UConn coach Geno Auriemma won his 12th national championship in April to extend his lead as the most successful women's college basketball coach of all time. Just behind him is former Tennessee Volunteers coach Pat Summitt, who won eight national championships in her 38-year career at the helm.Summitt and Auriemma shared an intense rivalry as they battled for college basketball supremacy. The rivalry spilled off the court, and in her book, "Sum It Up," released in 2013, she detailed how her relationship with the Huskies coach deteriorated to the point that the UConn-Tennessee series was canceled."My home phone rang," Summitt wrote. "It was Geno. In retrospect, that was the moment when friendship and alliance should have prevailed. Each of us should have said, 'Let's talk this through and solve this. What are your concerns?' But we had long passed the point of being able to talk that way. Instead, it was hostile and defensive from the start."Geno made an opening remark. 'Geno, you and I both know we aren't playing by the same rules,' I said. The conversation only lasted a minute or so more. It mainly consisted of him saying that he hoped to see us in the NCAA Tournament, so 'I can kick your ass.' But we never played again."According to a November 2019 ESPN article, Tennessee announced in June 2007 that it would no longer play UConn in the regular season but never gave a reason. The article quoted Auriemma as saying, "She accused us of cheating. She just doesn't have the courage to say it publicly."According to the ESPN story, "it would be reported that Tennessee made a complaint to the SEC about UConn's recruiting tactics."A Sports Illustrated story from February 2013, providing excerpts from Pat Summitt's book, detailed Summitt giving her side of a relationship that frayed over the years and broke over recruiting. However, Summitt declined to "itemize my complaints publicly."When Geno Auriemma compared Pat Summitt to men's college basketball coaching greatsBetween them, Geno Auriemma and Pat Summitt won 20 national championships, far ahead of their peers, and during a news conference in 2023, the UConn Huskies coach credited the former Tennessee Volunteers coach with helping to elevate his team to new levels."We helped each other," Auriemma said. "Coaching against Pat and having Pat in the league, or in the world of women's basketball, was like Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski and John Wooden."It was probably the first and only classic women's basketball rivalry on the level of North Carolina and Duke ... Steelers-Cowboys and Yankees-Red Sox and Auburn-Alabama and right there, UConn-Tennessee women's basketball. I mean, to be put in that context with those other rivalries ... it became something really special."Auriemma won his first national title in 1995 by beating Summitt's Tennessee and won five of their six Final Four clashes. By the time Summitt retired in 2012, she was the most successful women's college basketball coach with eight national titles.But since then, Auriemma has won five more titles to overtake her and is showing no signs of retiring after ending his nine-year national championship drought in April.