Tennessee filed a complaint against UConn with the NCAA through the Southeastern Conference office in 2007. It was regarding a tour of ESPN that the Huskies set up for Maya Moore and her mother, Kathryn, during a recruiting visit in October of 2005. The complaint resulted in the Huskies being charged with a secondary violation.
Tennessee has recruiting issues of its own these days. According to the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the university last week reported a secondary violation to the SEC office after a photo of Lady Vols head coach Pat Summitt, assistant coach Dean Lockwood and recruit Meighan Simmons at her high school in Texas appeared in two publications. The report will eventually be forwarded to the NCAA.
The photo, which was taken Sept. 23, originally ran in the San Antonio Express-News last month and again in the News-Sentinel. It violates NCAA guidelines prohibiting publicizing contact with a recruit.
When asked to comment on the situation Tuesday, Geno Auriemma first looked as if he was unaware of it before providing a response.
“My official comment would be stuff happens in life,’’ Auriemma said. “I’ve even been known to make a mistake once or twice. So who am I to cast any stones. The intent of most rules is whether there’s anyone there or isn’t anybody there … It’s like do you stop at a red light only when you see a cop there or do you just go through the red light because there’s nobody watching? Obviously, there’s an intent to the rules and sometimes the intent doesn’t necessarily make sense. The actual rule and what the intent of the rule is, they don’t jive. But we’re always judged on what the intent of the rule is. There’s 500 pages of rules or whatever the NCAA rules manual is, and some are easy to figure out and some are not.’’
Simmons has since given an oral commitment to play for Tennessee.
The first week of practice is over and Auriemma believes that the Huskies could play a game right now if they had to. They still do not have a definitive starting point guard, though. Auriemma is not yet ready to name Lorin Dixon, Tiffany Hayes or Caroline Doty as the starter.
“It’s not necessarily any competition as such because we’ve played with three guards pretty much ever since I’ve been at Connecticut,’’ Auriemma said. “I think it might just come down to different situations and different times. That’s one thing I learned coaching the National Team this last trip is you can adjust some times based on who you’re playing. Yeah, you’d love to have, `Ok, these are our five.’ But some games maybe you just might want to say, `Hey, look, I think it works better this way.’ So when you look at our guard situation with Kalana (Greene), Tiffany, Lorin, Caroline and Kelly (Faris) you’ve got five guys that can rotate in those three spots pretty easily. And then you’ve got Maya moving over there sometimes when you go with the two big guys. So you’ve got a lot of different ways to go that depending on what the situation is … And then you’ve got to find out too who’s good coming off the bench, who has to start because they’re psyche can’t handle not starting. So it’s all those little things that go into it. We’ll see. Maybe during the exhibition games we’ll zig and zag and see what happens. Maybe the first couple games of the year we’ll see what happened and go from there.’’
Auriemma said that Hayes, Moore and Tina Charles have been the three best players at practice. No shock there. He continues to praise Faris, the team’s lone freshman, for her performance. He expects her to play 15 to 20 minutes a game this season.
And, overall, he is pleased with how the first week went.
“Given the first week, I think there’s a pretty good vibe that I get from this group,’’ Auriemma said. “It’s not the easiest thing to get acclimated to a new floor leader. If you had a different one every year then you could say, `well, kids are used to making that adjustment.’ But when you have had the same one for four years, it’s very difficult all a sudden for somebody to switch gears and say, `Oh yeah, this is just going to be just like …’ So that’s probably been the hardest adjustment is getting used to a different way of the offense getting into its flow, just a different feel that exists in the gym without Renee (Montgomery) being here. Because they’ve all been through it, they know the drills in practice. They know the routine. They know what we’re trying to do. Certainly we’re a lot further ahead. We could play a game if we had to right now, which if you ask me that question next year I would say we might not be ready to play a game when the Big East season starts. But right now because of all the returning veterans we’re in pretty good shape I think.’’
Rich
