You could see it coming after Geno Auriemma stopped practice the first time and walked onto the court. “Either get used to the fact I want it done right or this is going to be a long season,” Auriemma said to his unbeaten, top-ranked team, which would beat Providence for its 30th straight win a day later. “We’ve been here what, four months, and we haven’t gotten anything done. I’m not going to put up with this stuff anymore.”
Forty minutes more, and Auriemma kept his word, stopping practice early and for good, then calling his team together at the foul line. For 20 minutes, the players stood in a circle around Auriemma as he berated his defending national champions so quietly the buzzing drone of the ceiling lights was the loudest sound in the arena.
As usual, senior forward Svetlana Abrosimova came in for particular attention from the coach. “You got a problem?” he said, and Abrosimova responded with a slight sideways motion of her head, enough to provoke the coach. “You’ve got a problem. But guess what? No one is going to feel sorry for you.”
Abrosimova stood motionless. She has had back spasms since a guy pushed her hard in a Florida pickup game over the holiday break, and her recent play has not been far from the standard that made her a two-time All-American and perhaps the country’s best women’s college basketball player.
“She is a great player, a tremendous shooter,” said Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw, whose unbeaten, third-ranked Irish meet Connecticut Monday afternoon in South Bend, Ind. “She is a really special kind of player because she can do so many things.”
Auriemma knew that almost from the moment he saw a videotape of Abrosimova, then 15, playing for the Russian junior national team. Less than two months after her 17th birthday, she left St. Petersburg to enroll at the University of Connecticut with no knowledge of the place beyond a media guide she could barely understand, so halting was her English at the time.
“I tried to translate what the players said in the media guide,” she said. “The interviews seemed interesting.”
Now Abrosimova is a 6-foot-2-inch woman of 20, a dean’s list student at the business school, which inducted her into its Academic Hall of Fame, and a member of the school’s sporting pantheon.
She leads the Huskies in scoring and steals, is second in rebounds and assists and is the darling of passionate crowds that have made the Huskies a sellout attraction the last 41 games at the on-campus Gampel Pavilion (10,027 capacity) and this season’s three game at the Hartford Civic Center (16,294). Women’s basketball is a Connecticut cult: Its telecasts on Connecticut public TV are the most-watched public TV programming in the country.
“At 6-2, the things Svet is able to do are amazing,” said junior forward Tamika Williams, also 6-2 and the team’s top-scoring reserve. “She is so agile with the ball, she can take you off the dribble, hit really deep threes and play defense now. When I first came, she could never guard anybody.”
None of that earns Abrosimova any slack from Auriemma. Neither does the back problem that limited her to 11 minutes in the Dec. 30 win over No. 2 Tennessee, nor an ankle twist that cut into her effectiveness. Said Abrosimova: “He thinks I’m feeling sorry for myself.” Call it from Russia with tough love.
“Svet can play through anything. She’s a tough, tough kid,” Auriemma said. “But she never wants to look bad out on the court. She believes if she’s not 100 percent, she’s not going to be able to show everyone what she can do. That impacts the way she plays. She holds back.”
Auriemma simply expects Abrosimova to be, game after game, the player who had 18 points, 11 assists, seven rebounds, four steals and no turnovers in the season-opening 99-70 rout of then third-ranked Georgia. In her 23 minutes of action during Saturday’s 104-55 rout of Providence, Abrosimova shot 3-for-11 but had eight assists, seven steals and six rebounds.
“She and Coach still bang heads,” Williams said. “But he’s gotten a little better the past couple years. Sometimes I thought Coach’s head was going to explode.”
In the past two seasons, there were enough public explosions between Auriemma and Abrosimova that protective fans sent the coach angry letters asking him to calm down. His mother simply picks up the phone in her suburban Philadelphia home to deliver that message (“Why are you doing this to Svet? Leave her alone. Be nice to her.”) in the Italian dialect the two speak when the matter is serious.
“I’m still amazed by the way people treat me here,” Abrosimova said. “I guess they decided to take care of me because they saw I was here with no friends and no family.”
Auriemma’s 69-year-old mother, who came with her husband to the U.S. from the hill country near Naples when Geno was 8, has a life-size poster of Abrosimova on the door between the garage and the house. There are, Auriemma said, no pictures of him in the house.
The picture Auriemma had of Abrosimova before they met was not something he needed videotapes to imagine. As a kid who spoke no English upon arriving in the U.S., he understood better than most just how much will and courage were necessary for a 17-year-old to accept the challenge of both university studies and elite basketball in a place where she would have trouble communicating.
