'How lucky are these kids?' What Nykesha Sales brings to Geno Auriemma's staff: Mike Anthony

STORRS – UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma was asked about Nykesha Sales – long program legend, new assistant coach – on Saturday afternoon and started by wondering aloud.

“How lucky are these kids?” he said.

The current UConn players, Auriemma meant. There’s been so many over the past few decades – and so many great ones – that it might be difficult to properly appreciate, with access only to a coach’s memory and some highlight footage that’s getting a little grainy, just how charismatic and prolific Sales was in 1994-98. If she wasn’t UConn’s longest-burning star she sure was, at times, the brightest.

“Somebody who not only, at the time, held the scoring record here, but then was an All-WNBA player every single year she was in the league, and then has coached at a couple different places and seen things a little different than we do here at UConn, which is good,” Auriemma said. “How lucky are some of these kids to be able to work with her?”

Cool Keesh, as she was known, represented first-to-second gear in the Huskies’ race toward college basketball history as well as anyone. She was the best high school player in Connecticut while at Bloomfield High – maybe the best high school player in America – and, as a college freshman, was the final piece to a puzzle that included Rebecca Lobo and Jen Rizzotti as UConn went undefeated for its first title in 1995.

That run changed the sport forever. Sales, who once scored a record 42 points in a game, had three more tremendous seasons and went off to the WNBA, where she was a dominant scorer, first with the Orlando Miracle and then as an original member of the Connecticut Sun after the team’s relocation. She’s why the Mohegan folks wanted that particular team, in fact.

Now Sales, 50, is back where her All-American banner hangs, running practices in a building, the Werth Champions Center, that wasn’t even a blueprint or a dream when she last called campus home. After 10 years coaching on staffs under Katie Abrahamson-Henderson (six at Central Florida, four at Georgia), Sales was hired to replace her former UConn teammate Jamelle Elliott, who resigned in June to pursue opportunities outside of coaching.

It is, in every way, a perfect fit. Sales is still beloved by fans in the state. While she created a great life for herself in the Orlando area, being back in Connecticut means reconnecting with friends and family members who remain in Bloomfield. She was once the plucky one with all the moves, and now she’s the experienced coach, with a different level of relatability for current players and, still, all the different colors to her personality.

“I’m a cheat sheet because I played here, I know [the coaches] well, I was a pro – I know a lot of them want to be a pro,” Sales said. “So I’m a cheat sheet. I can help them, kind of before you self-destruct, and give them hints of what I think might happen if you don’t do stuff right or play hard. But I watch the players that are out there and I try to help them in those ways. The X’s and O’s, Coach has. But it’s those little details. Those little tidbits might help you out, keep you out of trouble.”

Auriemma isn’t easy to play for. Few, if any, of the great ones are. Sales lived it. She was always Geno’s favorite. Among the chosen few, at least. She’s known as the one player he never yelled at. Auriemma always had a soft spot for Sales, who does understand the pressures of the program and the reality of dealing with the harshness of its lessons.

“Sometimes I get harsh, too, after a while – you keep saying the same thing,” Sales said. “But … I pull players aside and try to help them out and give them a different tone. I always say, ‘It’s not how he says it, it’s what he says.’ So if you take that sensitivity out of that, you could learn a lot and you could grow a lot. … I wasn’t a sensitive player. They say not by him but, trust me, I got my fair share when I moved on to the pros. So I understand it a little bit.”

Before Sales moved onto the pros, she set the UConn career scoring record in a way that put her squarely in the middle of an obnoxious debate. She stood at 2,176 points when a torn Achilles’ tendon abruptly ended her senior season, one behind Kerry Bascom. Three days later, on Feb. 24, 1998, Auriemma, in coordination with Villanova coach Harry Perretta, set the stage for Sales to score one last bucket and take the record.

Sales, wearing a cast, took the court and limped toward the basket for the opening tip. Villanova players cleared out, allowing Sales an uncontested layup. The Huskies let Villanova score on the ensuing possession. It was 2-2. Sales was the record holder. What followed was a debate, regional becoming national, about the integrity of the record.

