Geno Auriemma was on a conference call with USA Basketball Women's National Team Director Carol Callan following the announcement that Jayne Appel, Rebekkah Brunson, Ebony Hoffman and Kia Vaughn have been added to the list of national team pool players which the 12-member U.S. squad playing in the world championships will be drawn from. Also, it was announced that the national team training camp will start on Sept. 4 with two days of training at Flint Hill School in Oakton, Va. followed by two days of work at George Washington University before heading north for two exhibition games and two days of training in Hartford from Sept. 9-12.

While Auriemma was on the call, I asked him for a reaction to Caroline Doty's third torn ACL - all in her left knee - which will sideline her for the upcoming season. Here are his remarks.



Caroline has had this issue for a while. It has kept her from playing in the past and now it is going to keep her from playing this season. It is unfortunate that it happened, it is unfortunate with the timing, it's something you wouldn't wish on any player once much less three times.

Caroline is going to put on a happy face, she is going to put up a good front but deep down inside you know she is really struggling with this. As soon as we start practice, she is going to struggle more and as soon as we start playing, the struggle is going to get even more difficult. That is the hand she is dealt right now.

I am not worried about us. I am not one of these guys who is going to keep reminding everybody that 'hey, if we had Caroline, we'd be really good.' As we go through the season, Caroline is not playing for us this year and we are a going to have to figure out a way to do what we want to do with who we have. Caroline has her own issues, her issue is to get healthy and our issue is to do whatever we set out to do but do it without a real important part of our team. It is going to be difficult but it is not supposed to be easy, we did it two years ago and now we are going to have to do it again."

Other notes from the conference call.

The list of the 12 players representing the U.S. in the world championships has to be presented to FIBA by Sept. 21 and the U.S. roster will come from the 21 healthy players currently in the pool.

Other than UConn's Maya Moore, there's no plan to invite any active college players to training camp.

The U.S. will play in a tournament in Spain with Australia, Spain and Senegal after leaving for Europe and will also play an exhibition against the Czech Republic on Sept. 20 in Brno before heading for Ostrava in the Czech Republic where the U.S. will play its preliminary round games.

Everybody in the pool who is done with the WNBA season (in other words, their teams either didn't make the postseason or have been eliminated) will be in Connecticut when the team arrives on Sept. 9.