How Geno's Privilege Blinds Him to the Rest of the Coaching World

On November 15, 2019, the typically collected 11-time NCAA championship coach Geno Auriemma looked anything but, as he sat at the presser table.

Arms crossed in his post game conference while wearing a consistent scowl on his face, Aureimma produced a spot-on impression of a child who just found out he isn't allowed to go to a friend's birthday party this weekend because he didn't clean his room.

I watched in utter amazement, a man who typically places the sports world in awe with his meme-worthy press quotes and countless Youtube blurbs about effort, go from wise to downright whiny. Let's get one thing straight, I am a fan of what UCONN Women's Basketball has achieved, but this isn't about that.

As the first reporter opened up the question about Evina Westbrook's eligibility waiver being denied by the NCAA earlier in the week, Auriemma nodded anxiously as if he'd been planning his response with fervor. What was most surprising wasn't that Geno handled his response with so much angst, but for the first time in a long time, the NCAA told a powerful, white, male, winning NCAA coach that he couldn't have his way.

Suddenly, the Geno who preaches character, hard work and openly escapes any kind of scrutiny when he talks about how young and dumb his freshmen female athletes are, appeared weak and bitter.

For those of you not aware, at the close of the 2019 NCAA Women's Basketball season, former Tennessee Lady Vol, Evina Westbrook spoke in a candidly cutting post-game interview eluding to the culture at Tennessee which ultimately, many argue placed the final nail in the coffin of former Head Coach, Holly Warlick. Warlick was fired in the weeks that followed. The media erupted with responses from UT fans and the rest of the NCAA women's basketball world ranging from excuses that Westbrook was just a kid who misspoke, that perhaps she was frustrated with Warlick and losing or that she was just a brat and a major part of the team culture issues at UT.

What we do know is that no one but Warlick and those players know the real truth about what happened at UT. However, the amazing part of all of this remains that somehow, some way, Geno seems certain he knows exactly what happened. Right.

“A kid is in an environment that’s not necessarily healthy. An environment that, if you knew what the environment was — which I can’t say — you would not want your kid in that environment,” Aureimma stated.

One of the hottest topics in college athletics is currently coach-athlete abuse. The current challenge remains deciphering and separating actual abuse reported by players who are being treated poorly and those athletes who are simply retaliating for not receiving ample playing time, or other trivial dissatisfactions, is real. The funny thing is that with all of the hard lessons that Geno preaches, he has yet to be accused of anything and he lives so far from the world that so many female college coaches live in when it comes to being handcuffed in your coaching.

You hear Geno talk about recruiting and what he is looking for specifically. He touts his hard line about not needing to coach effort because it's expected. When in reality, the reason Geno can take those hard lines and treat his players the way he does is because he's issued complete autonomy to do so.

In UCONN's eyes, Geno has earned the right to coach his women like male basketball coaches coach their males...as long as he is successful. This power will never be eliminated and Geno knows it which is why he can sit in press conferences without fear of overstepping or misspeaking.

When UCONN basketball begins, the gym doors close and the underground world of what those athletes go through will cease to ever make it to the ears of the athletic director because if they did, they wouldn't be listened to anyway. Why? Because it's Geno.

Very few know but there is an informal parent support group set up each year for freshmen parents to be able to help their children "survive" their first year of Geno's coaching at UCONN women's basketball in the transition. Without context, I will not say whether or not this is good or bad but one thing is for certain, in my profession as a Division I NCAA female coach, if there was a whisper of such a parent group within my program, my administration would have their ears to the ground in a heartbeat with me in their office first thing Monday morning.

That aside, the more troubling part of Geno's statement for me is the ambiguity when he spoke about the environment at UT. From his statements he is clearly defending Evina's decision to leave and painting Warlick's former program as a toxic place. Geno's disregard for the fact that ambiguity was intentional to deliberately encourage the public to point the finger back at Warlick shows his blatant disrespect for her and the situation he knows zero about. Regardless of what Westbrook shared in order to earn his allegiance and place him firmly on the front line of the battle for her in this waiver war with the NCAA, he is in the wrong.

Geno does not know the first thing about what the culture was like at UT even if he thinks he does.

During my time following Warlick's career I managed to find some of the most entertaining and foul UT fan pages that absolutely ripped apart its coach and team with each performance. The parent pages were the worst and some still did not even realize how accessible those posts were.

When Geno is talking about a toxic environment was he referring to the boyfriend stealing that was occurring amongst teammates? Was he referring to the inter-team dating because he disagrees with homosexual relationships? Was he referring to the systematic parental movement to have Warlick removed? Who knows?

Either way, these are apparently things at UCONN that cease to brew because Geno has the bandwidth and power to wave his hand and run his team and culture how he sees fit with a staff that would die before they would expose him.

Regardless of the truth of what was happening at UT, Warlick was never permitted that latitude in the same way countless female coaches across all sports are prevented from truly being able to shape unbridled rock solid cultures due to fear by administrations that it will be seen as harsh, unfair or "too tough". These are words that are rarely ever used to describe male coaches in their college athletic environments with male athletes.

For Geno to say with such certainty that UT's environment was toxic is a guess on his part with the reliance only on Westbrook's account. It's a mere assumption that Westbrook's depiction is 100% accurate and honest. Geno says he will only ever hire women on his staff. Most tip their hat to him and that it's a nod to gender equity. An example of an assumption would be for me to say that he only hires women because another male on staff would be entirely too intimidating for him so he keeps his hen house in line. But hey, that's merely an assumption on my part without facts in the same way his statements about UT are.

Geno's ability to coach how he needs in order to win is hardly something afforded to both female coaches and males who coach female sports and it's clearly taken for granted. Even with this recognition he is still unsatisfied and in the process, stepped on the throat of a former female coach who never in a million years do the same to him. This generation will guarantee that Geno's clock is ticking and karma is coming.

Did you enjoy this article? Please hit like, comment or tweet @TFCoachCarlson with #BeFearless. To contact me visit thefearlesscoach.org