Athletics

January 11, 2017 | Combined Reports - UConn Communications

Women’s Basketball Winning Streak Has Long History at UConn

As we celebrate our women's basketball team equaling their previous unbeaten record of 90 games, we look back to the very earliest days of women's basketball in Storrs.

As we celebrate our women's basketball team equaling their previous unbeaten record of 90 games, we look back to the very earliest days of women's basketball in Storrs, when the team boasted an unbeaten season as far back as 1902. (Archives & Special Collections, University Library)

As we celebrate our women's basketball team equaling their previous unbeaten record of 90 games, we look back to the very earliest days of women's basketball in Storrs, when the team boasted an unbeaten season as far back as 1902. (Archives & Special Collections, University Library)

The stakes weren’t nearly so high, nor the competition as strong, but back in 1902, in the very earliest days of the women’s basketball team at Connecticut Agricultural College – the forerunner to the University of Connecticut – the college boasted that the team was ‘unbeaten,’ setting a precedent that the team would return to multiple times under Head Coach Geno Auriemma decades later.

According to a history of the University by Mark J. Roy ’74 (CLAS), the women’s basketball team started around the same time as the first men’s team in 1901. And until Hawley Armory was built in 1914, both men and women practiced basketball in the attic of the women’s dormitory, Grove Cottage.

Sources: ‘University of Connecticut,’ by Mark J. Roy (Arcadia Publishing 2001); and the University of Connecticut Photograph Collection, Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library.