UConn Women Make The Grades

Ah, the old GPA and the old APR.  It’s been big news around Husky Land the last few weeks, hasn’t it?

No problem for the UConn women, or many other female athletes at UConn. They dominated the floor Saturday night at halftime when the school honored those student-athletes with at least a GPA of 3.0 last spring or this fall.

There were guys  in the bunch of 300 or so from the university’s varsity programs. I saw them. But the ratio was something most guys would like,  like 10 girls to 1 guy. Or at least it seemed.

Geno Auriemma’s No. 3 ranked basketball team had five players on the floor – Stef Dolson, Heather Buck, Caroline Doty, Kelly Faris and Kiah Stokes. That’s a healthy representation for a elite national program with an ambitious road schedule.How in the world does this seem to happen every year with women’s basketball?  Geno Auriemma had an explanation.

“You might ask the question this way: ‘You know, year after year, you guys win 30 games. How do you do that? And guys are named All-Americans. How does that happen? Well, we recruit All-Americans, which means we have the best players coming into the program.

“We also recruit really good students. We’ve eliminated the ‘Why you shouldn’t come to UConn’ argument.  Back in the day, people asked why go to UConn, if you can go to Duke or Stanford or Notre Dame? People [recruiters] would throw that in our face. One time, even Boston College was using that crap. And who the hell are they [to say that about UConn]?

“But we’ve eliminated that tact because of the success our players have had in school. What has happened now is, we try to go out now and find more than the best players in the country. We look for good students and see if they are willing to work at [school]. We may bring in average students, but at least they do average work or above.”

UConn keeps academics competitive by splitting the players into academic teams run by the assistants, Chris Dailey, Shea Ralph and Marisa Moseley. The coaches actually draft the players and standings are kept based on each player’s GPA.

“We already have good students coming in here and all we do is re-emphasize to them how important it is to us,” Auriemma said. “We make it very important. I run it like a Catholic school program. If you didn’t go to class, you didn’t practice. If you don’t go to study hall here, you don’t practice.

“I ask my kids if they would ever consider missing practice. ‘Hell no,’ they say. Then I ask them, well, what makes you think you can miss a study hall. … Look, I don’t think my guys are perfect, don’t get me wrong. They don’t go to every class. They are like every other college kid. If they want to cut a class, they probably do. If they want to get their homework from somebody else, they probably do. They do what kids do.

“But at the end of the day, they will be held accountable for their grades. And its the responsibility of myself and my staff to make sure it gets done. I get no credit because I do diddly with it. It’s Chris, Shea and Marisa.”