Ten years after the UConn women’s basketball team won its fourth straight NCAA Championship, Morgan Tuck’s favorite moment from the 2016 title game features Geno Auriemma screaming during a third-quarter timeout.
Syracuse was in the midst of a 16-0 run, and Auriemma laid into his team in the huddle for allowing complacency to creep in. But with the Huskies still leading by 17 points, for the first time in her career, Tuck tuned him out. The Huskies were 12 minutes from history, and everyone else in the building knew it.
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“I did not care that he was yelling at us,” Tuck said with a laugh. “I didn’t care that he was mad. I was like look, we’re about to win our fourth championship. I know they’re making the run but like, we’re fine. It was the first time in college where I really felt like we got there. We did it.”
UConn won every game it played in 2015-16 by double digits, and its 31-point margin of victory in the championship was the second largest in women’s basketball history behind only its 33-point win in the 2013 final.
But Auriemma, now in his 41st season, says the 2016 tournament was the most difficult of his career, so much so that the stress manifested itself physically after the team returned home with its fourth straight trophy.
“The pressure and the expectation … of, this is something that’s really, really meaningful and significant and huge for this group of players, I felt that,” Auriemma said. “I carried that with me everywhere I went, and after it was over, I was completely wiped. I had nothing left. I missed the parade that year. I missed the championship dinner. I missed like a week of life. I was home and I couldn’t move.”
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Almost everyone who has ever won consecutive titles agrees on a simple truth: Repeating is really hard. There’s a reason no women’s basketball team has gone back-to-back since the Huskies did it with one of the most stacked rosters ever assembled. But a decade later, UConn is chasing that mountaintop once again. The program ended a nine-year championship drought in 2025 and is now the overwhelming favorite to run it back in 2026 as the undefeated unanimous No. 1 team in the country.
“There’s standards here that are kind of ridiculous,” Auriemma said. “Like it’s kind of stupid the things that have happened here … But it’s a good problem to have.”
The history of repeats in women’s college basketball
Almost every repeat in the history of women’s basketball belongs to one of two programs: UConn and Tennessee.
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At the height of the rivalry in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Auriemma and legendary Lady Vols coach Pat Summitt were trading title runs every few years. Tennessee won three straight from 1996-98, then UConn had its own three-peat from 2002-04. The Lady Vols earned their second set of consecutive titles in 2007 and ‘08, and the Huskies immediately followed it with back-to-back wins in 2009 and ‘10.
And then there was the iconic four-peat, an accomplishment Auriemma “can’t imagine being done ever again.” UConn’s four championships in a row began in 2012-13, the year after Summitt’s retirement, and the program lost a total of just six games during those four seasons.
The Huskies went undefeated twice en route to those four titles, and it’s fairly common for a perfect record to go hand-in-hand with a repeat. Six of the 10 unbeaten seasons in women’s basketball came as part of consecutive championships, and each of UConn’s and Tennessee’s runs included at least one undefeated record.
The only outlier is the first repeat in the history of the sport, accomplished by USC in 1983 and ‘84. The Trojans won the second and third NCAA Tournaments ever held for women, led by a pair of all-time greats in Cheryl Miller and Cynthia Cooper.
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What makes a back-to-back champion
It’s obvious to state, but the baseline requirement for a repeat championship is an excess of talent. Every back-to-back champion in the 21st century has carried at least five players that went on to the WNBA, and the Huskies never had fewer than eight future pros on the roster at any point during their four-peat.
Atop the foundation of depth, it takes a unique kind of superstar to lead consecutive title runs, and Auriemma has developed a skill for finding players capable of flourishing under the brightest lights. First it was Diana Taurasi on the 2002-04 teams, who set the blueprint for future UConn champions as a two-time Final Four MVP. The Huskies had two first-team All-Americans on the roster in 2009-10 in Tina Charles and Maya Moore, but Charles says Moore was the heartbeat the team rallied around when it mattered most.
“Back in the day Coach Auriemma would say, ‘We had Diana and they didn’t. We had Maya, and no other team did,’” Charles said. “Especially my senior year (2010), the last game vs. Stanford in the San Antonio Final Four we were down at the half, and we just weren’t shooting well. But then Maya was just able to turn it on in the second half, and it’s the reason why we won.”
