Geno Auriemma is the women’s basketball coach at UConn, and if you’v never heard of him before today, you’re about to not likely be able to forget him any time soon. At a post-game press conference, Auriemma had some BLUNT words for kids who want to play sports and their parents, and we ALL need to hear them! His take on how prospective athletes ACT today, and how parents push them, is now going viral, for good reason.
Auriemma says, “Recruiting enthusiastic kids is harder than it’s ever been because every kid watches TV . . . and what they see is people just being really cool. So they think that’s how they’re gonna act. They haven’t even figured out which foot to use as a pivot foot and they’re gonna act like they’re really good players.”
In other words, kids want to skip the hard work and learning the craft of sports and skip straight to the glory and fame that comes with being a superstar athlete. Auriemma says to weed out these kinds of players in his program, he and his coaching staff place a “HUGE premium on body language” — because it’s reflective of an athlete’s attitude.
“If your body language is bad,” Auriemma says, “You will never get in the game. EVER. I don’t care how good you are”
He then goes on to recount how he one benched a star UConn player because she was “acting like a 12-year-old,” and said, “I’d rather lose than watch some kids play the way some kids play.”
