Late Tennessee Volunteers coach Pat Summitt once revealed why she had complaints against coach Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies. In her book “Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective,” Summitt shared how annoyed she was with the Huskies.
As per Summitt, Auriemma’s team resorted to shady recruitment tactics off the court, especially during the prime of the annual Volunteers-Huskies series in the 2000s. Summitt couldn’t take it anymore to the point that she had the series cancelled in 2007, which started over a decade of no Tennessee vs. UConn games.
“I was finished. I didn’t see any other choice. ‘I’m not putting up with this anymore,’ I told my staff. I met with Joan and our university president, Dr. John Petersen, and outlined my reasons for wanting to discontinue the series: The lack of response from UConn and the personal negativity convinced me it was no longer in our best interest,” Summitt wrote.
“I thought we needed to send a message that we didn’t want a game that wasn’t played in the right spirit. The administration agreed, and we declined to renew the series,” she added.
In the 2010s, Auriemma overtook Summitt for the most national titles by a women’s basketball team coach with 12 currently. The late coach had eight.
Auriemma’s most recent one came earlier this year when he and the Huskies defeated Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks by 23 points, 82-59, in the 2025 NCAA title game.
According to Pat Summitt, UConn Huskies denied any wrongdoing in their recruiting schemes
In the same book, Pat Summitt detailed that she kept bringing up her concerns of how the UConn Huskies were recruiting to the higher-ups of both programs and even the officials of the SEC. However, according to her, the Huskies always denied any wrongdoing.
“Over the course of about a year, I became increasingly upset with a couple of UConn’s tactics in recruiting. I didn’t itemize my complaints publicly then, and I’m not going to now. I went through the appropriate channels and that’s how it will stay. I made my concerns known to UConn through our athletic director, Joan Cronan, and the Southeastern Conference. UConn responded that they saw nothing wrong with what they were doing.” Summitt explained.
Before she died in June of 2016, Summitt amassed a staggering eight national championships, 18 NCAA Final Four appearances, and 16 each of the SEC regular season championships and the conference tournament titles in her Tennessee Volunteers career from 1974 to 2012.
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