STORRS — There’s a different energy inside UConn women’s basketball practices as soon as the calendar turns to March, that signature buzz of anticipation and tension that accompanies the arrival of the postseason.
Coach Geno Auriemma is famously demanding of his players, no matter the circumstance, whether it’s a preseason workout or the last five minutes of a 50-point win. In March, the intensity ratchets up to yet another level. Perfection is no longer a goal, but an expectation.
“I feel like all the things Coach nitpicks about and everything like that, that really is a big focal point for us during this time,” Huskies point guard KK Arnold said Friday. “Those little things we need to clean up. I feel like that’s the biggest thing in practice we talk about, that the things that we maybe made a mistake on in preseason or during the season, by postseason that needs to be well out of it. And if we do mess up, how do we bounce back right away?”
Top-ranked UConn gets its first taste of postseason basketball Saturday when it kicks off the Big East Tournament in the quarterfinals against 8-seed Georgetown at Mohegan Sun Arena. But when Huskies legend Diana Taurasi stopped by practice earlier this week, she reminded the team that the conference tournament is little more than another stepping stone on the path to the ultimate prize.
that’s a lot of national championships and gold medals wandering around Werth pic.twitter.com/lER8RSjtUd
— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) March 4, 2026
“There’s a lot less stress that goes into this knowing that there’s more basketball to come after this, win or lose,” Auriemma said Friday. “When Dee was here the other day, she was giving Sarah (Strong) some great advice: ‘Don’t forget, we won a national championship twice after losing in the Big East Tournament.’ … But I think this tournament is obviously really important to every team and certainly important to us.”
UConn was knocked out of the Big East Tournament during Taurasi’s career in 2003 and ’04 before going on to win NCAA titles. It also lost the conference championship in 2013 to Notre Dame, then beat the Fighting Irish in the Final Four en route to the first of four consecutive national championships.
The Big East in 2026 isn’t quite the juggernaut it was when Taurasi played, and the Huskies have dominated since rejoining the conference in 2019-20. The team has swept the Big East regular season and tournament championships for five straight seasons, and it enters this year’s tournament on a 67-game win streak against conference opponents.
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UConn’s superiority this season hasn’t been limited to the Big East as it heads into the postseason undefeated for the first time since 2018. Just one of the Huskies’ 31 wins was by fewer than 10 points, and Auriemma said he’s still shocked how smoothly the pieces came together for his team.
“I went into the season thinking, there’s so many things I want to find out,” Auriemma said. “And it went way better than I thought, way better than I could have envisioned. Everybody. seems to have fit in pretty easily … We had whatever (slump) we had in February, but I’m surprised we didn’t have a couple of those in November, December, January. I think for the most part, it’s about as good as I could have hoped.”
Even with the perfect record and the target of ‘defending champion’ on UConn’s back, star guard Azzi Fudd said the pressure of the postseason isn’t weighing as heavily on the Huskies as it did in 2024-25. The experience of winning a national championship relieved a certain tension for all of the team’s returners, and Fudd feels them playing with different ease this time around.
“It’s not that there’s any less pressure or the expectations have fallen at all, but most of us have been there and we know what it takes,” Fudd said. “There was a crazy energy last year, but it was like that intense pressure that we need to get this done or else. Now it’s like, we’re calm, we’re confident, and we’ve got this.”
Entering the Big East quarterfinals, Auriemma doesn’t feel he has anything left to learn about his team. He sees the weekend purely as a opportunity for the Huskies to get accustomed to elimination stakes while competing for a championship before the pressure rises in the NCAA Tournament. It’s also a chance for the team’s role players to earn some additional trust from the coaching staff by proving they can rise to the occasion on a big stage.
“I know what we’re capable of. I know what we’re good at. I know what we struggle with,” Auriemma said. “You just want to go out and say, can we build on what we’ve done? Can certain players adapt to tournament play? For some of our younger players, this will be their first win-or-go-home kind of thing.
“And I always used to think — it’s happened so many times — that whoever is the Player of the Year for the longest time never won MVP in the Big East tournament … Somebody comes out of nowhere and just blows up for three days and gets MVP, so you go out and say, who’s going to be that person this weekend?”
If UConn beats Georgetown on Saturday, it will advance to the semifinal at 2:30 p.m. Sunday against the winner of the quarterfinal between 4-seed Marquette and 5-seed Creighton. The championship game is set for 7 p.m. Monday.
How to watch
Site: Mohegan Sun Arena, Uncasville
Time/date: Noon, Saturday
Team records: UConn 31-0 (20-0), Georgetown 14-16 (6-14)
Series record: UConn leads 59-6
Last meeting: 84-52 UConn, Feb. 26 at PeoplesBank Arena
TV: NBC Sports Network
Streaming: Peacock
Radio: UConn Sports Network on FOX Sports 97.9