On Tuesday, the women’s college basketball, WNBA and Olympic legend announced that, after 20 years in the WNBA, she is retiring.
In the hours following her announcement, tributes flooded in, not only from those close to Taurasi, but also from around the sports world. This includes her coach at UConn, Geno Auriemma, who also happens to be college basketball’s all-time winningest coach .
‘It’s hard to put into put into words, it really is, what this means. When someone’s defined the game, when someone’s had such an impact on so many people and so many places. You can’t define it with a quote,’ Auriemma said in a statement on Tuesday.
‘It’s a life that is a novel, it’s a movie, it’s a miniseries, it’s a saga. It’s the life of an extraordinary person who, I think, had as much to do with changing women’s basketball as anyone who’s ever played the game.’
Taurasi and Auriemma built the UConn women’s basketball program into one of the sport’s powerhouses over the guard’s four-year career from 2000 through 2004. In four seasons with the Huskies, Taurasi helped lead UConn to three consecutive national championships from 2002 to 2004. UConn was only the second program to achieve that feat, after Tennessee from 1996-98.
UConn went 139-8 overall and 22-1 in the NCAA Tournament with Taurasi. She further etched her name as one of the great women’s college basketball players with back-to-back Naismith National Player of the Year awards in 2003 and 2004.
She currently ranks 10th on UConn’s all-time scoring list and was the first player to finish with at least 2,000 points, 600 assists and 600 rebounds in a career.
But the player-coach relationship between Taurasi and Auriemma extends further than the four years they shared in Storrs, Connecticut. Of Taurasi’s six Olympic gold medals, the most basketball gold medals won by a single player – male or female – in Olympic history, two of them came with Auriemma as her Team USA coach. The first one came at the 2012 London Olympics, with the second one coming four years later at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
‘In my opinion, what the greats have in common is, they transcend the sport and become synonymous with the sport. For as long as people talk about college basketball, WNBA basketball, Olympic basketball: Diana is the greatest winner in the history of basketball, period,’ Auriemma said in his statement.
Taurasi finishes her 20-year WNBA career – all with the Phoenix Mercury – as a three-time WNBA champion and the league’s all-time leading scorer.
The USA TODAY app gets you to the heart of the news — fast. Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more.
