My favorite professional team since I was 9 got re-located and all I got was an email
About 75% of my life dedicated to this franchise over with an email. Okay, dramatic. They had a whole farewell tour "Sunset Season", but still.
It's a weird feeling. Being from Connecticut growing up with no professional sports teams you kind of get the autonomy to pick any team regardless of location unless your parents anoint you with a fandom. After years of watching Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi collect championships at UConn like Infinity Stones, I was basketball obsessed. At the same time, between NBA 2K6 and watching Steve Nash, Amar'e Stoudemire, and Shawn Marion, I was becoming a Phoenix Suns fan. Naturally, I started begging my mom to take me to a Suns game.
There was, of course, one small logistical problem: we lived in Connecticut.
But my mom, being the woman she is, was going to figure something out. She heard "my kid wants to see professional basketball" and got to work. She turned to her coworkers, who served as her sports consultants. These were already trusted sources. My jersey closet was stacked largely thanks to them: what would now be considered a vintage LeBron Cavaliers jersey, an LT Chargers jersey. You name it, I probably had some version of it.
And as luck would have it, one of those coworkers had season tickets. Not to the Phoenix Suns...to the Connecticut Sun. So sometime around 2004 or 2005, my mom finally took me to see professional basketball. I didn't get Nash, Stoudemire and Marion. I got way better. I got Nykesha Sales, Lindsay Whalen, Asjha Jones, Katie Douglas, Taj McWilliams-Franklin, and eventually Margo Dydek.
Turns out, Mom did pretty damn well.
The problem is I now have a hole in my heart the size of Mohegan Sun Arena and I'm a free agent. It didn't need to be like this. As it has been stated a length, the Mohegan Sun had received higher offers to buy the team from Boston and even a willingness to move the team to the state capitol with promise of a larger investment of resources such as a workout facility. But no, it seems the powers that be had other plans in mind. Houston got the chance to once again house one of the original 8 teams. I'm happy the city gets to have a team again, but sad that it came at the expense of Sun. New England deserves a frickin' team. We invented the sport (shoutout fellow SC alum James Naismith) and proceeded to perfect it (shoutout Storrs). Unfortunately, greed and personal interests will seemingly always prevail in the sports business.
Honestly, writing this in hopes it makes me feel better, but the fact of the matter is I will always be that 9 year old girl watching Nykesha Sales, Lindsay Whalen, and Asjha Jones alongside her immigrant mom learning the game together in section 115. And even though I never got to see them win a championship, I will always have the fact that I got to love the game before Everyone Watches Women's Sports was trendy. Before the sold-out arenas, expansion fees, celebrity investors (and disruptors), charter flights, debates about valuations, and all the new nonsense.
Don't get me wrong. I wanted this growth and still do, but I want these athletes to be appreciated for what they bring to the game both on and off the court. Women's sports deserve every dollar, every facility, every sold-out arena, every expansion team, and attention through direct access. I just never imagined that getting everything I wanted for the game would mean losing my damn team.
Who the hell do I root for now?!?