“I thought it was gone, but,” she said Saturday when I asked for her memory of the play, and the experience around it. “It was a lot. It was kind of taken out of context a little bit at the beginning. It was just something that Coach thought was a good idea, to give back or whatever. Now I’m in like 10th place or 11th or 15th, so it doesn’t even matter anymore.”

That’s beautiful. It’s not like she, or others, set those records and hope to own them. It’s classic Keesh, too. She’s tied for seventh, with Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, now trailing only Maya Moore (3,036), Breanna Stewart, Paige Bueckers, Napheesa Collier, Tina Charles and Katie Lou Samuelson.

“Records are going to be broken,” Sales said. “But at the time, I thought it was cool and I thought it was a nice gesture for him to do that. Obviously people are going to have their opinions but for the most part it was more love than hate. You get over it. You just go through ups and downs and get over it. And it kind of dissolved until it came back right now.”

Sales played at UConn when people – and only some people – were starting to use various flip phones and the newest Nokia models. Did uconnhuskies.com even exist yet? I don’t know. Certainly Twitter and Instagram weren’t driving sports discussions.

Women’s basketball has grown tremendously. Social media has provided new views of players and those who celebrate them. My guess is that the play and the record would have been more celebrated had it all taken place in 2026 instead of 1998.

“I don’t know,” Auriemma said. “Are there more crazies today than there were then? Or would the craziness that we live with in the world, where every day there’s something more outrageous than the day before, be looked at as, wow, that was really cool? I don’t know.

“I felt bad for her because she didn’t ask for it. She deserved it, but she didn’t ask for it. She deserved the outcome, what we were able to do for her. And I would have never, ever, ever, in a million years, done it if it impacted an NCAA Tournament, a national tournament, a national record, infringing on someone else’s success at another school, anything like that. That’s why I never understood the big hoopla. But I am fortunate that, in subsequent years, other people have gotten gifts. But because they didn’t play women’s basketball, they weren’t treated with the animosity that, unfortunately, she was.”

Sales’ return to UConn has been celebrated. Seeing her and Auriemma interact is the perfect reminder why he says that basketball keeps him feeling young. Sales has unique energy. You can see it from afar, how she conducts herself at practice. You can hear it in her voice. You always could.

“The conversations I have with her every day, they make me feel, God Almighty – when I met Keesh, she was my grandson’s age,” Auriemma said. “Think about that. At the same time, though, I feel like I’m the same age as I was then, talking to her, except she got older, I didn’t. Because now we have conversations that are really adult-like instead of I’m her coach and she’s my player. I think every kid on the team, the coaching staff, everybody, couldn’t be happier, to be honest. It’s a great win for UConn, for our program, as coaches and for our players. It’s huge.”

Sales was once the most gifted player in the UConn program.

Like Sarah Strong is today.

Both won national championships as freshman, then went about leading the program into the next phase of its push further up the NCAA mountain.

“Obviously, she’s one of the best players in the country,” Sales said. “I don’t know if I was when I was here, like that.”

Just about, though. Sales went on to become a WNBA All-Star in eight of her nine seasons.

She remained anchored in the Orlando area after the Miracle’s move to Uncasville and became a coach there by chance. While playing pickup ball one day at UCF, she was approached by members of the women’s basketball staff.

“And that day, they talked me into coaching,” said Sales, who at the time was working toward a career in the pharmaceutical field. “I said, ‘I will try it, but teach me.’ Because I never thought I would be a coach. So I didn’t pay attention. I took instruction, but giving instruction was different. So they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, of course.’ After a while, it wasn’t as hard as I thought. It was a chance for me to give back and empower women and teach them a little bit.”

And, as it turned out, it was a way to get Sales back home to UConn. Back to practices that look the same in culture and structure, but so different with this generation of players. Sales, for years as a coach, played in practices against players and volunteers.

“I’m too old for it now,” she said Saturday. “I’m 50, playing against 17-year-olds – it’s not smart. Little stuff – the pinky toe hurt – and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m done.’”

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This article originally published at ‘How lucky are these kids?’ What Nykesha Sales brings to Geno Auriemma’s staff: Mike Anthony.