Welcome to Hoop Queens, a new series spotlighting some of New England's women's basketball legends. This series aims to show the history of women's basketball in the region through the stories of its all-time greatest talents. Follow along as we learn about who helped grow the game to where it is today.
In a way, it all started with a massive coffee maker and some hot dogs.
Linda Wooster, one of five founders of the Connecticut Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, was in the basement of a building at Southern Connecticut State University, helping prepare refreshments to sell at a baseball card show in an effort to fundraise enough money for the organization to put on its first gala.
“We didn’t have anything big enough to cook hot dogs in for that many people, so we cooked them in a 100-cup coffee pot,” Wooster said. “Talk about the saying, ‘from humble beginnings.’ We couldn’t get any more humble than we were.”
Wooster and the organization’s other four founders pulled together enough money to honor the first group of inductees in April 1988.
Jennifer Rizzotti, who was inducted in 2001 thanks to her illustrious career as both a player and a coach, remains one of the organization’s most decorated honorees. But she didn’t stop there.
Thirty-seven years after the founding of the first state women’s basketball hall of fame in the country, the sport is bigger than ever within Connecticut and throughout the Northeast.
Rizzotti — Fairfield, Conn., high school phenom, UConn legend and now Connecticut Sun president — is at the forefront of it all.
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UConn women’s basketball was getting its share of local attention in 1995. It wasn’t just mobs of students showing up to home games—the Huskies were gaining a national stage.
The rivalry matchup between UConn and Tennessee on Martin Luther King day was aired in a primetime slot on ESPN as the buzz surrounding women’s basketball grew to an unprecedented level.
Rizzotti, the starting point guard for the Huskies at the time, helped her team to a win that day as the nation watched.
“That was the start of it,” Wooster said. “That was the start of women’s basketball in Connecticut.”
A few months later, Rizzotti helped bring home the program’s first championship as UConn beat the Volunteers again, this time in the NCAA Tournament, capping off a perfect 35-0 season.
“TV was airing a little bit more women’s basketball, newspaper was definitely carrying more articles,” Wooster said. “I think UConn pretty much forced the hand of newspaper.”
High school basketball in Connecticut prepared Rizzotti for the NCAA level. She graduated from New Fairfield in 1992 as the Connecticut Gatorade Player of the Year, a two-time state champion and a 2,000-point scorer (spanning three years at New Fairfield and a freshman season when her family lived in Japan). Rizzotti also played AAU basketball at the same time as other Connecticut legends like future Huskies teammate Nykesha Sales.
When it came time to go to college, Rizzotti knew she wanted to stay close to family. That narrowed down her options to Providence, UConn, and Rutgers.
Providence and UConn were battling to sit at the top of the Big East, but the Huskies, led by seventh-year coach Geno Auriemma, were coming off their first ever Final Four appearance.
“You could just sense that they were on the rise, and that they were kind of on the cusp of doing something great,” Rizzotti said. “And I wanted to be a part of that.”
It wasn’t just recent success that drew Rizzotti to UConn, though. The future looked pretty good, too.
“(UConn) had signed Rebecca (Lobo), and that was a big selling point for me,” Rizzotti said. “As a point guard, I wanted to make sure that my opportunity to play and make an impact was going to be great — but also that I was going to have good players around me.”
The potential was alluring, but Rizzotti took Auriemma’s consistent communication to heart. He even visited Rizzotti’s home during the recruitment process.
“I say this all the time about Geno: I think one of his biggest strengths is building relationships,” Rizzotti said. “As good as he is as a coach, and motivating us on the floor, I think the fact that he can be so hard on us and get the best out of us is because he put the time in to get to know who we were as people.”
Rizzotti’s decorated UConn career includes 1,540 career points, 637 assists (fourth in program history) and 350 steals (third in program history. She earned AP Player of the Year honors in 1995-96 as a senior during the Huskies' title run.
After graduating in 1996, Rizzotti went on to play professionally for eight years. The Houston Comets selected her in the fourth round of the 1999 WNBA Draft and she won two WNBA championships with the franchise.
The lessons she picked up at UConn that went beyond the X’s and O’s — especially lessons about recruiting and building relationships — came in handy not long after she graduated. At just 25 years old and with no collegiate coaching experience under her belt, Rizzotti was offered the women’s head coach position at Hartford.
“I don’t think that there would have been many athletic directors in the country that would have hired a 25-year-old with no experience if they hadn’t been watching me grow up in my career at UConn,” Rizzotti said.
She spent 17 years at Hartford, earning America East Coach of the Year honors three times and leading the Hawks to the NCAA tournament six times. She also found massive success coaching with Team USA women's basketball.
“I think Jen’s contribution is just sort of an understated one, as probably one of the most incredible role models that any woman in athletics could have, because she’s done it all,” Wooster said. “She’s coached at the collegiate level, she’s coached internationally, she’s played internationally, and she’s been a wife and a mother while doing it. She just checks off every box of what a young woman in athletics can aspire to. I mean, you could have it all. You could do it all.”
After spending three years coaching at George Washington, Rizzotti stepped away from coaching. Basketball, in a different way, had called her back to Connecticut.
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Similar to when she was hired at 25 to coach at Hartford, Rizzotti says her reputation in the Connecticut basketball community helped her get a job in the Sun’s front office.
“I don’t think it was always intentional, but certainly opportunities arose in my career because of my success at UConn,” Rizzotti said. “And so when those opportunities, those doors opened for me, I just made sure that I was prepared to walk through them.”
Rizzotti's perspective and goals have shifted over the course of her career, as she’s begun to think more about the legacy she wants to leave.
“I look at it as now, now it’s my job to not just look at my own personal opportunity for advancement,” Rizzotti said. “But to make sure that I’m preparing the next generation of women to be leaders in this sport.”
The Sun’s games at TD Garden are part of Rizzotti’s lasting legacy. Connecticut played in the first ever women’s professional basketball game held in the arena in August 2024, delivering a sellout event in a victory over the Los Angeles Sparks.
The Sun will pay another visit to the Garden on July 15, this time to take on the Indiana Fever. Playing in a regional cultural hub like Boston is an opportunity for the franchise to reach more fans spread throughout New England.
“We do want to be considered New England’s team,” Rizzotti said. “And so we do feel like we need to have a presence in the area.”
New England is hungry for women’s basketball, according to Rizzotti.
“It’s a city and a fan base that values professional sports and winning, and it’s a region that is craving women’s basketball,” Rizzotti said.
Rizzotti has been satisfying the region’s hunger since the 1990s, when she helped UConn create excitement for the sport like never before.
“It’s given me the opportunity to go to college for free, to build my career as a player and a coach,” Rizzotti said. “The fans of Connecticut and New England supported my career in a way that allowed me to play at the highest level. And so it’s pretty easy for me now, in this point in my career, to look for opportunities to give back to the community that gave me so much.”
