Sports
Geno Auriemma needs to be better than bizarre postgame actions against South Carolina
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.
Staley shouldn’t spend a second looking backward.
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.
“I just said what I had to say,” Auriemma said.
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.
Some of that sanity sunk in by Saturday afternoon.
“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.
SYDNEY: As Twenty20 cricket competitions explode around the world, Australia’s Big Bash League is struggling to chart a vision for the future, after plans to privatise its franchises stalled.
Cricket Australia chief Todd Greenberg is adamant that outside investment is necessary to shore up the game’s financial future and keep pace with a boom in other well-funded leagues played in a similar time slot.
They include the UAE’s ILT20, South Africa’s SA20, and New Zealand’s privately-backed NZ20 scheduled to start in December 2027, all bidding for the best local and overseas players.
“If those salary caps (of other leagues) are significantly higher than ours over the coming years, and players can earn more in those areas, then players will follow those. That’s a real risk to us,” Greenberg told local media.
“I want to make sure that for Australian cricket, our ambition is to have a league that runs at the key part of the year for us, which is the December-January window, and it’s the best T20 league in the world at that moment in time.
“To do that, we have to have a significant amount of money in our salary caps to attract not only the best players from overseas, but to retain and attract our own best players.”
He added: “The concept of bringing private capital to cricket is inevitable at some point.”
While not a direct competitor as it runs in a different window, the benchmark Indian Premier League has seen massive success thanks to wealthy benefactors, with England’s The Hundred also on a roll after an influx of private capital.
But it is a thorny issue in Australia with an initial proposal to sell stakes in each of BBL’s eight teams stalling last month amid concerns about a loss of control for the game’s local custodians.
While the Victorian, Western Australian and Tasmanian cricket associations voiced support and South Australia said it was open to the idea, New South Wales and Queensland rejected the move.
Queensland Cricket, which controls the Brisbane Heat, said it was worried about player payments skyrocketing to unsustainable levels, and that private owners may not be as invested in the grassroots game.
Cricket NSW, which operates the Sydney Sixers and Sydney Thunder, was similarly concerned that it could be detrimental to how the sport is governed and how local players are produced.
‘Sugar hit’
There are also fears about an Indian takeover, with the most likely buyers seen as the rich IPL team owners who have invested in other short-form competitions around the globe.
Former Australian captain Greg Chappell is in the “No” camp, arguing that the BBL belongs to the states and communities that have built it into a successful and well-attended product.
While acknowledging the commercial realities, he said selling it off was not the answer.
“The moment you introduce private ownership at scale, you introduce a set of priorities that may not always align with the long-term health of the game,” he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Private investors, however well-intentioned, answer to shareholders, not to Australian cricket.”
Andrew Jones, a former head of strategy at Cricket Australia who was instrumental in the launch of the BBL, is similarly unconvinced.
“A one-off sale is a sugar hit, not a solution,” he said in The Australian newspaper, arguing that revenues can be better grown through sponsorships, wagering, ticketing, and more focus on commercialising the women’s game.
Despite scepticism, Greenberg remains confident and is now eyeing a hybrid ownership model.
This would allow the BBL franchises keen to sell stakes to do so while allowing those against to maintain complete ownership.
“If we end up not going together at the same time, can we still extract the same level of revenue, and can we extract the same level of value?” he said.
“I think we can, but I’ve got to do the work to satisfy a recommendation that would ultimately go to the members and our board.”
Sports
NASCAR’s Truck Series and O’Reilly Autoparts Series honor Kyle Busch with moments of silence at Charlotte
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The NASCAR world is paying tribute to Kyle Busch this weekend, and that includes some classy ones from two series in which the late driver had a lot of success.
While Busch — who passed away Thursday after “severe pneumonia [that] progressed into sepsis” — had been a full-time driver in NASCAR’s top series, the Cup Series, for more than 20 years, he still competed occasionally in both the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and the Craftsman Truck Series.
He was especially known for his dominance in the Truck Series, winning 69 of his 184 races, and at one point owned a team. In fact, the final win of Busch’s career came just under a week before his death in a Truck Series race at Dover.
ZERO BS. JUST DAKICH. TAKE THE DON’T @ ME PODCAST ON THE ROAD. DOWNLOAD NOW!
Kyle Busch, driver of the No. 7 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet, is introduced before the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series SpeedyCash.com 250 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, Texas, on May 1, 2026. (James Gilbert/Getty Images)
On Friday, the Truck Series was in Charlotte as part of the Coca-Cola 600 weekend for a race that Busch was supposed to take part in.
NASCAR, RACING WORLD REACTS TO KYLE BUSCH’S SHOCKING DEATH AT 41: ‘CANNOT COMPREHEND THIS NEWS’
Corey Day was in the No. 7 Chevrolet for Spire Motorsports, the truck in which Busch took his final win, and it was set to start on pole after Friday’s qualifying was rained out.
Kyle Busch celebrates the final win of his NASCAR career at Dover Motor Speedway. (Photo by David Hahn/Icon Sportswire)
Before the race was set to begin on Friday evening, teams and fans held a moment of silence for Busch.
Unfortunately, the race never got underway and was postponed until Saturday morning and then again to Saturday night.
The O’Reilly Autoparts Series, which Busch raced in many times and won many times during his career, also took a moment to remember him before their race at Charlotte on Saturday.
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That race was also suspended due to rain.
There will be some heavy hearts on Sunday when the Coca-Cola 600, the NASCAR Cup Series’ longest race of the year, gets started at 6 p.m. ET.
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While Kyle Busch was a legend in the NASCAR ranks, he was incredibly well respected throughout the world of motorsports.
That’s why one of Busch’s NASCAR numbers — the one I’d argue is most iconic — will make an appearance in the 110th Running of the Indianapolis 500.
Busch had a bunch of numbers across NASCAR’s three national series, but in the Cup Series, he used No. 5, No. 18 and No. 8.
ZERO BS. JUST DAKICH. TAKE THE DON’T @ ME PODCAST ON THE ROAD. DOWNLOAD NOW!
Kyle Busch used No. 18 during his years with Joe Gibbs Racing. (Isaac Brekken/AP)
For many fans, No. 18 is the number they associate with Busch, as he used it for 15 years, including during both of his championship seasons.
NASCAR, RACING WORLD REACTS TO KYLE BUSCH’S SHOCKING DEATH AT 41: ‘CANNOT COMPREHEND THIS NEWS’
You can close your eyes and picture it on the side of those legendary M&M’s paint schemes.
Well, Sports Business Journal’s Adam Stern shared that Dale Coyne Racing, which runs the No. 18 Honda driven by Romain Grosjean, will display the classic No. 18 used on Busch’s car during his time with Joe Gibbs Racing in the Cup Series.
How about that tribute?
Of course, the numbers are typically trademarked, so as Stern reported, the idea — which came from Fox Sports IndyCar commentator Townsend Bell — required getting in touch with Joe Gibbs Racing.
Busch never raced in the Indy 500 or in the IndyCar Series; however, he did have a lot of success at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in NASCAR.
NASCAR star Kyle Busch died on Thursday at just 41 years old. (James Gilbert/Getty Images)
His brother, retired NASCAR driver and former Cup Series champ, Kurt Busch, attempted double duty by competing in both the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on the same day in 2014.
It’s a heck of a tribute from the folks at Dale Coyne Racing with an assist from JGR.
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And while I don’t want to play favorites, wouldn’t it be something to see that No. 18 in Victory Lane?
Grosjean will start Sunday’s race in 24th, which means he has some ground to make up, but anything can happen in the Indy 500.
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