Standing before his team in the locker room of the Target Center in Minneapolis on April 2, 1995, head coach Geno Auriemma told his players that the University of Connecticut could make history as an unbeaten team if they won the 1995 NCAA women's basketball championship. The team had compiled a 34-0 record. He asked for ...

"As we were doing it, we had no idea what the significance of it was,” Auriemma says of the 1994-95 season. “We were just trying to win games, and it took on a life of its own. It’s still amazing to me when I look back at the magnitude of it all. None of us would have imagined the impact it would have over time.”

A decade later, having won four more NCAA titles—including three consecutive championships between 2002 and 2004—the significance of the 1995 UConn title can be seen not only as a historic turning point for the sport of women’s basketball but also for its role in drawing attention to women’s athletics in general.

“Before 1995, there was already movement to create women’s professional basketball,” says Peter Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, “but UConn’s undefeated season really propelled it.

“Nothing like this had happened in women’s basketball before. You had an enormously successful coach. You had personalities who captured the public imagination. You had an undefeated team. And it was all going on right in the back yard of major media. It was the perfect storm.”

Little more than a year after the Huskies’ unprecedented victory, there were not one but two women’s professional leagues—the American Basketball League and the WNBA. Rebecca Lobo ’95 (CLAS), the Academic All-American who led the Huskies, became an icon for young girls, many of whom who wore UConn jerseys with her number 50. A Rhodes scholarship candidate, Lobo would make history as a member of the U.S. women’s basketball team that distinguished itself—on the 20th anniversary of the first appearance by women in Olympic basketball competition—by winning gold at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. She then became one of the nation’s first professional female basketball players in the WNBA.

Champions Reunion The 1995 NCAA championship team reunited for the first time when it was honored during the 2005 Big East Tournament at the Hartford Civic Center on March 6. Front row (L-R): Kim Better-Thompson ’96 (ENG), Carla Berube ’97 (CLAS), Kelley Hunt-Gay ’98 (CLAS) and Pam Webber-Mitchell ’95 (ED), ’98 (BUS). Back row: assistant coach Tonya Cardozza, head coach Geno Auriemma, associate head coach Chris Dailey, assistant coach Meghan Pattyson-Culmo ’92 (CLAS), Jennifer Rizzotti-Sullivan ’96 (CLAS), Kara Wolters ’97 (CLAS), Brenda Marquis-Wilson ’99 (CLAS), Sarah Northway-Maria ’97 (CLAS), Jill Gelfenbien ’95 (SFS), Rebecca Lobo-Rushin ’95 (CLAS), Missy Rose ’97 (ED), Nykesha Sales ’98 (BUS) and Jamelle Elliott ’96 (ED), ’97 M.A.

“The 1995 season was an extraordinarily important one for UConn,” says Jeffrey Hathaway, UConn director of athletics. “Certainly it was a tremendous validation of the quality of our program, and it provided exposure for a variety of women’s teams around the country. Our women’s basketball team became nationally recognized and Rebecca Lobo became an icon in women’s athletics.”

The 1996 Olympics provided women’s team sports with their greatest spotlight to date. In addition to winning the basketball gold medal, teams of U.S. women also won gold in soccer and, for the first time ever, in softball. Almost 35 percent of the competitors in Atlanta were women, compared to barely 20 percent in the 1976 games in Montreal, and they won a record 19 team medals. Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly and the other members of the U.S. women’s soccer team became role models for young girls. By 2002, women’s professional leagues in soccer, volleyball and football joined the women’s pro basketball leagues.

“It takes 20 years to make an Olympic athlete,” observes Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “The women who competed in Atlanta in 1996 were the first generation of Olympians to have grown up as full beneficiaries of Title IX.”

Title IX is the landmark federal legislation that greatly expanded educational and athletics opportunities for girls and women. Until its passage, in 1972, girls and women had limited resources and opportunities to compete in high school or collegiate athletics. In 1973, the first year of Title IX, only 13,000 U.S. high school girls played basketball, and there were just 30,000 women participating in NCAA-sponsored intercollegiate sports, scarcely 15 percent of college student athletes. That was the same year the Lobo family of Southwick, Mass., celebrated the birth of a baby girl they named Rebecca.

“Even at the collegiate level, many women’s teams played in auxiliary gyms and antiquated facilities,” says Roby, describing women’s basketball in those days. “They often dressed in hand-me-down uniforms.”

“When I was in high school, we didn’t practice in the same gym that we played in until the day before the game,” says Chris Dailey, UConn’s associate head coach for women’s basketball. “When I played at Rutgers (1978-82), we didn’t split time in the gym with the men’s team, the way we do today at Gampel Pavilion.”

