The Athletic has live coverage of Texas vs. South Carolina and UCLA vs. UConn in the 2025 Women’s Final Four.
TAMPA, Fla. — If Geno Auriemma and Dawn Staley do a double-take when they walk into Amalie Arena on Friday for the Final Four, it’d be hard to blame them. Certainly, the interest that has followed the women’s NCAA Tournament the past few seasons — as the games have set record numbers in viewership and attendance — has had a longer runway at their programs at UConn and South Carolina, but the growth of the overall game is impossible to deny. That evidence is everywhere Auriemma and Staley look.
On campuses, they’re flocked by fans. In women’s basketball circles, they’re lionized. Their fingerprints are all over the sport at every level. This growth is impossible to imagine without them. Because of their successful careers, they get to be the rare champions within a sport who can enjoy the fruits of their labor … while still laboring.
They’ll play in the Final Four against other teams (UConn against UCLA, South Carolina against Texas), but a collision course toward their meeting for the national championship has been evident since the bracket was released.
It’s not just that they coach two of the best teams in the country this season. Staley and Auriemma’s basketball lives have been interlaced for more than 30 years. UConn is competing in its 24th Final Four, but during its first trip in the final round in 1991, Auriemma’s squad ran into No. 2 seed Virginia, which was led by a tough point guard named Dawn Staley. Virginia won, and you better believe Auriemma and Staley can still break down that game.
A rivalry between them has blossomed through the years into one of the best in women’s college hoops. In this story of building women’s basketball, the threads and throughlines of growth don’t need to be manufactured. Of course, there is a large group of players and coaches who blazed the trail before Auriemma or Staley. But who has done more to continue advancing the modern game forward than Auriemma and Staley?
At UConn, Auriemma built a powerhouse out of a school in the middle of cow fields. The program had never experienced success until he got there in 1985. On his campus tour during his interview, he wasn’t shown the gym because administrators worried he might turn down the position if he saw it. In early seasons, he needed to convince students to attend the women’s basketball games. But in his fourth year, the Huskies made the NCAA Tournament. In year 10, they won their first (of 11) national titles.
The 24th Final Four for Geno Auriemma and the Huskies pic.twitter.com/RIeI1I74dX
— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) April 1, 2025
Staley took the hard path, too. She didn’t inherit a program or take over a team that had already been cultivated and made into a national power. She began coaching at Temple while still playing in the WNBA. The program had just one NCAA Tournament appearance in history. She led them there five times in eight seasons before South Carolina hired her. With the Gamecocks, similarly, there was no prestige or aura around the program before she arrived. But in her fourth year, she led the team to the NCAA Tournament. And in Year 9, she brought home the program’s first NCAA title.
See you in Tampa FAMS ❤️ pic.twitter.com/Riz5HTSQ3U
— South Carolina Women’s Basketball (@GamecockWBB) March 31, 2025
Staley and Auriemma are not coaches who shy away from a challenge, but rather, run straight toward them.
Those chips that sit on their shoulders were born of childhoods in the Philadelphia area (for Staley, in North Philly; for Auriemma, in a large Italian immigrant community just northwest of the city). As hefty as they might be, they never caused either to slow or avoid the platforms rightfully bestowed upon them.
They are perhaps the two most vocal coaches in the sport. When there is a change or a question about the game’s future, everyone wants to hear what Auriemma and Staley have to say. They’re asked for their suggestions and solutions, and they willingly — often, adamantly — share.
Staley has publicly advocated for equal pay and opportunities for Black coaches across the country, notably, sending pieces of her 2022 championship net to Black female Division I coaches. (Staley continued a tradition that began when Carolyn Peck, who was the first Black female coach to win a national title at Purdue in 1999, did the same for Staley.)
Auriemma has opened his program to coaches from across the country to observe and learn from the Huskies. Even UCLA coach Cori Close, whom he will face Friday night, has visited Storrs on more than one occasion. Tennessee coaches came to UConn for a few days at the height of the programs’ rivalry.
“Basketball is basketball,” Auriemma said. “And it’s our job to share it if we have anything that’s worth it, and if they think that we have something that’s worth it.”
The two have been consistent voices when it comes to women’s basketball media rights deals, equity in the NCAA Tournaments, increasing parity and a host of other topics. Anything that seems important to their cause of elevating women’s basketball.
You don’t receive (and get to keep) that mantle unless you know what to do with it. On and off the court, they’ve proven their leadership as they’ve shepherded the sport into this current era of explosive growth.
“You have to respect the level of consistency and excellence that they’ve done it at,” said Texas coach Vic Schaefer, whose Longhorns will face Staley’s Gamecocks on Friday. “You look at both those programs and see where they are. For me, I have been doing this for a while, I have a great deal of admiration for both of them because they have done it at an incredible level and they’re very consistent year in, year out. In any profession, y’all, no matter what you’re doing, that’s what you strive for.”
For as much as their attention has been meticulously focused on their individual programs and players, with national titles as the end goal, this too — the excitement, the attention, the ticket sales, the legitimacy that has been finally placed on the women’s game — has been a part of their aspirations. The women’s basketball world that Auriemma, 71, and Staley, 54, walked into decades ago and the one they see today are not even close to the same. But that’s because of them.
The architect doesn’t always get to see the building constructed, yet in their cases, they get to live in it, too.
Staley and Auriemma are now Final Four mainstays, their programs setting the bar for what women’s college basketball success looks like. But their impact is felt far beyond Tampa, too. Five of the last seven WNBA MVPs and six of the nine WNBA Rookies of the Year graduated from either UConn or South Carolina. Auriemma and Staley coached Team USA to golds in three of the last four Olympics. (Staley won gold medals as a player in three previous Olympics, too.)
“You look at all the players that have come out of those programs, past, present and future, that standard is high, and that standard for greatness is only continuing to grow,” said former UConn star Breanna Stewart, who is three-time WNBA champion and three-time Olympic gold medalist. “And they’re making sure that players that come through their programs are gonna leave better than when they came and make sure they’re going to continue to make a mark and an impact in the next level.”
On the Mount Rushmore of those who’ve built the game into what it is today, there are many. But among those still pacing sidelines and winning championships, it’s Auriemma and Staley who are most prominent.
This weekend in Tampa, there’s yet another opportunity for the two to add to their legacies, going after their 12th and fourth national titles, respectively. Potentially, they’ll face each other. That meeting would be a blockbuster that would extend their own storylines in the sport and also continue building the game to which they’ve both dedicated their lives.
“Without Coach Auriemma and Coach Staley continuing to uplift and elevate women’s basketball,” Stewart said, “I don’t think we would be in the position that we are today.”
— The Athletic’s Ben Pickman contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen/ The Athletic; photos of Geno Auriemma and Dawn Staley: Eakin Howard/ Getty Images, Lance King/ Getty Images
