Elena Delle Donne

Elena Delle Donne (born September 5, 1989) is an American professional basketball player for the Washington Mystics of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA).

She was the first and only student at Ursuline so far to score 2,000+ points during her high school career and also set the girls' high school national record for consecutive free throws made (80) in 2005–2006.

Delle Donne was also named a WBCA All-American.

She participated in the 2007 WBCA High School All-America Game, where she scored 17 points, and earned MVP honors for the Red team.

She also participated in volleyball.

Delle Donne won the volleyball DIAA state championship with Ursuline in 2007.

She posted a season high 20 kills against Padua during a game involving the number one and two teams in the state.

Following an outstanding prep career during which she became the most highly touted women's basketball recruit since Candace Parker, Delle Donne received a basketball scholarship from the University of Connecticut.

She took a similar break prior to the 2007–08 season in high school.

However, in early June 2008, Delle Donne abruptly dropped out of Connecticut's summer school program after just two days in Storrs.

Delle Donne was very close to her family, especially her older sister, Lizzie, who has cerebral palsy and is blind and deaf.

She was not ready to be separated from her family.

On August 16, 2008, Delle Donne announced she would not accept the scholarship due to burnout, and instead decided to enroll at the University of Delaware and join their volleyball team as a walk-on.

She played middle hitter at UD for the 2008–09 season.

The 2008 Delaware Blue Hens finished their season with a record of 19–16.

They were 9–5 in their conference (Colonial Athletic Association) and won the conference tournament.

They earned a spot in the NCAA Tournament, but lost to Oregon in the first round.

Delle Donne played college basketball for the Delaware Blue Hens from 2009 to 2013.

Delle Donne did not continue on the volleyball team in 2009, but joined the basketball team.

On June 2, 2009, Delle Donne announced that she would play basketball for the Blue Hens in the 2009–10 season as a redshirt freshman.

Gene, Elena's brother and the middle child of the Delle Donne family, stated in a 2012 ESPN story on his younger sister:

"Her relationship with Lizzie is huge. It's so close. It's a big reason why she is such a homebody who came home from UConn, because she craves to be around Lizzie and to experience Lizzie grabbing her and sniffing her and just spend quality time with her."

A week after leaving Connecticut, Delle Donne said by telephone from her home in Wilmington that she has "a lot of personal issues to fix. Only my family understands what's going on. Right now I am going to take a long personal break."

In 2012, ESPN writer Graham Hays said about her return to the sport "it cannot be complete coincidence that it came the year Gene returned to Delaware and went to work for his dad's company."

She was drafted by the Chicago Sky with the second overall pick of the 2013 WNBA draft, and led the Sky to the 2014 WNBA Finals, where they were defeated by the Phoenix Mercury.

Delle Donne has won two WNBA Most Valuable Player Awards (2015, 2019), been selected to seven All-Star teams, and was the first WNBA player to join the 50–40–90 club.

She was named to The W25, the league's list of the top 25 players of its first 25 years, in 2021.

She is by far the all-time leader in free throw percentage in WNBA history, with a mark of 93.7%.

Delle Donne inherited her 6'5" (1.96 m) height from both her parents—her father, who played college golf, is 6'6" (1.98 m), and her mother is 6'2" (1.88 m). Her childhood was marked by a struggle to come to terms with her unusual height. According to a 2016 ESPN story, her first memory was going on a shopping trip when she was three years old and hearing other shoppers tell her mother that an 8-year-old should not be using a pacifier. In third grade, her class was assigned to measure themselves using lengths of paper; she was "humiliated" when her paper extended well beyond those of her classmates. Within two years of that incident, a doctor wanted to start her on injections to stunt her growth; her mother refused. By the time she was in eighth grade, she was already 6'0" (1.83 m).

Additionally, according to the same ESPN piece Delle Donne had to come to terms with having "a body that could do a great many things that the body of her older sister, Lizzie, couldn't."

Lizzie was born deaf and blind, is unable to speak, and also has cerebral palsy and autism.

In another 2016 ESPN story, Delle Donne credits her mother with helping her accept her height:

"She's 6–2 and my dad is 6–6, so she understood. She was like, 'I'm telling you, one day you are going to realize how beautiful your height is.' She would always tell me how unique I am and say, 'Why try to be like the rest of the pack? Be your own person.'"

Delle Donne gained national recognition as a high school basketball star at Ursuline Academy in Wilmington, Delaware.

She led Ursuline to three straight Delaware State Championship titles and was ranked as the number-one overall high school recruit by Scout.com as well as a McDonald's All-American.

In a 2016 interview with ESPN, Delle Donne also recalled a trip she took during the summer of 2009 to the school that Lizzie was attending.

While there, she met another woman at the school, a basketball fan who used a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, who told her, "Elena, do everything you can with your abilities, just like we do."

Delle Donne had a very productive freshman season.

She averaged 26.7 points per game, the third-highest of all Division I women's basketball players.

Delle Donne was traded to the Washington Mystics in 2017 and led them to their first WNBA championship in 2019.