Geno Auriemma has never been shy about saying exactly what he thinks, camera or no camera. So when Apple TV‘s three-part documentary event The Dynasty: UConn Huskies asked to follow him through a season, mic him up during the NCAA tournament, and sit him down for 15 hours of interviews, the reasonable assumption was that nothing would change. Auriemma says otherwise.
“We had been through this before on a smaller scale, so it didn’t seem like it would be that intrusive,” Auriemma told Gold Derby. “And you know what? It was the filter that I needed that I can’t put on myself. So maybe I was trying to save me from myself.”
Check out an exclusive clip from the series below, then keep reading for the rest of our conversations with Auriemma and the directors.
‘Geno being Geno’
The series wastes no time establishing who it’s dealing with. Early in the first episode, during Auriemma’s sit-down interview with director Matt Hamachek, the mics pick up a squeak, and the crew tells him it’s coming from his shoe. He denies it and refuses to take his shoes off to settle the matter. So they move the box he’s sitting on instead, and the squeak disappears. It was the box all along, not him. “Why the hell would I say it if it wasn’t true?” he says, still needling them for doubting him in the first place.
“That was Matt sitting across from him,” said Erica Sashin, who co-directed the series with Hamachek. “I loved it the moment I saw it in the footage. It says so much about who Geno is in such a short amount of time. It’s Geno being Geno, and you always want to capture those moments.”
Hamachek called it “a great line for a documentary subject to say at the beginning of the series.”
15 hours, one microphone, zero filter
Getting there took some negotiating. Hamachek said he and Sashin were upfront from the start about what they wanted.
“We told him this wasn’t going to be a basketball movie — not about how many games you won or lost,” Hamachek said. “And then we said, ‘By the way, we want to do 15 hours of interviews with you, we want a microphone on you during the tournament, and we’re going to film you in the locker room when you’re showing emotions that haven’t been captured before.'”
Asked what it’s like hearing players, coaches, and rivals talk about him throughout the series, Auriemma didn’t flinch. “They say it to my face, so I’m okay with it,” he said. “I think they’re exaggerating a little. [Some former players are] resentful that we made them do things, and now they look back and go, ‘If I did it again, I wouldn’t.’ Yeah — we tortured you for four years. It was the greatest four years of your life.”
He offered one example: speaking with Sue Bird at the Olympics and asking if her four years at UConn were as miserable as she made them sound. “She said, ‘I have [one] word to describe why I hated my four years at Connecticut: pantyhose,'” Auriemma said. Chris Dailey, his longtime associate head coach, made the team dress up for dinners on the road. “Sue was national player of the year. You know what she remembers? Pantyhose.”
‘Us against him’
Bird’s harsher assessment also makes the series: that surviving UConn meant thinking of it as “us against him” — the team against Auriemma. He doesn’t dispute it.
“When you were in school, didn’t it feel like it was you against your teacher?” he said. “That teacher was trying to make it hard on you to get an A. And when you got the grade, you thought, yeah, I got you. Same thing. I played the part of the other team. I played the part of a bad ref. I played the part of the ball not going in. If you win that fight against me most days, nobody’s going to beat us.”
The sausage and peppers
The series also traces Auriemma’s own insecurities. He moved from Italy to America at age 7 and showed up to school with sausage and peppers in his lunchbox, desperate to feel American. Auriemma said it shaped him more than people might expect.
“A lot of it,” he said. “The classes I liked, I got As. The classes I didn’t, I didn’t care what grade I got. Now I’m the worst when it comes to harping on my players about their grades — because I know what can happen if you just let it go. I know all the pitfalls that are out there. I’ve seen it, and I do my best to try to impart that onto the players.”
The Paige Bueckers problem
The series also captures how differently the next generation arrives at UConn. Paige Bueckers showed up with a massive social media following before she’d played a single college minute.
“Social media has changed the game and the recruiting process because it’s changed [the players],” Auriemma said. “I asked Paige, ‘What are you famous for? You haven’t scored a point in college.’ She grew up in a world where you’re hit with something new every minute of the day. How do you deal with that as a kid? How much are you thinking about what I just said as opposed to what you just read earlier in the day? You wonder if there’s even space left for what we’re trying to teach.”
Pat Summitt, the fastest gun in town
No UConn story is complete without Tennessee, and Auriemma credited the rivalry with Coach Pat Summitt for pushing the program to where it is.
“Everybody needs somebody to shoot at,” he said. “It’s like the old West. Who’s the fastest gun in town? I’m going after him. Pat was that woman, that coach who stood above the game. If we beat them, I knew we had a national championship team. If we lost, we had work to do.” He recalled a book on the greatest rivalries in sports that someone once gave him, listing Yankees-Red Sox and Ohio State-Michigan right alongside UConn-Tennessee women’s basketball. “That’s how big it became. It elevated the whole sport.”
Summitt, who coached the Lady Vols to eight national titles over 38 seasons, died in 2016 at age 64 from complications of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
An ending nobody could plan
The series’ final chapter lands on UConn breaking an eight-season championship drought with the 2024-25 team, a moment Sashin said the filmmakers never counted on.
“The season wasn’t going well,” she said. “It felt almost cursed — they had incredible players, but the injuries kept piling up. It wasn’t looking great heading into the tournament. We weren’t planning on it happening this way. It was just incredible for the film.”
The Dynasty: UConn Huskies premieres globally on Apple TV on Friday, Aug. 21.
