Geno Auriemma has been coaching women's basketball at UConn for over 40 years. If there's a list of people who are fully qualified to say whatever they want about the sport, it's a) probably a pretty short list, and b) he's definitely in the top five.
So it's really not too surprising that Auriemma was asked about Caitlin Clark's 2026 season, including assertions that she's being unfairly targeted or that other players in the league aren't exactly her biggest fans. Auriemma admitted he has no doubt that there are players who have "personal animosities" against Clark, though she stopped short of laying out exactly why that might be.
Auriemma also offered a bit of a challenge: "Anybody can deny it all they want. Because if I’m wrong, then there will be a lot more people coming to her defense and they’re not. And neither am I, because I don’t coach in the league and I don’t play in the league," he added.
But he made it clear that despite those feelings, the attention paid to the idea that some people might not like Clark is unusual and outsized. After all, so-called personal animosities are kind of just part of being human. No matter what you do or don't do, not everyone will like you — and there's no real reason to believe that they should.
Auriemma perhaps anticipated that some might take his comments as proof that he supports arguments that Clark has become the epicenter for conversations about race in the WNBA, because he doesn't. For him, if there's any negativity toward Clark from other players, it's for two big reasons: she was a number one draft pick in the league, and she also gets a ton of attention.
Clark is one of the most famous athletes of any gender in the world. That's not something that can be denied, no matter what you think about her. It also doesn't seem like something she's especially thrilled by, and more like something she tries to manage as well as she can, because she doesn't really have any other option but to just get through it. One day, there might be a new top draft pick that dethrones Clark as the WNBA player most people know of, but until then, this is her reality.
Diffrent people have different responses to being around that kind of fame, and that's true of her colleagues in the league. Auriemma didn't name names and doesn't have to even begin to speculate, but he's not wrong — and he's saying something that a lot of people know is true.
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