“You think, `This kid just wants to be great,'” Auriemma said. “The problem was, her idea of a great player was someone who gets the ball and scores whenever they can. My idea is a little bit different than that.”
Abrosimova had no idea at all about basketball when a coach picked her out of an elementary school class in 1987 because she was an unusually tall 7-year-old. That was typical of the talent identification system in the former Soviet Union, which won the inaugural Olympic women’s basketball tournament in 1976 with Juliana Semenova, immobile but 7 feet tall, as its star. The Soviet women won all seven world championships they entered from 1959 through 1983, after which U.S. teams fortified by Title IX products began to dominate world and Olympic tournaments.
Thus discovered, Abrosimova moved to a sports school that specialized in basketball. After being the last player picked when cuts were made for 10-year-old players who would advance in the school, Abrosimova and her mother, Ludmila, a masseuse who also knew nothing about basketball, vowed to overcome whatever shortcomings left Svetlana so close to rejection.
Among the steps were putting up a hoop in the large hallway outside their ground-floor apartment. There, Svetlana would practice dribbling and shooting, sometimes against her mother. Errant passes wreaked havoc on the hall phones and mirrors, much to the consternation of Abrosimova’s father, Oleg, a submarine mechanic who would repair the damage.
“Every time he came home from work, he would say, `What else did you do today?'” Svetlana said. “My mother felt so silly, she would go, `Well, maybe we broke a mirror.’ She couldn’t catch the ball, but she tried to blame it on me.'”
The daughter, MVP of the European 18 & Under Championship at 16, was noticed by scout Boris Lelchitski, the South Carolina-based international scout who sent the tape of her to Auriemma. He immediately began recruiting efforts.
The Soviet Union had collapsed six years earlier. A young Russian like Abrosimova had the apparent freedom to go anywhere.
It wasn’t that easy for Abrosimova. The Russian basketball federation and the husband-wife coaches who had directed her career since primary sports school days pressured her to stay home, even though their own daughter had left to play basketball in the U.S. They told her she wouldn’t be able to play on the Russian national team or in the Olympics if she left and that she might not play or make any money in the U.S.
“It was like, `You’re really good, stay here. Don’t go there, you’re not good enough,'” Abrosimova said.
She wanted to leave, but there was the matter of learning enough English to get through the ACT test. A six-month crash course helped, but Abrosimova still was scared to death as she faced the first multiple-choice test of her life. “My math was almost perfect, but I just guessed at the English,” she said.
Off she went, to a place and a coach she never had seen. She had her parents’ support, two small suitcases of belongings and enough money for a return ticket if things didn’t work out. Abrosimova immediately cut off that lifeline by spending most of the money on clothes. She has saved four years to buy tickets to the U.S. for her parents, who will see her play a college game for the first time on Senior Night Feb. 23. “I like challenges,” she said.
Hers would involve long nights of trying to do homework in a language she could barely understand and long afternoons of trying to understand why the coach always was on her case. English came easier, even if Auriemma insists he never raised his voice to Abrosimova during her freshman year. The last two seasons he demanded, often pointedly, that she raise her level of play. That was a shock, especially since Auriemma was unfailingly nice and close to Abrosimova off the court.
“In Russia, I was one of the best players, and no one ever yelled at me or told me what to do,” she said. “When I got here, [Auriemma] was really hard on me. I didn’t know if he was mean or a bad person or didn’t like me personally. I didn’t know if I should be mad at him or if he was still mad at me. It took a while for me to figure out he just wanted me to be a better player.”
The improvement is evident in her defense, in her going from a player who had more turnovers than assists as a sophomore to one who is averaging 4.4 assists and 1.3 turnovers a game this season. The scoring has remained a constant: Abrosimova is fifth on the school’s career scoring list, with an average of 13.2 points per game this season on a team whose scoring is so balanced four players are in double figures and seven are averaging 8.5 or more. Abrosimova could be the top choice in the next WNBA draft.
Her only disappointment since leaving for the U.S. came at the 2000 Olympics–the federation’s threats were idle; she made the team–as Russia lost narrowly to Brazil in the quarterfinals. With the regular point guard injured, Abrosimova led the team in assists and steals but also in turnovers.
Good thing Auriemma was an assistant coach for the champion U.S. team instead of the Russians. Otherwise, with those Abrosimova turnovers, you know what would have been coming.
