Kerr, Auriemma join Cal WBB for "Chat with Champions"

With UCONN making its first visit to Haas Pavilion, the Cal women’s basketball program took advantage of the opportunity and invited head coach Geno Auriemma to speak to Cal donors and other Bear supporters. Auriemma was joined by Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors, and the event was appropriatedly name, “Chat with Champions.” The event was a fundraiser for Cal women’s basketball.

Cal head coach Lindsay Gottlieb moderated the hour-long conversation. 

Kerr is of course the eight-time NBA champion--five times as a player, and three times as the Warrriors’ coach. But as Gottlieb reminded the crowd, Kerr is also a Bearent--“Nick and Maddie’s dad”--as his children are recent Cal grads who competed for the Cal men’s basketball and women’s volleyball teams, respectively.

Auriemma is in his 34^th year as UCONN’s head coach, in which time he has built the Huskies into one of the most dominant programs in any sport, amassing 11 national championships and 1037 wins--“I think we’re all fine if he stays on that number,” said Gottlieb--and six undefeated seasons.

Both Auriemma and Kerr displayed their well-known wit in providing direct and insightful answers to Gottlieb’s questions. As a bonus, the two men clearly respected and enjoyed each other, and they played off each other, with Kerr favoring self-deprecation, while Auriemma played off his image of plain-speaking know-it-all. But Gottlieb pierced that gruff exterior right off by sharing a story of meeting Auriemma when she was 16 (though her friend, who was being recruited by Geno): when she tore her ACL in her senior year, Auriemma called her and offered to help her find a program. It was an example, she said, of him showing “that he is more than willing to extend a hand, to grow our game, to help young coaches.”

With both men at the top of their respective games, Gottlieb asked them about how they define success at this point of their careers. 

“That has changed over time,” said Auriemma. “When you first begin as a coach, success is ‘I want to show that I can coach; I want to win games; I want to earn the respect of my peers.’ And after a while, after you win, and win often, that’s not enough anymore. Now, it’s I have to replicate what I’ve done, and that’s when it gets very very difficult. When you have to reinvent every single year, and that’s difficult to maintain over a long period of time. So success has to be redefined as maybe that I want to make sure that I’m doing everything I can to put my team in the best position to win. And whatever happens after that, I gotta live with it. I can’t worry about other people’s expecations of me.”

Then he quickly added, to big laughs,  “And yet, you always have in the back of your mind, ‘What are you going to do, criticize me? I have 11 national championships!’”

Then Kerr contributed his thoughts about how to deal with failure, as rare as it has been “I remember game seven at home against Cleveland [in 2017). The feeling of that loss will stay with me forever. There has be a self-reflection in terms of, ‘You’re not always going to win. Not everything will fall your way.’ With the Warriors, we’ve seen nothing but the highest of the highs, but that moment was an unbelievable reminder to me that things are going to go wrong, and they will go wrong again.” Kerr then relayed how impressed he was by GM Bob Myers, who in the aftermath of that seventh-game loss, had the presence of mind to consider the Cavaliers and what that moment might be for them. Myers directed his staff to cut down the nets in Oracle and deliver them to the Cleveland staff. “How you handle yourself after a loss probably defines you more. It was the classiest thing I’ve ever heard anybody do in the heat of the momet, and it made me really really proud.” 

The wide-ranging conversation covered a variety of topics, including:

• On whether UCONN’s or the Warriors’ success is bad for the game--Auriemma: “only if you don’t intend to get better; we’re actually good for the game. At some point you’re going to get tired of losing to us.”
• On getting/coaching elite talent who already has the desire to win greater than desire for personal accomplishments--Kerr: “You have to do the best job you can evaluating players. Player arrives and he’s either going to have winning on his mind, or something else. I’m not going convince him. We have some unbelievable competitors. Draymond Green, you know, he lets you know. Steph Curry doesn’t let you know. He’s out there joyfully prancing around and doing his shimmy. But that guy, he has fire in his belly. Same with Klay Thompson; same with Kevin Durant.”       Agreed Auriemma: “You’re not going to change somebody that much in college. You may change something in their game, but you’re not going to change fundamentally who they are.” He acknowledged that he has failed to follow his instincts and have thus made some bad selections.
• On what advice he’d give Kerr about coaching the Olympic team (Kerr will assist Gregg Popovich at the 2020 Olympics): “Bring three of your players. That will endear him to Gregg Popovic.”
• Kerr, given the choice of women players, would like to coach Diana Taurasi: “I got to now Diana when I was working with the Phoenix Suns, and she was playing with the Mercury. She was so dynamic. Her talent just jumped off the page. But her enthusiasm--she just has this joy for the game, and it was infectious.”
• On women coaching men, in 10 years’ time--Kerr: “Somebody needs to take a leap of faith and hire a woman, and that person will have to have a lot of success, because the NBA is a copycat league. But somebody has to take that chance, and I don’t know if that’s going to happen, hosnestly.”
• On the role of athletes in the national discourse and political expression--Kerr referred back to the 60’s, when college students took the lead in protests, and a lot of African American athletes were “very vocal and important in the civil rights movement.” So he believes that it’s important that athletes now make their voices heard. Auriemma agreed by also had a different take: “I encourage it. However, they’re not adults--college freshmen or sophomores. I think it was Gregg Popovic who said, ‘Are you really aware of what’s going on in the work for you to make a statement, or are you doing it because you feel like this puts me to get into the conversation?’ I think there has to be some perspective. If you’re 27, and you’ve been through a lot, and someone asks your opinion, I think you have more credibility than when you’re 17 oe 18 years old. And you say, well those 18 year olds can go to war. I get that. I understand all that. The fundamental question--when you’re a pro, do you represent the organization, or are you representing just yourself? A college athlete--do you represent yourself, or do you represent your school? I’m a little bit older than Steve, and I remember--I had a draft card and all that other stuff--and if it wasn’t for college kids, a lot more kids would have died, the racial situation would be worse. So, it took college to put their lives on the line. Today, people just want to make statements, but they don’t want to put their lives on the line. To me those are two different things.”
• On another sport they’d coach--Geno: “Track. Run as fast as you can, stay left, and get back to me.”
• On player that would make the best coach--Kerr: “Andre Iguodala.”
• And this from Geno: “I would take a European kid over an American kid anyday,” explaining that Americans are not as fundamentally sound, because the regimen here is full of games instead of practices. “What we’re getting is kids who theoretically can do a lot, but can’t play basketball. So we have to teach more, and we can’t do as much with them. Yet, I’m still pushing the envelope with these kids, saying, ‘If you can’t do this, you can’t play here.’ I watch a lot of what [the Warriors] do, a lot of what the Celtics do, and we... well, you’ll see...”