With their 100^th Consecutive Win Last Week, Here’s a Deeper Look into the Success of UCONN Women’s Basketball and what this means to the rest of the Sports World

On Monday, February 13th the UCONN Women’s Basketball team of and head coach Geno Auriemma added another major accomplishment no one in a major professional or collegiate sport has ever done to their resume; and that is to win 100 games in a row.

Before I go into what this means to the sport of Women’s Basketball or the sports world, let’s look at all of the things Geno Auriemma and the Huskies have accomplished since he came here and how this program has stood alone as a truly dominant force amongst major sports, at least in this past decade.

Geno Auriemma began coaching in 1985 at UCONN, and since then, he has owned the recruiting world of women’s college basketball; one that brings athletes in, wins them national championships, and allows them the best possible opportunity to go to the WNBA after four years.

Just to focus on recent history, Auriemma has led his team to at least the Final Four in nine of the last ten seasons, and has won the National Championship six times in that span. No one in the men’s game has come close to that sort of success.

Now with this recent accolade and the pile-up of accomplishments the program has received since 1985, people in the sports world question how good this dominance is for the sport, and how significant this accomplishment really is for a team that has already been this dominant for so long.

I think with women’s basketball, a sport that is competing in the same seasons as the NBA and Men’s College basketball, it’s hard to judge how dominant this team really is compared to other sports, and/or how difficult (after building the culture that’s been built up at UCONN) it is to accomplish what they have.  Yes, winning 100 games in a row is impressive, but how impressive is it?

In the Men’s game, there is a movement of the “one and done” players, with constant rebuild of teams through star-studded recruiting and players moving on to the NBA to make more money. Even with the teams that don’t run on this “one and done” program in the men’s game, the competition added from this is far more exciting and there is far more parity in the men’s game. This simply isn’t present at the women’s college level where even the best of the best players stay all four years, which takes away a lot from the difficulty from the sport that the men’s game has. Even with UCONN’s success the same four or five teams are normally present in the Final Four, with schools like Tennessee, Notre Dame, Baylor, Maryland, and now South Carolina as other competitors to UCONN, but few others tend to make it as far.

With the dominance of UCONN’s programs contributing a lot to seasoned, four-year talent, many people ask why do women in college stay all four years constantly instead of going straight to the WNBA?

1. With the alumni system/connections to universities the college game presents, along with the tournament and how seasonal it is (everyone knows when they’re playing), it is far more entertaining to watch a Women’s NCAA game than that of a WNBA game, where their season starts in May, goes through the Summer, the games don’t have as much excitement/crowd-presence, there’s not as much on the line, etc.
2. The pay in the WNBA is not as substantially rewarding or desirable as that of the Men’s game, where in the men’s game players are leaving after one year to make millions of “guaranteed” dollars, and the end result of staying four years and winning is not as substantial as it is in the women’s game.

There’s also been a huge lack of competition UCONN has faced over this past decade and in the past two years especially, and with their recent success, the lack of a constant rival and the constant blow outs they hand out night in and night out has brought light to how dominant they are but also how much they own that specific sport.

I think what Geno Auriemma has built up and succeeded in his time at UCONN has been incredible, but now accomplishments like winning 100 games in a row should be expected of them while also proving not that difficult with the competition in the sport, and there’s no doubt in my mind they will win the tournament again this year.