By Will Despart
The Sporting Tribune

The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award.

Throughout the last three decades, you could make a significant argument that the epicenter of college basketball has been located in Storrs, Connecticut. Between the men’s and women’s programs, the university has accrued a whopping 18 national championships since 1995, with six of those championships coming from the men’s side.

You can trace most of UConn’s modern success back to the 1989-90 men’s basketball season, when a fourth-year coach from Braintree, Mass. named Jim Calhoun led the Huskies to their first conference championship and NCAA tournament berth in 11 years. UConn finished 31-6 that season and lost to Duke in the Elite 8, though Calhoun earned consensus National Coach of the Year Honors.

In large part because of the momentum that Calhoun accrued for the University in that 1989-90 season, both he and women’s coach Geno Auriemma spent the 90s building programs that would largely come to define the current era of college basketball. While Auriemma beat him to the punch with a Final Four appearance in 1991 and a national championship in 1995, Calhoun didn’t take long to meet his colleague (and rival) at the top of his profession in 1999.

That season, Calhoun avenged his loss to Mike Kryzewski and Duke in the 1990 by downing the Blue Devils in one of the great national championship game upsets ever. Duke entered that game as 9.5 point favorites riding a 32-game winning streak, but it didn’t matter as UConn and Calhoun pulled out a 77-74 win in a nail-biting finish.

That moment catapulted the men’s program, not unlike the way the 1995 championship catapulted the women. The 2004 Huskies, led by Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon, started the season atop the national polls en route to their second national title. That team featured four NBA lottery selections and six first-round picks and is remembered as one of the most complete rosters in NCAA history.

In 2005, Calhoun was honored for his contributions to college basketball with his reception of that year’s John R. Wooden Legend of Coaches Award.

Calhoun wasn’t done, however, earning his third and final national title on the ever-so-memorable 2011 team led by “Cardiac Kemba” Walker. After going 9-9 during Big East regular season play, the Huskies ripped off five wins in five days to win the Big East Tournament and then ran through the NCAA tournament as a No. 3 seed, beating Brad Stevens and Butler in the national title game in Calhoun’s last great triumph.

Calhoun retired from his post at UConn in 2012 after a turbulent repeat attempt was secondary to the legendary coach’s health issues. Since his retirement, the program went on a similarly unbelieveable run to the title under Kevin Ollie in 2014 and has since become the defining program in the sport within the last five years with back-to-back championships in 2023 and 2024 and potentially another on the horizon under Dan Hurley.