-20, 4-for-22, 1- for-17, 5-for-18, 4-for-16, 7-for-26. That’s the 3-point shooting yesterday across the country. How many arenas are we going to sell out with that bulls–t?”
Those statistics beg for an explanation. Was it stiffer competition? Were they just off shooting days? Was officiating to blame? Are there issues with the modern-day game?
Auriemma had a different reason.
“Know what time our shootaround was yesterday?” Auriemma asked. “Six o’clock in the morning – 6:20, I think, for half an hour. This morning, I just saw Notre Dame leaving, so they had media this morning. Their practice time is tonight at 5:30.”
The eight teams that played on Friday shot 34 for 139 beyond the arc. That’s 24.5%, a staggering difference of 11.9 percentage points from the 36.4% that those eight teams averaged in the regular season. After a bad day from long distance, Auriemma took issue with the people scheduling the logistics of the tournament.
“Does anybody who makes these decisions ever ask the coaches and the players, ‘Hey, does this work?’” Auriemma asked. “Do you guys do this during the regular season? Is this normal?”
Auriemma takes issue with more than just the scheduling. He doesn’t like the practice of cramming 16 teams into two separate regions, while the men have four separate regions with four teams each.
While both tournaments share the same basic format, the logistics are far from the same. For the second weekend of the tournament containing the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight, each of the four regions in the men’s tournament has one location.
The women only play in two locations, meaning eight teams are in one city.
The decision to change to two sites instead of four, which the tournament previously staged, is still fresh in coaches’ minds. Making the jump in 2023, UCLA coach Cori Close has a slightly different perspective than Auriemma, but the same end goal in mind.
“I understand exactly why we did this at the time,” Close said. “I also think we have to be constantly nimble to go, ‘Does this serve our game best now? And is there any small tweaks that would make it run more efficiently?’ It’s a really hard combination to find. We’ve been begging for years for maximum coverage.”
One impact that the two-site regional has is total attendance figures. Auriemma claimed that the combined attendance on Friday was 18,000. He suggests changing from two locations for the second weekend to four, like the men’s tournament. As Auriemma noted, even 5,000 in each location would make for a total of 20,000 fans in attendance across one round.
Another thing that Auriemma called out was the quality of the equipment used in the Sweet 16. The NCAA brought brand new baskets and basketballs to the weekend. While on paper, that sounds beneficial, the logistics of a brand new basketball aren’t ideal to play with compared to a used ball that’s been worn in.
“They bring in new baskets, new basketballs right out of the box,” Auriemma said. “Got people dribbling the ball off their feet. You got people missing layups all over the place. You bounce the ball and it goes up to the ceiling. There’s just no concept of how basketball is played.”
Even in the little things, issues are apparent. While the men’s tournament has four regions with distinct, recognizable and consistent names: South, West, East and Midwest, the names for the regions in the women’s tournaments feel somewhat like afterthoughts, with different names each year. They are named after the location in which the final weekend is played.
This year, it’s Fort Worth 1, Sacramento 2, Fort Worth 3 and Sacramento 4.
The little things might seem unimportant, but they add up to Auriemma’s claims that the NCAA isn’t doing enough to live up to its goal of growing the sport.
“I just don’t understand some of the decisions that are made about our game when we’re trying to grow the … game,” Auriemma said.
This was not the first time UConn’s coach took issue with logistics. After taking down UCLA in last year’s Final Four, Auriemma took issue with the way the NCAA schedules the men’s and women’s tournaments.
For the first two weekends of the tournaments, the men are given Thursday to Sunday for their games, while the women play Friday to Monday. However, in the weekend containing the Final Four, it flips. The men then play on Saturday and Monday while the women play on Friday and Sunday. That means the two teams that win Elite Eight games on Monday will have a relatively short rest period before a Friday game.
While UConn locked their spot in the Final Four on a Sunday in 2026, the team played its Elite Eight game on a Monday last season, leading to an unhappy Auriemma.
“We finished Monday night and we play Friday,” Auriemma said. “The guys playing finish Sunday and they play Saturday. ‘But we’re in this for the student-athletes.’ No, you’re not. You’re in it for everything but the student-athletes.”
One logistical challenge that teams also may face in a tournament with a two-site second weekend is travel. While travel is undoubtedly intended to be a challenge teams face in March, men’s teams often get the opportunity to get around that. From Houston playing at the Toyota Center in 2026 to Purdue playing at Lucas Oil Stadium in 2025, makeshift home games certainly exist for the men.
However, fewer neutral-site locations limit the likelihood of that in the later rounds of the women’s tournament.
While it could be an issue to some, three-time national champion coach Dawn Staley says her South Carolina Gamecocks have no problem dealing with it.
“We’ve done it before,” Staley said. “Our performance coach does things that will help our bodies to adjust. They’ve gone on walks when we got here. And they’ve gone on walks on days in which we didn’t play, just to get their bodies adjusted.”
Staley, like UConn’s Auriemma, is a legend of college athletics. While coaches all around the country advocate for necessary changes to be made to the world of women’s basketball, one thing that can go overlooked is the impact that those coaches have on the fans.
Outside of advocacy for administration-based changes, interacting with fans – a staple for Staley – is a big way that she helps grow the sport.
Staley, who always takes the opportunity to sign autographs for fans, was planning on doing her usual post-game autograph signings on the court near the seats after the Gamecocks beat Oklahoma in the Sweet 16. She ran into a small issue.
“(The fans) started helping to organize it, and then some gentleman came over and he’s like, ‘Stop, we’re not doing this.’” Staley said. “I was like, ‘Well, why?’ And he said because the NCAA people told us to stop it. ‘Excuse me? I’m going to keep going because this is the way you grow the game.’”
Like most coaches, Staley is focused on improving the experience of fans and players. Despite the Staleys of the world, problems still exist in the world of women’s college basketball.
As the Final Four nears, there’s undoubtedly complexity in finding solutions to the issues raised by coaches like Auriemma. From weight rooms to the amount of locations for regionals, Auriemma was blunt when explaining the root of the issues at last year’s tournament.
“The student-athletes,” Auriemma said, disappointment boiling in his voice, “their experience sucks compared to the men’s experience.”
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