UConn’s Geno Auriemma has officially tied former Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer as the winningest coach in NCAA Division I basketball history. The No. 2 Huskies defeated No. 14 North Carolina 69-58 on Friday, giving Auriemma his 1,216th career victory.
He has a chance to officially break the record at home on Wednesday when UConn hosts Fairleigh Dickinson at 7 p.m. ET.
Auriemma took over the UConn program in 1985, and at that point the Huskies had only one winning season in the program’s history. Now, almost four decades later, UConn’s women’s basketball is known as one of the most powerful dynasties in college sports history with 11 NCAA Championships, 23 Final Fours and six unbeaten seasons.
“Forty years ago, UConn took a chance on me,” Auriemma said during his postgame interview with ESPN. “Those players early on took a chance on us — me and (Chris Dailey). We couldn’t process them anything, we didn’t have anything. I would tell them, that they should feel incredibly proud because we built it out of nothing. We built it out of nothing in a place they said it couldn’t be built.”
In February, Auriemma became just the third coach to ever reach the 1,200-win mark, joining VanDerveer and former…
