Elena Delle Donne
In 2008, 18-year-old Elena Delle Do­nne, the number one women’s basketball recruit in the country, signed to play for powerhouse Connecticut. Then she changed her mind. As she hitched a ride home to Wilmington in the middle of the night, “I knew the entire basketball world would come down on me,” she says. “But that didn’t matter. It just wasn’t right.”

Delle Donne left the glitz of a national program because she couldn’t leave what mattered most: her sister, Lizzie, born blind, deaf, autistic and with cerebral palsy, with whom she shares a special connection based solely on touch and smell. That bond gave her the strength to come home. “I realized that as long as I was with my family, I could play basketball and love it,” she says. “But it just wasn’t worth having without them.”

She now plays for Delaware, 20 minutes away. In her three years, fan attendance has increased 250 percent; Delle Donne has been the MVP each season. This past spring, she led the Blue Hens to their first-ever victory in an NCAA tournament game. “Elena makes everyone else around her better players,” says Harry Perretta, the 34-year coach of rival Villanova. And better people, too. —Carrie Denny

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