Sports
| Club | Sport | League | Venue |
| Connecticut Whale | Ice hockey | American Hockey League | XL Center |
| Hartford Colonials | American Football | United Football League | Rentschler Field |
| Hartford Wanderers | Rugby Union | New England Rugby Football Union | Colt Park |
Hartford became the home of the WHA's New England Whalers in 1975 after the club moved from Boston. The Whalers would be one of four teams from the WHA that joined the NHL in 1979. The city was home to the NHL's Hartford Whalers from 1979 to 1997, before the team relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina and became the Carolina Hurricanes.
The Boston Celtics played various home games per year in Hartford from 1975–1995.
The University of Connecticut men's and women's basketball team – the UConn Huskies – also play a number of their home games at the XL Center downtown. Other home games are played at Gampel Pavilion located on the university's campus in Storrs.
Hartford also used to have a National League baseball team, the Hartford Dark Blues, back in the 1870s, and a NFL team, the Hartford Blues, for one season in 1926.
Read more about this topic: Hartford, Connecticut
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“Come, my Celia, let us prove
While we may the sports of love;
Time will not be ours forever,
He at length our good will sever.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“The whole idea of image is so confused. On the one hand, Madison Avenue is worried about the image of the players in a tennis tour. On the other hand, sports events are often sponsored by the makers of junk food, beer, and cigarettes. What’s the message when an athlete who works at keeping her body fit is sponsored by a sugar-filled snack that does more harm than good?”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)