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Geno Auriemma and Robin Roberts before an exhibition game between Connecticut and the New York Liberty in 1998. (photo by Bob Stowell/Getty Images)
Robert W Stowell Jr via Getty Images
Nearly three decades after introducing a national viewing audience to the WNBA, Robin Roberts and Geno Auriemma fielded a common request to 1990s icons.
How about a reunion to honor the league’s 30th anniversary? ESPN Senior Vice President of Sports Production Tim Corrigan asked.
The Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame members delivered identical answers: If the other said yes, they would do it. Which is how Roberts and Auriemma came to join veteran play-by-play commentator Beth Mowins as one-time color analysts on the call for the July 7 game between the Dallas Wings and New York Liberty (8 p.m. ET, ESPN).
The duo will reunite as one of the ongoing 30th anniversary tributes amid exploding growth in the WNBA. They called two seasons together for ESPN/ABC, the only company to air games since the league’s inception, with play-by-play lead Roberts continuing on as the early voice of the league alongside other analysts.
Expect there to be plenty of color upon their reunion, this time in upgraded high definition. On the 29th anniversary of their first call on ESPN — the Utah Starzz defeated the Los Angeles Sparks 102-89 at home on June 23, 1997 — Roberts landed an early dig on a meandering path down memory lane.
“Geno, will you be prepared this time?” the “Good Morning America” co-host asked. “I remember you showed up and you had a napkin with a couple of notes. But you made it work.”
Auriemma, then a one-time NCAA champion coach at UConn, recalled through laughter having to learn pronunciations ahead of ESPN’s first telecast because they had never seen most of the players before. There were fewer TV channels in general, limited broadcast windows for women’s basketball overall, and the opportunity to readily stream or search online information online remained decades away.
“Now they’re all household names,” Auriemma said.
Three are Auriemma’s most recent star-studded alumnae. Breanna Stewart, an unprecedented four-time NCAA champion at UConn and three-time WNBA champion, is off to another MVP-caliber campaign for the Liberty (11-6). The Wings (11-6) feature the most recent No. 1 overall picks, Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd, who won UConn’s 13th and most recent national title together in 2025.
“I don't have to coach them,” Auriemma said. “So I can say all the things I've always wanted to say about them. So I'm looking forward to it.”
Roberts remained close to the game after her Emmy Award-winning career as an ESPN broadcaster, celebrating the league’s successes and often sharing its biggest news on the morning show. Her Rock’n Robin Productions company announced a documentary on the expansion Toronto Tempo last week, and released one on late Tennessee head coach Pat Summitt earlier this year. She became an equity investor in the Liberty in October and is a regular at Liberty and Connecticut Sun games.
The journalist in her is taking the assignment seriously, to the point that she said she feels like a coach taping and rewatching games. Many of her GMA staffers, including one young producer, are massive WNBA fans there to help her in the lead-up.
Or maybe even on the air.
“It might be a little bit like ‘Devil Wears Prada,’ I might have a little earpiece in my ear with her feeding me some info,” Roberts said. “I know that there will be some heightened interest. The audience watching now, it's different. Before you could get away with maybe not knowing your stuff as much. This is a very, very savvy audience.”
When Roberts and Auriemma announced their first game together in 1997, it was the second game of those teams’ existence. Interest was high for a league hawked by NBA Commissioner David Stern, but dropped off in the 2000s as teams folded.
The environment is different even since the 25th anniversary. There will be a record 18 teams by 2030 as the league expands, including to a 50-game schedule next year. Viewership is at all-time highs, with games regularly nabbing 1 million viewers on various networks. A Fever-Liberty matchup in June set the 2026 high-water peak of 3.02 million. And social media takes everything to an entirely different level. Auriemma knows the only way they’ll make that many waves is if either of them says something “outrageous,” which he acquiesced might happen.
Roberts felt it was a disservice to the audience not to have a third, more seasoned veteran of the game in the booth. Mowins will be there to guide the ship, allowing Roberts and Auriemma to add “fun and some flavor,” Auriemma said, while reminiscing on how the league began and how it arrived here.
“I just want to be in the moment,” Roberts said. “I think that’s the thing that Geno and I really excelled at that time. I think sometimes you can get too much in your head.”
She’ll soak in the regular sight of a sold-out crowd at Barclays, recalling that not long ago, the top bowls of NBA arenas were curtained off due to low ticket sales. This year, more than half the league is averaging at least 10,000 fans per game, with four cracking the 14K mark, according to Across the Timeline. (Three teams are selling out arenas with a capacity of 7,000 or less.)
Auriemma won’t need to name-drop men to make his point.
“In order to legitimize what we were doing back then, we had to compare every player to an NBA player,” Auriemma said. “Now we can talk about them in their own right and compare them to each other, the great players in the league. So we've got a whole different script to work with now.”
Once they each heard the other had confirmed their nostalgia-fueled event, Roberts said they were more focused on where to eat dinner the night before and head out to drinks afterward. Auriemma may make notes on that dining napkin again. But unlike when he was simply trying to figure it all out 30 years ago, he can fall back on a wealth of knowledge.
Even if it still might careen off course.
“I do remember, one time, I said, ‘Hey, Robin, remember we went to lunch today at Roberto's? That's a great place, wasn't it?’” Auriemma said. “And you go, ‘Yeah, I really liked it.’ And [Corrigan] is in my ear going, ‘Shut the hell up and talk about the game.’
“Now that we are older, we can say whatever we want, Rob.”
Chipped in Roberts: “What are they going to do, fire us?”
“Yeah, what are they going to do,” Auriemma said, “fire us?”
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