Would UConn's Geno Auriemma be OK with one of his players taking a knee

Let's just call it the game after the game.

I've been covering Geno Auriemma's UConn team since the late 1990s and the stuff we get from him after press conferences are just a reporter's dream. Some of it is even on the record.

His press conference ended with Auriemma being asked about Breanna Stewart, who led the Huskies to four straight national titles, and her decision to pen an online essay about being sexually abused as a kid.

I wanted to ask him about how the time his players are at UConn helps them get ready to become ambassadors for the sport after they graduate. You see the philanthropic work Tina Charles does now and think back to when she first arrived at UConn and what an amazing transformation. Sue Bird, Stefanie Dolson and Diana Taurasi have gone public with the fact that they are gay not to bring attention to themselves but to give a platform to an issue.

"You'd like to think that everybody gets an opportunity to express who they are, what they believe in and feel comfortable doing that," Auriemma said. "We live in an era, an age that more so than ever that it is conducive to that. A lot of the older players, when a lot of them were in college it wasn't as easy. People weren't as accepting, weren't as understanding as they are today and it is not until you grow up and you realize this is what I want to do, this is how I am going to live my life from here on in.

"The fact that they feel strongly about things is important, we talk about a lot of things, lots of issues come up on our team. An issue of what has been happening around the country the last couple of years with you take something as divisive as police brutality and can't deny the clear evidence that it certainly is a tremendous bias against people of color and to ignore it is to go along with the status quo. We spend a lot of time, 'how do you feel about that? How do you feel about what is going on in the NFL?' Everybody gets an opportunity for the most part, the young kids are a little too young maybe but as you get to be juniors and seniors, they think about it a lot. We ask them a lot of questions about that sort of stuff. Just because nobody is out there during the national anthem taking a knee doesn't mean that they don't have strong feelings about what is going on because they do."

That led to me asking Auriemma if he would have a problem if one of his players took a knee during the playing of the national anthem as NFL players have been doing.

"I don't know how I would feel about that because we talk to them about it," Auriemma said. "I would want there to be an actual action that represents that this is what I am going to do. There are a lot of different opinions on that, we have a platform to let everybody know this is how I feel. Everybody already knows, anybody with a conscience feels that way. I think it has been done, it has been brought to everybody's attention. Enough? No. Has anything been done about it until it became not about police brutality anymore, it became about has been tweeted from the White House. Then it changed the dialogue completely and it made it worse. Now you have two issues you are trying to grapple win. One, can we get that under control and treat everybody the same and 2) can we get people stop doing things to stop throwing gasoline on the fire. I think that probably infuriates people, takes it to a whole other level beyond what was happening in Ferguson, Minneapolis, Baltimore...

"We live in a world that if you are not careful, every time you pick up the paper, every time you watch TV, every time you go on the internet you have another reason to take a knee. If we aren't careful, we are going to live our lives on our knees because we are pissed off with everything that we see, everything we hear. At some point something has to come out that makes you feel pretty good about what people are doing instead of all the stuff that is constantly being thrown out there."