HELLO, AND thank you for your interest in Connecticut basketball! We hope you enjoy your trip to Storrs, a town that proves that even in a tiny, densely populated state, you can be in the middle of nowhere. Before your official visit, please note:
On your way into the town of Storrs, you will pass through an intersection known as the Four Corners, which was named because—here is a bit of campus lore—it has four corners. Yes, so do most intersections. But ours also has a combination Dunkin’/pizza joint/gas station. Yes, so do most intersections in New England. But ours also has a Dick’s (Auto Care, not Sporting Goods) as well as … um …
Anyway: All the greenery serves as camouflage, but we trust you’ll find our campus eventually. It is truly quite lovely. Please allow yourself a moment to picture a young Geno Auriemma arriving here 40 years ago for his first head coaching job, ready to build one of the great dynasties in sports history. You can almost hear his pitch to prospects …
“We’re not in a recruiting area where a lot of players are growing up,” Auriemma said recently. “We are not in a major city or major community, so to speak. We didn’t have a great arena on campus. The university itself was a commuter school, pretty much. I can’t think of any positives that there would have been, 40 years ago, to come to school here.”
Ah, well, that was then. This is now, according to our men’s coach, Dan Hurley:
“You’re not going to get seduced by the weather or major city or the geography.”
Moving right along: While you are here, you might want to attend a tailgate at our beautiful on-campus football stadium. Great idea! But we don’t have an on-campus football stadium.
To understand how unusual that is: In the last 34 years, 23 schools have won at least one men’s or women’s basketball championship. Twentyone of them have on-campus football stadiums. The exceptions are UCLA, which plays in the Rose Bowl, and UConn, which does not play in the Rose Bowl. Even Villanova’s football team, which competes in the FCS, has a campus stadium. Ours plays in East Hartford, 25 miles west of campus, which saves us the trouble of asking 25,000 people to turn right at the Four Corners stoplight to get to a game.
What we have in abundance here at UConn is banners. Since 1995, our women have won 11 national championships, while our men have won six—as many as Duke and North Carolina combined.
You might wonder: How did this tiny, unglamorous outpost become the self-proclaimed Basketball Capital of the World?
It seems like a mystery, but it’s more of a riddle: The answer lies in the question.
“No one,” Hurley says, “picks UConn for the wrong reasons.”
