UConn women’s basketball has won more championships than any other Division I team.
The 12 they’ve won came over a span of 31 years—about 39 percent of the time they won it all over that stretch, while finishing in the top 10 of the final AP poll 100 percent of the time. Every player who has come through Geno Auriemma’s program since the first title in 1995 has had good reason to hope that they could win at least one.
So, it was inevitable that a film would be made about Auriemma’s tenure, and now
the docuseries is here.
Executive produced and directed by Matthew Hamachek and Erica Sashin, “The Dynasty: UConn Huskies” debuts globally on Apple TV on Friday, Aug. 21.
What wasn’t guaranteed was that the filmmakers would capture a full-circle moment.
Hamachek and Sashin stepped into UConn’s world at the beginning of the 2025 calendar year. At the time, the Huskies had two losses on the season: to then-No. 8 Notre Dame and then-No. 7 USC. Those defeats had caused them to fall to No. 7 in the nation.
They were outside the top five. Their national championship drought was nine years long. Sure, they had a shot at winning it all. But given how hard it is to be that one team left standing at the end of the season, it appeared the docuseries would celebrate the still-unbelievable first 11 championships.
Yet, things worked out in fairy-tale fashion, with the Huskies dominating their national semifinal by 34 points and the final by 23 points to claim No. 12, ensuring star Paige Bueckers would be leaving Storrs as a champion.
“It didn’t seem like when we signed on that there was any great hope of a national championship in the future,” Hamachek told Swish Appeal.
He elaborated:
And I don’t think that Erica or I are real UConn fans necessarily; we’re not obsessed with women’s basketball. But I think it really benefitted us. I think when you have that perspective and you’re not entirely focused on the story, you focus on what makes these things universal. The basketball and the championships and how the team’s doing is less important than finding these characters and what makes what they’re doing recognizable to anybody who’s watching, whether they like sports or not.
“We really set out to tell the story of this enduring dynasty without the expectation that they were going to win in 2025,” Sashin added. “And it was incredible that they did, especially after a nine-year drought.”
The series is split into three episodes. The first focuses on Rebecca Lobo’s recruitment and the program’s build up to its first national championship run in 1995.
The second tells the story of the Sue Bird-Diana Taurasi era, as well as Geno’s early life and how that shaped him as a coach. Viewers will get to see behind-the-scenes footage and hear from Auriemma, Lobo, Bird, Taurasi and a number of other UConn greats about what those early years of the dynasty were like, when the program began to contend with the greatness of the Tennessee Lady Volunteers and their head coach Pat Summitt. And the second episode, of course, completes the full story by showing celebrations from Maya Moore’s two and Breanna Stewart’s four championships that brought the total to 11.
The third episode begins in Hopkins, MN with the recruitment of Bueckers, and takes us through the injury adversity UConn faced in the 2020s. It then gives us an in-depth look at the 2025 season, and, in eerie fashion, the program that was once the most intimidating and unbeatable force in all of sports is not denied during the season Hamachek and Sashin chose.
Sashin said her favorite part of making the film was “getting to speak with some of the most incredible players and women and athletes out there.” She explained:
That’s really one of the things that drew me to want to do this in the first place. It was just really a privilege to sit across from them and learn about their experience (at UConn) and their personal growth and what it was like to be a player under Geno—the struggles, and, really in all the cases, the eventual self-realization.
Hamachek echoed Sashin’s sentiments, and added that “to be able to witness (UConn) accomplishing their dream and to be on the court with them at that time I think was also just extraordinary.”
“Because a lot of these sports docs, you’re coming in long after they’re over and telling the story; you don’t get to actually be embedded with the team. So that was really special.”
From watching the series, viewers will learn a great deal about both Auriemma and Summitt, and what makes them two of the most fascinating figures in women’s basketball history. Viewers will also get to hear what Bueckers was really going through during the adversity she faced in her five years in Storrs, beyond her obvious, surface-level desire to win a championship.
From covering Auriemma’s belief from the beginning that women deserved the same respect and hard coaching as men to the rivalry between Auriemma and Summitt to Auriemma’s emotional reaction to Summitt’s passing to the utter dominance of Taurasi to the pressure on Bueckers to live up to her talent and the UConn mystique, the series delivers an epic time capsule that is all too appropriate and needed given all of UConn’s accomplishments, as well as how the program and the stars it has produced have impacted gender equality in basketball and beyond.
Here is Swish Appeal’s full interview with Hamachek and Sashin:
