Geno Auriemma

Who is Geno Auriemma?

Luigi "Geno" Auriemma is an American college basketball coach and the head coach of the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team. He has led UConn to eight NCAA Division I national championships, and has won six national Naismith College Coach of the Year awards. Auriemma was also the head coach of the United States women's national basketball team from 2009 to 2012, winning the 2010 World Championship, and the gold medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics.

He emigrated with his family to Norristown, Pennsylvania, U.S. when he was seven years old and spent the rest of his childhood there. After graduating from West Chester University of Pennsylvania in 1977, Auriemma was hired as an assistant coach at Saint Joseph's University, where he worked in 1978 and 1979. He then took a two-year absence from college basketball, serving as an assistant coach at his former high school, Bishop Kenrick, before assuming an assistant coaching position with the University of Virginia Cavaliers in 1981. Auriemma became a naturalized United States citizen in 1994, noting in his autobiography that he finally decided to naturalize when his UConn team was slated to tour Italy that summer and he was concerned about potential problems because he had never done any required national service.