While the news of coaching legends Debbie Ryan and Van Chancellor stepping down at Virginia and LSU respectively might have caught UConn's Geno Auriemma off guard at first, upon further reflection he was not stunned to see them or any of his coaching peers step away from the game.

"The Debbie (Ryan) thing caught a lot of us former players and coaches by surprise. You know its coming at some point, but when it didn’t happen when Debbie first got sick with cancer, you thought ‘ok she’s fought through that.’ Now it’s
about enjoying her life and what you’ve built over the years.

"Everybody knows that at some point they are going to wake up in the morning and they say I don’t want to do this anymore. I can see after 30 some years. For Van (Chancellor) I’m not surprised at all. At a point it comes to ‘Do I want to spend the rest of my life with 18 year olds?’ I just don’t know that everybody can do that for an indefinite amount of time. I think when you get to a certain age and have a certain amount of success, I’m not surprised by either of those two. I think its going to happen even more as the next couple of years unfold, because the pressures of the job are so much greater than they ever were. Everybody used to talk about women’s basketball, why don’t they take us more seriously, why don’t they pay us more, why don’t they give us more resources, why don’t we get this and this? What happens now is that you are getting all of that and if you don’t win you get fired. I
think you are going to see in the next couple of years coaches saying I got into this for a different reason.’”