Dick and Kathy Geltzer pose with a Connecticut Sun flag at their home in Wethersfield on April 1, 2026.
Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
Nearly two dozen times a year, Dick and Kathy Geltzer, both 80 years old, journey from their Wethersfield home down to Mohegan Sun casino to cheer on the Connecticut Sun from Section 13, behind the home team’s bench.
The Geltzers have had season tickets since the WNBA team arrived in Connecticut in 2003, barely missing a game in that time. They’ve marveled at generations of Sun players and become close with fellow fans over the years.
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But after this summer, when the Sun leave Connecticut for Houston, it will be all over.
“We planned most of our vacations around the games, we took our grandkids to games, our kids to games, friends to games,” Dick Geltzer said last week. “It’ll leave a big void.”
“I’m just so sad inside, I really am,” Kathy Geltzer said. “I love our team. I love our Connecticut Sun organization.”
The Sun will become the latest in a long line of professional sports franchises to leave Connecticut, wounding thousands of diehard fans in the process. The state again will find itself without a top-level professional team in any sport, with no obvious path to attracting a new one.
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Christine Pattee is a longtime Connecticut Sun fan coping with the looming loss of the team to Houston. She’s seen here with her Sun gear at her home in Coventry on April 1, 2026.
Jim Michaud/Hearst Connecticut Media
Christine Pattee is a longtime Connecticut Sun fan coping with the looming loss of the team to Houston. She’s seen here with her Sun gear at her home in Coventry on April 1, 2026.
Jim Michaud/Hearst Connecticut Media
Even at the minor-league level, Connecticut has had only mixed results. Days before the Sun’s departure became official, the NHL’s New York Islanders announced its AHL affiliate would move from Bridgeport to Hamilton, Ontario, another hit to the state’s sports landscape.
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It’s no great mystery why Connecticut can’t keep top-level sports teams, experts say. Even its largest population centers are smaller than most major-league metro areas, meaning less potential attendance and fewer people watching on television. From a league’s perspective, there’s almost always a better option.
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“It strikes me that if it’s a choice between the Connecticut Sun market, which is questionable in its size and strength, and a team in Houston, then it’s pretty clear that it would make sense for the league to push for Houston,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.
Christine Pattee is a longtime Connecticut Sun fan coping with the looming loss of the team to Houston. She’s seen here with her dog, Foxy, and her Sun gear at her home in Coventry on April 1, 2026.
Jim Michaud/Hearst Connecticut Media
With the Sun and Islanders departing, Connecticut sports fans are left to mourn the loss of their beloved teams. They’re also left to confront the suspicion that their state simply isn’t major-league – an idea that has hovered over the state since the NHL’s Hartford Whalers departed in the late 1990s.
“It’s very much a throughline that we as a state and we as residents have been trying to wrestle with for the last 30 years,” said Matthew Barry, a Connecticut resident who studies and writes about sports fandom. “Are we worthy for this marker of being a city that’s worth watching?”
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Gov. Ned Lamont, who pursued several attempts to keep the Sun, said last week the combination of Houston’s advantage as a TV market and the NBA’s preference for WNBA teams in existing NBA markets ultimately doomed efforts to keep the franchise in Connecticut.
Asked whether Connecticut could one day attract another top-level sports franchise, Lamont paused for a few moments, then finally said, “It’s not easy. I’m not sitting around throwing billions in hoping to swing somebody this way. It’s got to make sense for it to work and I’m not sure it would make sense right now.”
Can CT support pro sports?
Count Jennifer Rizzotti, a former University of Connecticut basketball star and current president of the Connecticut Sun, among those who think the state is worthy of top-level pro sports.
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“I definitely think Connecticut deserves and can support a professional franchise, and I think we’ve proven that,” Rizzotti said last week. “Our fans have proven that we deserve a team, in terms of their knowledge and their passion, their loyalty and commitment to supporting this team.”
And yet despite all that, Rizzotti’s team ultimately was lured away to a bigger city with more potential TV viewers. What does that say about the viability of high-level professional sports in Connecticut?
Christine Pattee is a longtime Connecticut Sun fan coping with the looming loss of the team to Houston. She’s seen here with her Sun gear at her home in Coventry on April 1, 2026.
Jim Michaud/Hearst Connecticut Media
Most people interviewed for this story spoke with at least some resignation about Connecticut’s place in the sports landscape, informed by history dating back 150 years. From the Hartford Dark Blues, a National League baseball club that lasted two seasons in the 1870s before moving to Brooklyn and then folding, to the Whalers a century later, Connecticut has sometimes attracted top-level franchises but has never been able to keep them.
