Sports
‘Be a coach’: Dan Hurley on ego, Maui losses, Lakers — and Geno Auriemma’s wake-up call
UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley admits that his “ego had gotten — was getting — the better” of him following a conversation with legendary women’s basketball head coach Geno Auriemma last season, he writes in a forthcoming book.
In Hurley’s “Never Stop: Life, Leadership, and What It Takes To Be Great,” he writes that after UConn’s 0-3 trip to the Maui Invitational last November in which Hurley was assessed an ill-timed technical foul in overtime against Memphis and railed against the officiating all week, he needed to take stock of his attitude and behavior — especially after his wife, Andrea, told him he crossed a line.
Hurley reached out to Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan, ESPN’s Seth Greenberg and lastly, Auriemma.
“He didn’t say anything the others hadn’t. But he delivered the message in a certain way. With force. With gravitas.
He made me really see. My ego had gotten-was getting-the better of me.
I admitted he was right. I told him that I was spiraling. I told him that I was convinced we were going to finish below .500.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if the only gratification and the only part of coaching that excites you is winning the national championship, then you’ve lost your way, buddy! Where’s the joy in the things that you’ve always been about as a coach before you went on the championship run, like relationships with your players, like helping people get better. Like making your team the best it can be.
‘Be a coach, man. This is when you really need to be a leader. This team isn’t as good as last year’s, so what the hell are you going to do about it? Are you going home? Are you going to let this thing unravel?'”
Hurley writes in “Never Stop: Life, Leadership, and What It Takes To Be Great”
In a recent interview with ESPN, Hurley said his conversations with Auriemma helped him correct the ship on a personal level.
“The book lays out both aspects of things. I’ve handled failure in my life pretty well, I’ve battled, I’ve kept going, I’ve kept trying to work on myself, kept trying to improve, my career, my personal life. But then there’s also times where you don’t handle success as well as you’d like,” Hurley told ESPN.
In the book, he describes the jolt of that stretch: After winning back-to-back titles and even fielding an offer from the Los Angeles Lakers, it felt like an 18-20 month run where everything broke his way. Then came Maui — three straight losses — and the glow vanished.
“I unraveled some out there, emotionally and with leading the team. But that moment with Geno, that was a good moment for me, it was like a three-week Band-Aid. It cured where my mind was at. Once you realize you don’t have a national championship team, that hits you, that Band-Aid of conversations that I had with him, it stabilized me,” Hurley said in the interview.
Hurley also writes in the book that he considered resigning as UConn’s head coach and taking a year off, a development first reported earlier this month by The Athletic.
Days after the Huskies’ season-ending NCAA tournament loss to Florida — after which there was another viral moment of Hurley complaining about the officiating — Hurley says he was worn down by the last few years and the general state of college basketball.
He expanded on those thoughts to ESPN — and also explained why he ultimately decided to stay.
“I think some of it was being a bad loser. I was clearly a bad loser at the end of that game,” Hurley said. “We were playing the longest possible seasons, having extremely busy offseasons. There are different responsibilities you have as the top program in the sport, responsibility to do everything, promote college basketball, add that up with all the changes with NIL and the portal and what your team looks like the day after your season’s over. You don’t feel like pretty much anybody is on your team. Even if they’re not in the portal, every kid has an agent, and that agent is shopping you around. All those things, the offseasons that were short and packed and the long seasons and incredible dominant success in that tournament, being fatigued, being a sore loser, those things for a couple days put me in that spot.
“But in the end, Jaylin Stewart and Solo Ball were like — within a day or two, those guys coming in and saying, ‘We’re staying, we’re not even trying to negotiate, whatever you want to give me, I’m here.’ That’s what kind of snapped me out of it. Along with thinking, I’m never going to be the coach at UConn again and being the coach at UConn changed my life.”
“Never Stop: Life, Leadership, and What It Takes To Be Great,” which Hurley wrote with Ian O’Connor, comes out on Sept. 30. (The Auriemma excerpt was reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Morez Johnson Jr. had 19 points and 11 rebounds against his former team as No. 3 Michigan defeated No. 10 Illinois 84-70 on Friday night and clinched the Big Ten regular-season title.
Johnson, who played for the Illini last season after verbally committing three years earlier, was booed throughout the game by Illinois fans.
Aday Mara had 19 points on 8-for-9 shooting, and Yaxel Lendeborg finished with 16 points and seven rebounds for the Wolverines (27-2, 17-1), who are 10-0 on the road and have won 23 games by 10 or more points.
