The University of Connecticut Huskies women’s basketball team winning is often expected, but their 100th win in a row is remarkable—especially considering the team that achieved it. No.1 UConn beat No. 6 South Carolina 66-55 Monday night at home to pick up that milestone win, but as Sports Illustrated‘s Richard Deitsch writes, even head coach Geno Auriemma didn’t expect that to happen in comments before this season considering the challenges his team was facing this year:
“To think we will go undefeated this year, we would be setting ourselves up for failure,” Auriemma said. “Stewie [Breanna Stewart], Moriah Jefferson and [Morgan] Tuck were 151-5 in their career. That’s not the real world. How long do you think you can live that world? I don’t know when it is going to happen. It might happen early, it might happen late, but it’s going to happen. And I’m okay with it because we will coach them through it and they will see that’s the real world, and the world everyone lives in.”
…“We haven’t been in a situation where there are so many question marks about new roles people have to step into,” Auriemma said in October. “The conversation here among our team and coaches hasn’t touched at all about who No. 1 is but more that this is the first time we have had so many undefined roles.”
Those roles have been filled, though. As Auriemma told Harvey Araton of The New York Times, four players in particular have stepped up:
“We have no preseason all-Americans, but we have four really good players, and every time we need something, one of them comes up with something,” Auriemma said, referring to the juniors [Gabby] Williams and Kia Nurse, and the sophomores Katie Lou Samuelson and [Napheesa] Collier.
Two of those four were critical Monday night. Williams led the way with 26 points and 14 rebounds, while Collier chipped in 18 and nine. Samuelson and Nurse didn’t make as much of a mark on the scoresheet, only recording six and three points respectively, but they still made important contributions too. 21-2 South Carolina posed a stiff challenge, especially with 6’5” star A’ja Wilson (17 points and five rebounds) and 6’4” Alaina Coates (10 points and 15 rebounds), and the Gamecocks led 27-24 in the second quarter. A seven-point Huskies’ run helped make it 35-29 for UConn at halftime, though, and they didn’t look back from there.
This level of dominance is remarkable. UConn now hasn’t lost in 821 days (a 88-86 overtime road loss to Stanford on Nov. 17, 2014), and they’re the only NCAA program at any level to win 100 straight games. They also came close before, in 2012, losing what would have been their 100th to St. John’s. But it’s perhaps particularly interesting that the Huskies are still unbeatable this year despite the departures of key players like Stewart, Jefferson and Tuck, and despite the lack of preseason All-Americans. Even their coach didn’t think they’d get this far, but with a group effort, they have, accomplishing something remarkable in the process.