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Once the Sun and Islanders officially skip town, Connecticut will be left with one minor-league baseball team (the Hartford Yard Goats); two minor-league soccer teams (Hartford Athletic and the newly established CT United FC); and two minor-league hockey teams (the Hartford Wolf Pack and Danbury Hat Tricks).
“Hartford is a small market,” Zimbalist said. “In the way major league sports are structured today, it’s hard to imagine there being an economically strong and viable team in the Hartford area.”
Zimbalist said he couldn’t rule out the possibility of Connecticut one day attracting another team and that he could imagine, in theory, some sort of top-level franchise catering to the wealthy population center of southwestern Connecticut and New York’s nearby Westchester County. More realistically, though, he presumes Connecticut will be playing in the minor leagues for some time to come.
Connecticut Sun collectibles belonging to fans Dick and Kathy Geltzer of Wethersfield.
Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
Others are more optimistic. Joseph Bajorski, a Berlin resident who serves as treasurer of the Hartford Whalers Booster Club, noted the Hartford-New Haven area has as many residents as some other major-league markets. He sees little reason the Whalers couldn’t return with the right ownership group.
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“We have to dream big to achieve big,” Bajorski said. “Just accepting minor-league level sports is, I think, adequate for the current day, but long term, we need to focus on returning Hartford to the professional leagues again.”
Barry, on the other hand, argues a focus on attracting a major-league franchise can distract Connecticut sports fans from the teams they already have, including UConn’s powerhouse college basketball programs.
“Instead of trying to measure ourselves by, ‘Are we ever going to be worthy for a team? ‘ I think we can make our own experience,” he said. “Instead of trying to have this idea of, ‘We need the leagues to notice us,’ we need to create our own opportunities.”
The pain of losing a team
Unfortunately, none of this philosophizing about the meaning of sports fandom is much help to Sun fans devastated about losing their team.
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Marcia Velencia doesn’t even live in Connecticut – she and her family reside outside Boston – yet she had season tickets to the Sun and rarely missed a game. Her two sons, ages 10 and 11, have become diehard fans in recent years, preferring women’s to men’s basketball.
Recently, she’s had to explain to them why they only have one more season with their favorite team.
“They’re pretty devastated,” Velencia said. “They feel like a real connection to the game.”
A Connecticut Sun drinking glass that belongs to Dick and Kathy Geltzer of Wethersfield.
Ned Gerard/Hearst Connecticut Media
Even more frustrating, Velencia said, is the way the NBA and WNBA appeared to steer the Sun away from New England and toward Houston, whose ownership group wound up paying less than groups from Hartford and Boston offered. As the situation played out last year, she distributed T-shirts at Sun games reading, “Sell teams for what they’re worth.”
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As much as she loves women’s basketball and wants to support the players, Velencia said she isn’t sure how many WNBA games she’ll watch moving forward.
“It’s hard to be like, ‘Yeah, I want to support this group of people who really just locked us out when we were the ones who carried the team through when no one wanted to support the (league),’” she said. “So I’m still mulling it over.”
For diehard fans, a sports team can be a true source of community, the type of which can’t be found elsewhere. Christine Pattee, a longtime season-ticket holder who sits with the Geltzers behind the Sun’s bench, said she’ll mostly miss the camaraderie and friendship she found in her section.
“I can watch the team on television (in Houston),” Pattee said. “But at 84, personal relationships are really important.”
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Despite her sadness, Pattee said she understands why the Sun are leaving.
“It’s much better, first and foremost, for the players because they so clearly were unhappy with this logistical situation,” she said. “They had no proper practice facilities at all, so it’s much better for the players to be living in a big city where living arrangements are better and practice facilities are much better.”
If there’s anyone who knows something about the pain of losing a team it’s a Whalers fan. Nearly three decades after the Whalers left for North Carolina, some of the team’s most diehard fans still won’t leave the team behind. They organize events, tout the Whalers’ legacy and lobby for an eventual return.
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Asked what advice he’d have for Sun fans struggling with the type of loss he experienced back in 1997, Bajorski suggested they continue following basketball, maybe at lower levels – and never let their major-league dreams die.
“If they want to keep the Sun alive and they want to continue working to obtain a franchise for Hartford,” he said, “I would highly encourage it.”