Wooden Award Flashback: Jim Calhoun puts UConn on the map

The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award. 

Throughout the last three decades, you could make a significant argument that the epicenter of college basketball has been located in Storrs, Connecticut. Between the men’s and women’s programs, the university has accrued a whopping 18 national championships since 1995, with six of those championships coming from the men’s side.

Advertisement

You can trace most of UConn’s modern success back to the 1989-90 men’s basketball season, when a fourth-year coach from Braintree, Mass. named Jim Calhoun led the Huskies to their first conference championship and NCAA tournament berth in 11 years. UConn finished 31-6 that season and lost to Duke in the Elite 8, though Calhoun earned consensus National Coach of the Year Honors.

In large part because of the momentum that Calhoun accrued for the University in that 1989-90 season, both he and women’s coach Geno Auriemma spent the 90s building programs that would largely come to define the current era of college basketball. While Auriemma beat him to the punch with a Final Four appearance in 1991 and a national championship in 1995, Calhoun didn’t take long to meet his colleague (and rival) at the top of his profession in 1999.

That season, Calhoun avenged his loss to Mike Kryzewski and Duke in the 1990 by downing the Blue Devils in one of the great national championship game upsets ever. Duke entered that game as 9.5 point favorites riding a 32-game winning streak, but it didn’t matter as UConn and Calhoun pulled out a 77-74 win in a nail-biting finish.

That moment catapulted the men’s program, not unlike the way the 1995 championship catapulted the women. The 2004 Huskies, led by Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon, started the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/wooden-award-flashback-jim-calhoun-000256069.html

Author :

Publish date : 2025-12-05 00:02:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.