UConn women: Too good for their own good?
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UConn’s women’s basketball team celebrating the second of four straight NCAA titles in 2014.
There is no doubting the talent of the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball program. The Huskies won their fourth straight NCAA championship three weeks ago, crushing Syracuse by 31 points in the title game. Surprising? Hardly.
UConn has won 75 consecutive games and no opponent through a 38-0 season got any closer than Maryland’s 83-73 loss on Dec. 28. The Huskies’ average margin of victory for the season was an astounding 39.7 points.
It has people talking, and the overriding question is a simple one: Is this kind of dominance good or bad for the sport?
Dan Shaughnessy, a columnist for The Boston Globe, created a stir on March 28 when he argued that UConn’s unchallenged control is “not good for the promotion of women’s basketball as part of our national sports landscape.” The headline to Mr. Shaughnessy’s piece left no doubt as to his view, asserting that “UConn women are too dominant for their own good.”
Coach Geno Auriemma has led the Huskies to 75 straight victories.
Mr. Shaughnessy’s take is that the essence of sport is the drama of competition. If the result is a foregone conclusion, then the Huskies have essentially “stripped their sport of all drama and competition and made it similar to performance art.”
What’s the point of watching a 40-point blowout every week?
“Hate to punish them for being great, but they are killing women’s game. Watch? No thanks,” Mr. Shaughnessy posted in a recent tweet.
Mr. Shaughnessy has received his fair share of criticism in response, including from UConn coach Geno Auriemma.
“There are a lot better writers than Dan Shaughnessy, but that doesn’t mean he’s bad for the game,” Mr. Auriemma said at a press conference after his team’s 98-38 win over Mississippi State.
So what do AMSA athletes and coaches think?
“I think it makes every other team strive to be better,” junior Raeann Bowen said. “It makes all of the other teams work even harder to get up to [the Huskies’] level.”
Many AMSA students and athletes believe that the competition is fair, it’s just that other programs need to work harder to challenge UConn.
Physical education teacher Matthew Schiller, on the other hand, weighed in on Mr. Shaughnessy’s side.
“I would have to agree with him on this,” Mr. Schiller said. “They haven’t really had a close game in over three years. I do believe it’s bad for the sport, but I also believe it’s up to the other colleges to come up with a better recruiting plan.”
The catch here is that all the best high school players want to go to UConn. It’s difficult if not impossible to catch the Huskies if the competition has no chance of landing the country’s top recruits.
“[Mr. Auriemma] gets to pick the cream of the crop every year, and the best players go to UConn,” Mr. Schiller said.
As far as the members of UConn’s program and its legion of fans are concerned, that line of reasoning just sounds like sour grapes. They’ll keep on celebrating victories, without a care.
Nick Sousa is a member of the class of 2017. In school, he excels in computer science. Looking forward, he sees himself studying in the field of computer...
