WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) – The UNCW women’s basketball program will honor former two-sport star Dee Dee Toon Rivers with a luncheon on Tuesday, October the 7th, at the Wilmington Convention Center. Rivers, who passed away in April from congestive heart failure at the age of 47, played for the UNCW women’s basketball team and was a member of the women’s track and field program while attending the school from 1995-99.
“I knew Dee Dee, and when she passed, I think I really realized how many people loved Dee Dee in the Wilmington community, and the impact that she had in the community,” said Nicole Woods, third-year head coach of the women’s basketball team at UNCW. “You know, when I look back at her life and her career, she is what we want Seahawk student athletes to be. I just thought that was the right thing to do for her.”
As part of the program, Rivers’s daughter Saniya will be the guest speaker. Saniya grew up in Wilmington, playing basketball for Laney and Ashley High Schools, and was named the 2021 Gatorade National Player of the Year as a senior at Ashley, and was named a McDonald’s All-American following that season. She finished as the 16th ranked scorer in NCHSAA history with 2,501 points, and her teams lost just one conference game in four years. The Connecticut Sun of the WNBA drafted Rivers eighth overall after she led North Carolina State to the NCAA’s Sweet 16 in her senior collegiate season, finishing 28-7 and ranked ninth in the final Associated Press poll.
“In my conversations with her, I told her it wouldn’t be right to have anybody else other than her for the inaugural event,” Coach Woods said about Saniya being the keynote speaker for the luncheon. “Saniya Rivers grew up at UNCW. She’s a Seahawk through and through. I told her she’s an honorary Seahawk. She was thrilled to death for us to name this after her mom and for her to be the speaker.”
Attendees will also learn about the team that Coach Woods has assembled for her third season at the helm of the Seahawk program. Eight players return from the 2024-25 team that finished with a 14-18 record, winning nine games more than the previous season and advancing into the second round of the Coastal Athletic Association tournament. The 2025-26 season begins with a home exhibition game against Barton College on October 29.
“We talk about getting one percent better every single day,” Woods says about her current team. “There’s nobody in our locker room that was happy with our season last year. We let probably four or five games slip that if we win, we end up being second or third place in conference play. So, we expect to win every single game that we that we play. I do think that we’ve got the pieces. Our guards are some of the best in the conference and we’ve got some posts that have just been injured that just haven’t had an opportunity to play that I think a lot of people are going to be really excited about.”
Tickets and sponsorship opportunities are available for the inaugural Dee Dee Toon Rivers Basketball Luncheon, presented by the UNCW Women’s Basketball program. It will begin at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 7 at the Wilmington Convention Center. Tickets are free, and anyone interested in attending can contact UNCW Assistant Director of Athletic Development Operations, Samantha Cleary, at clearys@uncw.edu or 910-962-7737 for more information and to RSVP.
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