Lopiano says that after Title IX was approved, the women’s basketball programs able to jump out to a lead were at universities that already had separately administered programs. Texas, Iowa, Tennessee and Minnesota excelled in those early years.

“Schools like UConn had to wait for the right coach and the right time,” she says.

For UConn, that coach would be Auriemma, who arrived in 1985 and inherited a team that had enjoyed just one winning season in its 11-year history. By 1987 he had them winning routinely. Their first Big East regular season championship came in 1989.

It would take six more years before the women’s basketball team would reach the level of respect and great success that it was destined to find. Today, the widespread popularity of women’s college basketball stands as a tribute to the watershed moment created by UConn’s 1995 championship team:

• In 1997 the number of girls who registered for AAU basketball tournaments passed the number of boys playing basketball for the first time, according to a 2004 Women’s Sports Foundation report.
  
• Participation in basketball by females age 6 and older was 11 million in 1987, growing to 13.3 million in 1995. The following year, it jumped more than 28 percent to 14.1 million. Today, basketball is the most popular high school girl’s sport.
  
• UConn led all Division I women’s basketball teams in all game attendance (home, road and neutral sites) during the 2003-04 season with 392,692 fans. All NCAA women’s basketball attendance has more than doubled since 1995, when attendance was 4.9 million. In 1996, attendance moved to 5.2 million and in 2003 it passed the 10 million mark for the first time.
  
• The 2004 NCAA championship game between UConn and Tennessee was the most-watched basketball game ever on ESPN as fans anticipated seeing the unprecedented achievement of UConn’s winning two NCAA championships on consecutive nights.

“The women’s basketball championship in 1995 coincided with the beginning of UCONN 2000 and the transformation of the entire University,” says Hathaway. “Our athletic programs provide the University with another national forum for visibility regarding everything that’s happening throughout the entire institution. The student-athletes who were the essence of that 1995 team can take pride in knowing that what they achieved touched so many lives and provided so many opportunities for other young women that it will always stand as a key moment in the history of their sport.”

Early in August of 1994, three months before the start of 1994-95 season, the sophomores, juniors and seniors who would anchor the UConn women’s basketball team were summoned back to Storrs. There was an air of urgency at Gampel Pavilion. Head coach Geno Auriemma was introducing a new offense.

Built around his twin towers, Kara Wolters ’97 (CLAS) and Rebecca Lobo ’95 (CLAS), the new system offered tremendous flexibility for UConn’s talented point guard, Jen Rizzotti ’96 (CLAS). And it was hard to defend. But it hinged on precise coordination, and the team had only seven days to learn it, before they would board a plane for Paris and games in France, Italy and Belgium to test themselves against seasoned teams made up of proven players. The Huskies returned home both victorious and battle-tested.

“That trip was really important,” says Carla Berube ’97 (CLAS), now head women’s basketball coach at Tufts University. “In Europe we soon found out that, player for player, we were stronger than we’d been the year before. That trip helped us to bond quickly. We played really hard over there. When we came back to Storrs, the chemistry was good. We were ready.”

With methodical, unanswerable dominance of the competition in November and December, the Huskies set the tone for the 1994-95 season. With each game they got incrementally better, but no one was taking anything for granted.

On Jan. 16, 1995, the first nationally televised Martin Luther King Jr. Day women’s basketball broadcast, the No. 2 ranked Huskies played No. 1 ranked Tennessee for the first time ever at Gampel Pavilion. In an unprecedented move, the Associated Press Top 25 Poll was delayed by one day to await the outcome of a game.

Led by Wolters’ 18 points and five blocked shots and Rizzotti’s 17 points and five steals, the Huskies beat Tennessee to capture the number one spot and launched a rivalry that simmers to this day.

“That’s when we realized we might be able to run the table, at least in the regular season,” says Rizzotti, now head women’s basketball coach at the University of Hartford.

The trail that began in Europe ended on April 2 at the Target Center in Minneapolis. Poetically, it came down to a rematch with Tennessee. During the pre-game stretching, the Tennessee players spread over the mid-court line into UConn’s space. Rizzotti, mindful of the Tennessee players’ intimidation tactics, told them to move out of UConn’s side of the court.

In the locker room before the national championship game, Auriemma’s pep talk was eloquently simple. “To Tennessee it would be another ‘W,’” he recalls telling the players. “If we win, we have a chance to go into the history books as an undefeated team.”

The rest became history. For 40 minutes the two best teams in the country battled. Tennessee led 38-32 at halftime and Lobo, in foul trouble, had scored only six points. But in the second half, she put 11 on the scoreboard. Rizzotti finished with 15, and Jamelle Elliott ’96 (ED), ’97 M.A. added 13 more.

When it was over, the score was UConn 70, Tennessee 64. And nothing in women’s basketball would ever be the same.

— Jim H. Smith

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