Chiney Ogwumike and Andraya Carter weigh in on the heated exchange between Geno Auriemma and Dawn Staley at the end of South Carolina’s win over UConn. (1:29)
They don't come any tougher -- especially mentally -- than Dawn Staley. She didn't, by accident, drive her way out of North Philadelphia to become an All-American, All-WNBA and Olympic gold medal-winning player, and then an iconic, hard-charging national championship-winning coach.
So here's guessing she'll be fine, or already is fine, no matter the strange and wild outburst she endured from Geno Auriemma on Friday after her South Carolina Gamecocks defeated his UConn Huskies 62-48 in the national semifinals.
"We move on," Staley said on ESPN, still seeming bewildered by what exactly had happened.
Indeed, she and her team move on to bigger and more important things, namely Sunday's national championship game against UCLA, where Staley could win her fourth title as a coach.
It's Auriemma who needs to figure out how to deal with this. Not just in trying to make amends -- he issued an apology Saturday (in which he didn't mention Staley by name) that he should have delivered immediately. More importantly, he needs to keep it from ever happening again, because he has too much to lose if he doesn't.
To recap, Auriemma began barking at Staley during the postgame handshake, which should have been congratulatory but instead got contentious. There these two were, shouting in each other's faces, having to be held back by assistant coaches.
It was like some cartoonish WWE bit (it's not like Staley was going to back down, after all). And it was over, what exactly?
Auriemma kept trying to dodge the question postgame before finally saying he was troubled that Staley hadn't shaken his hand before the game (she actually had) and that he had stood around for "three minutes" waiting for her to meet him at center court.
Except it didn't need to be said. Whatever perceived slight Geno felt should have been internalized. He would never accept a player being thrown off her game from such a minor incident.
Instead, in a fit, he came across as petty, personal and completely unbecoming of who he's always been.
"There's no excuse for how I handled the end of the game vs. South Carolina," Auriemma said in a statement. "It's unlike what I do and what our standard is here at Connecticut.
"I want to apologize to the staff and the team at South Carolina," he continued. "It was uncalled for in how I reacted. The story should be how well South Carolina played, and I don't want my actions to detract from that. I've had a great relationship with their staff, and I sincerely want to apologize to them."
Auriemma is an absolute legend in women's basketball; a Hall of Famer, a gold medal-winning coach, a 12-time NCAA champion. Maybe most remarkably, 41 years into his career, he's as good as ever. UConn is, at least until Sunday, still the reigning national champion. The loss to South Carolina broke a 54-game winning streak.
It's more than just all these victories -- 1,288 of them, at a .886 clip. It's how he won them.
An Italian immigrant who grew up in Philly himself, Auriemma did it with intensity, bravado, charisma and unapologetic competitiveness. He took no quarter. He never accepted that women's basketball should take a back seat to anything.
He's never been for everyone. His scraps through the years have extended from NCAA administrators to chief rival Pat Summitt to even UConn colleague Jim Calhoun, who built a dueling powerhouse on the men's side in Storrs.
Auriemma, along with Summitt and others, helped redefine women's sports by ignoring a society that saw women athletes as fragile and instead coaching them just as athletes, thus driving them to levels no one saw as possible.
In the process, he lifted the entire sport by redefining greatness, annually raising the bar and by doing it in the Northeast, backyard to the national media.
You can't write the history of women's basketball, or basketball at all, without Geno Auriemma. The entire operation owes him.
Which is what makes Friday so disappointing to even his greatest fans.
At age 72, he needs to be particularly mindful of his actions. He needs to be supportive, not petulant; gracious, not emotional. He's the elder statesman, not the kick-down-the-door young guy. Lashing out is an act of ego and immaturity. He's better than such antics.
He needs to lift others up, even after bitter defeats, not try to tear them down.
He's done too much, accomplished too many things, positively impacted too many people to tarnish his legacy in the final chapters of what is otherwise one of the greatest stories ever told.