The Wolverines won their first outright conference regular-season title since 2014, when they also clinched with a win at Illinois.
Michigan’s 17 conference victories are the most in school history.
Keaton Wagler scored 23 points for the Fighting Illini (22-7, 13-5), who have lost four of six, including three in overtime. Wagler scored in double figures for the 21st straight game.
Kylan Boswell scored 15 points, and David Mirkovic had 12 points and 10 rebounds for the Illini, who entered the game as the Big Ten’s top 3-point shooting team. Illinois was just 9-of-29 from distance against Michigan.
Michigan led 38-31 at halftime behind Johnson’s 13 points.
Down 16-11 after a four-point play by Wagler, the Wolverines responded with an 11-point run capped by a 3 by Johnson and never trailed again. They led by as many as 21 points in the second half.
Michigan’s win snapped a nine-game losing streak against Illinois that began in 2019. The Wolverines had dropped four in a row to the Illini at the State Farm Center.
The Power 4 conference commissioners are expected to join dozens of sports celebrities and dignitaries on March 6 at the White House in a roundtable discussion with President Donald Trump about the future of college athletics, multiple sources confirmed to ESPN on Thursday.
President Trump will chair the group, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and New York Yankees president Randy Levine are listed as vice chairs, according to a source who provided a list of 35 people who received invitations. The list also includes:
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Golfer Tiger Woods
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Former college football coaches Nick Saban, Mack Brown and Urban Meyer
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Former secretary of state and College Football Playoff selection committee member Condoleezza Rice
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New England Patriots president Jonathan Kraft
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NBA commissioner Adam Silver
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Fox Sports president Eric Shanks
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ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro
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Several athletic directors, including Notre Dame’s Pete Bevacqua
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Former college athletes, including Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and Florida State basketball and football player Charlie Ward
The list also includes current university presidents and chancellors.
It’s unknown whether everyone invited will attend the event, which is called the “College Sports Roundtable.” Multiple sources planning to attend expressed skepticism about how much could be done on a Friday afternoon with so many people from different backgrounds involved.
“It’s people who could be involved in helping shape the future of college athletics and some of the solutions and strategies to structuring the athletic world going forward,” said one source who plans to attend. “It’s so preliminary, it’s hard to say anything with any sort of specificity because there hasn’t been anything provided to us in writing of that sort yet.”
Also expected to attend is billionaire businessman Cody Campbell, chairman of Texas Tech’s board of regents and a former college football player, who has been working on a “Saving College Sports” campaign and involved in discussions about a possible roundtable for more than a year.
Leaders throughout college athletics have also been meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill for years to rally support for legislation to help regulate NIL. Despite Trump’s outspoken support and multiple politicians taking stances on issues such as athlete employment, the NCAA has been unable to get a bill to the floor for a vote.
Yahoo Sports was first to report the meeting.
Kelly Inouye-Perez became the winningest coach in UCLA softball history when the No. 9 Bruins beat No. 4 Florida 15-12 on Friday night in the Judi Garman Classic in Fullerton, Calif., pushing her past mentor and Hall of Famer Sue Enquist for career victory No. 888.
It was Enquist, in fact, who crowned her.
Literally.
Enquist was part of the postgame celebration, stepping forward to present Inouye-Perez with a crown that had blue gemstones to match the UCLA uniforms players wore in the victory. Inouye-Perez grew emotional as she explained how much it meant to carry on a proud UCLA legacy.
Only three women have coached the winningest softball program in Division I history: Inouye-Perez played for the other two, Sharron Backus and Enquist, during her UCLA playing career. They each have 800-plus victories, and are responsible for all of UCLA’s 2,226 wins and 13 national championships.
In a phone call with ESPN after the victory, Inouye-Perez deflected praise and made sure to credit longtime assistant and best friend Lisa Fernandez as well. The two played at UCLA together and have been side by side since Inouye-Perez became head coach in 2007.
“When we talk about the Bruin family, it’s real, and that’s all I’m trying to do is sustain this tradition of excellence for all those that built this historic program,” Inouye-Perez said. “There is no other program that has sustained over six decades like UCLA softball and Lisa and I are doing our best to be able to do that.”
Inouye-Perez, in her 20th season as UCLA head coach, arrived in Westwood in 1989 as a catcher. She would ultimately win three national championships as a player. Her coaching career began as a UCLA assistant under Enquist immediately after her playing career ended.
This season marks her 38th straight year with UCLA softball. She remains the only person in Division I history to win a national championship as a player and coach.
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