Cindy Blodgett is 49 years old, more than 20 years removed from her playing career. She's now the athletic director and girls basketball coach at Lincoln School in Rhode Island, where she just led the program to its first RIIL Division 3 state championship.
But the reminders of her celebrity status in Maine never go away. When Blodgett played in the early years of the WNBA for the Cleveland Rockers, she routinely received flowers sent from a random fan. Even today, Blodgett gets basketball cards sent to her to sign — many from corrections facilities, she notes, and sometimes directly to her home address. The tributes range from flattering to uncomfortably out of bounds for the admittedly introverted star.
"I have routinely been in multiple places where people recognize me, come up and talk to me. Or (I've) been at a restaurant eating and look across the restaurant and see someone taking a photo from afar," Blodgett said.
Blodgett gained arguably the most devoted following of any New England girls hooper ever during her high school and college careers. Even Cooper Flagg, the other phenom from Maine, didn't have multiple books written about him in high school like Blodgett.
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The love was well-earned. Blodgett is Maine's all-time leading high-school scorer (boys or girls) with 2,596 points. The Clinton native then eschewed some of college basketball's powerhouses to stay home at UMaine and became the only New England Division 1 hooper ever (men's or women's) to eclipse 3,000 career points, winding up the sixth overall pick in the 1998 WNBA Draft. But as much as Blodgett appreciated the support, she was not naturally drawn to the spotlight that constantly shined on her.
"When you say celebrity-type, that is not what I felt like," she said. "I really felt like someone who loved basketball (and) playing the sport, and but I was not seeking attention. I actually often felt really uncomfortable by it, in the sense of I was sensitive towards my teammates. I certainly recognize that basketball is a very team-oriented sport. I was fortunate enough to experience a great deal of success and winning at both the high school level and even in college, so I was really appreciative of that, but it was not lost on me that this was not me doing it by myself."
Blodgett's upbringing has been chronicled many times over. She idolized Larry Bird as a child, first picked up a basketball at age 3 and never looked back. Blodgett immediately stepped on the high school court as a star, leading Lawrence to four state championships and a cumulative 84-4 in her four-year career. In those four years, she captured the fandom of an entire basketball-crazed state. Maine had always televised its state championships, but Lawrence played in the first televised regular season game in state history during Blodgett's senior year.
"We had some games in there that were (so) packed you had to put people in with shoe horns, and if somebody had to go to the bathroom, 50 people had to stand up,” Blodgett's high school coach, Bruce Cooper, told the Kennebec Journal in 2021. “It was absolutely deafening.”
Blodgett, under Cooper's guidance, joined a state AAU team to get some national exposure, traveling to Tennessee and New Mexico for tournaments. Soon some of college basketball's great coaches, like Muffet McGraw at Notre Dame and Ceal Berry at Colorado, were trekking up north to watch Lawrence's championship games along with 5,000-plus spectators.
"It was at a time when it was somewhat unusual, and so it was kind of cool too," Blodgett said. "It was good for girls basketball (and) high school basketball. I think it probably made my teammates kind of excited too, that the game was growing right in front of our eyes."
Notre Dame, Colorado and Maine were Blodgett's top three schools. In many ways, Maine's underdog status in the recruiting race was why Blodgett chose the school. She says the hometown appeal wasn't what sold her on the Black Bears, but rather her relationship with head coach Joanne Palumbo McCallie.
"She was really aligned with what my ambition (and) what my goals were that I wanted to accomplish as a player," Blodgett said. "And so because of that, when the process was coming to the end for me, I was like, I want to play for a coach, a) that gets me, b) who is going to challenge me to get better, but also, the school that represents the biggest challenge — which was really trying to help a school kind of get put on the map for girls basketball and had never made it to the NCAA Tournament. It never averaged more than, like, 800 fans at a game for a season. So there were a lot of reasons not to choose it. Quite frankly, it would have been a lot easier, in some ways, to go where a school is a bit more established."
Blodgett aced that test by all accounts. She racked up four Kodak All-American honors, led the nation in scoring twice, and most importantly, helped Maine to its first four NCAA Tournament appearances. By now, Blodgett's following had turned to reverance. Maine athletics considered selling Cindy Blodgett dolls; Blodgett shot the idea down, preferring simpler merch like pencils, shirts and socks. Stephen King regularly attended the routine sellout home games; his wife Tabitha wrote one of the two aforementioned books on Blodgett while she was in high school.
"I used to stand in Alfond (Arena) in a space outside the locker room before the games and I could look out the window and see the cars coming down the road,” said McCallie in 2018. “It was amazing upon Cindy’s commitment to come to Maine how the cars just kept coming, the headlights just kept coming.”
At the start of her senior year Blodgett had to declare one of two pathways for going pro. The first option was the American Basketball League, which included a K.C. Jones-coached New England Blizzard franchise where players could buy into revenue sharing from the league. The alternative was the third-year WNBA, which had more stable backing from the NBA and soaring early popularity. Blodgett picked the latter and tested herself in a pivotal pre-draft camp. She soon got a phone call that she would be a projected lottery pick and flew down to New Jersey for the draft, where Cleveland selected her sixth overall.
"I say this like not not cocky or arrogant way, but I knew I played really well, and I more than held my own with all of the players that were coming out in the draft," Blodgett said. "That was great, because a lot of those coaches hadn't seen me play against some of those other players that came from bigger teams. So to be able to go down there and be dominant, I knew obviously that that would help me. So when I got the call that I was a projected lottery pick, I knew that was really based on how I performed against some of those quote-unquote bigger names."
Blodgett never found consistent footing as a pro, suiting up for two seasons apiece with the Rockets and Sacramento Monarchs. But she still marveled at the huge crowds in nearly every city she played as the country buzzed with inital WNBA excitement.
Following her playing career, Blodgett turned to coaching, first assisting at Brown and BU before getting the head coaching job at Maine. She didn't click in the same way — Maine went 24-94 in her four years — but the state never stopped supporting her.
Now Blodgett has put some more distance between her past limelight and quietly admires women's basketball's growth. She watches the WNBA with her son, and like many, believes the players deserve higher salaries. When Blodgett was growing up, her dream was to play on the Celtics because she had no pro league to aspire to.
"Now you have young girls, when they're introduced to the sport of basketball, they immediately know that they have an opportunity to make this their livelihood," she said. "Now, you and I know it's less than one percent that will ever have the opportunity to do it, so the odds are not in your favor. But the fact that you can hang on a glimmer of hope — that if that is the direction you want to go, and you're fortunate enough to have enough talent to do it, you know you can do it."