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The face of the four-peat was Breanna Stewart, who Auriemma affectionately calls a con artist for her ability to ascend to a new level in championship scenarios. Stewart was the Final Four MVP of all four titles, most notably as a freshman in 2013 after she struggled for much of the regular season.
“She just had a knack, even then, that the bigger the games, the bigger the moments, the more confident she was, the more self assured,” Auriemma said. “That was there right from the very beginning.”
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But talent isn’t a guarantee. Kellie Harper played on all three of Tennessee’s title teams from 1996-98 and remembers the mental hurdles the squad couldn’t overcome during the 1999 season when it was eliminated in the Elite Eight. The 1999 Lady Vols were headlined by two-time national player of the year Chamique Holdsclaw and future Hall of Famer Tamika Catchings, but Harper said the success they had in previous years created a sense of urgency to win again that ultimately turned into a lack of focus.
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“Looking back, I just think we were going through the motions a little bit because we wanted to get to the tournament,” Harper said. “We wanted it so bad, but unfortunately we were just trying to fast forward to get there. I feel like Pat had to pull teeth more that year. I felt like she was urging us more that season — and we would still win a game, but we weren’t winning the way we needed to win.”
As part of the only class in NCAA history to graduate with four championships, Tuck understands exactly how much of a repeat run is mental. She credits Auriemma and associate head coach Chris Dailey for keeping a constant intensity throughout the regular season, even when the team was dominating every opponent in its path.
“Of course they say, ‘don’t think about the end of the season,’ but you do. That’s just part of it. But they definitely keep you in the weeds enough where sometimes you feel like you’re just trying to make it through that practice or through that week,” Tuck said. “You don’t have a ton of opportunity to think about it or feel like, ‘Oh we’re just chilling and things are really good.’ They make it hard, and when things are hard it’s a lot easier to stay in the moment.”
Do the 2025-26 Huskies have what it takes?
Going back-to-back is the hardest it’s ever been in the modern era of women’s basketball as parity continues to grow, but plenty of teams have had the makeup on paper in the decade since the last repeat.
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Stanford returned 10 of 11 players from its 2021 NCAA title, but an injury-riddled UConn knocked off the reigning champs in the 2022 Final Four. After its 2022 championship, South Carolina brought back four starters on a roster that included seven future WNBA players, and though they entered the tournament without a loss, the Gamecocks had their undefeated run ended by Iowa in the Final Four. LSU returned its two biggest stars in Angel Reese and Flau’jae Johnson and added All-American transfer Aneesah Morrow after winning the 2023 championship, and the Tigers couldn’t get past the Elite Eight the following season.
But UConn has something none of those teams did: Experience. Auriemma is the only living coach who has gone through the grind of a repeat and come out on the other side victorious. For 41 years, with Dailey at his right hand, his formula hasn’t changed. And if it was enough to bring UConn back to a national championship for the 12th time last season, there’s no reason to believe it can’t work again.
“I don’t think it’s something groundbreaking, but they’re just super consistent in what they do, and they have a one-of-a-kind feel for it in a lot of different ways,” Tuck said. “I think that’s why he’s been able to be more successful than any other coach in that realm, because he’s figured it out. He’s found a way to get people to buy into it consistently, and whether it’s 40 years ago or today, there’s a consistent level they’ve been able to maintain.”
The Huskies have all the markers of repeat capability midway through 2025-26, even after losing last year’s superstar Paige Bueckers. They are second in the country in scoring margin with four wins over opponents currently ranked in the top 15. Sophomore forward Sarah Strong is a national player of the year favorite, and redshirt senior guard Azzi Fudd is on pace for her first All-American season.
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But while both stars have risen to the occasion in the biggest regular-season matchups, their true test won’t come until March. Bueckers, like all the greats before her, was at her best in win-or-go-home scenarios and left UConn as the program’s all-time leading scorer in NCAA Tournament games.
Without that leadership to fall back on for the first time in their careers, Strong and Fudd will have to prove whether they belong among the program’s legends when the pressure to win rests most heavily on their shoulders.
“Each of (our) repeats had returners who were able to almost carry it on their own,” Auriemma said back in October. “We don’t have (that) personality on our team, so that’s going to have to evolve, whoever that is. I don’t know if Azzi has that type of leadership quality … and Sarah’s young, and she’s finding her voice.
“But if a couple things come together — and when they do in practice, when we have those two in a certain way, it looks really, really good.”
