A Florida expansion club renamed for a casino resort in Connecticut.

The Connecticut Sun began in Florida. English Wikipedia says the club was established as the Orlando Miracle in 1999, when the WNBA expanded from ten to twelve teams, and that it played at the TD Waterhouse Centre in Orlando as the sister team of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, whose owner, RDV Sports, held it from 1998 to 2002. According to Wikipedia, the Miracle wore white with blue at home and blue with white on the road, with the Miracle name across the chest.

The change came after the 2002 season. Wikipedia says the NBA then sold its WNBA franchises to the operators of the individual teams; the Magic’s owners did not want to keep the Miracle, no local partner was found, and the team was bought by the Mohegan Tribe. On 28 January 2003 it was announced that the club would move at once to Uncasville, Connecticut, the home of the tribe’s Mohegan Sun casino resort, and take the name Sun in reference to the resort. The team would play at Mohegan Sun Arena, which Wikipedia places at the centre of the resort’s mall area and which was owned by the tribe.

The club presented its new identity on 27 March 2003. In an announcement on the league’s website, the Sun described the logo as a fiery orange sunburst, a basketball and a blue ribbon carrying four white semicircular domes, which it called a modern interpretation of an ancient Mohegan symbol representing the four corners of the earth under the sky dome. The club said the mark was created with NBA Entertainment and Outthink, a brand and marketing agency based in Essex, Connecticut, and that many designs had been drawn with a focus on simplicity, imagery and the inclusion of a Mohegan tribal symbol. The general manager, Chris Sienko, said the colours of the logo would be carried into the uniforms, which were to be unveiled before the first season.

Sun red, gold and blue, then orange.

Those uniforms set the tone for the first Connecticut seasons. Wikipedia says that in 2003 the Sun wore white with “sun red” on the sides and red lettering on the chest at home, and a pure red kit with gold trim and gold lettering on the road. From 2004 to 2006 the road kit turned blue, with sun red and gold trim and gold lettering, while the white home kit kept its red accents.

The kits then went through several short-lived treatments. Wikipedia describes a 2007 set with simple sun images along the sides of both the white and the blue jerseys; a 2008–2010 set with the word “Connecticut” printed vertically down the sides of the home kit and “Sun” down the sides of the road kit, which carried “Connecticut” in gold across the chest; and a 2011–2015 set with yellow vertical stripes at home, white stripes on the blue road kit, and the Sun logo moved to the left shoulder.

Orange arrived through a league-wide change. Wikipedia says that in 2016, for the WNBA’s twentieth season, all games were played in all-colour matchups, so the Sun added an orange uniform while keeping the blue one. The communications company Frontier became the jersey sponsor in 2015. Today the team colours that Wikipedia lists, citing the club’s announcements and the league’s logo sheet, are orange, navy blue and white.

The arena shaped the presentation as well. Wikipedia says the Sun shared Mohegan Sun Arena with the New England Black Wolves of the National Lacrosse League until that team left in 2020. With the arena inside the resort, the team’s name, its home and its owner’s business all carried the same word.

Design and documentation.

A women’s professional basketball club builds its identity under a different set of pressures from a men’s club in the same city. Many teams in the league were set up in markets that already had an established men’s franchise, and some began life as sister clubs to an NBA team, sharing an owner, a front office and an arena. That arrangement shapes the brand from the start: the women’s team often borrows a colour, a type style or a naming idea from its partner, then has to decide how far to move away from it as it gains its own owners and its own audience.

Colour is usually the first place that independence shows. A club can stay close to the regional palette of the city’s other teams, or pick a combination that no neighbour uses, so that a jersey reads as its own at a glance on television and in the stands. Names tend to come from weather, landscape, local landmarks or a sense of energy, and short single-word names give designers room to build a mark around one strong shape.

Arenas matter too. Teams that share a building with a men’s club, an ice-hockey team or a concert schedule have to make their court, signage and branding stand out on nights when the venue belongs to them, and teams that move between venues carry their identity from one building to the next.

Keesusk: the tribe’s word on the jersey.

The clearest statement of the owners’ heritage came in 2021. ICT (Indian Country Today) reported on 9 April 2021 that, as the WNBA unveiled three new looks for each team for its 25th anniversary, the Sun’s Nike “Rebel” edition carried Keesusk, the Mohegan word for sun, across the front. The league said the new uniforms were meant to reflect stories of “female archetypes” in each team’s community.

ICT described how the design was made. Kathy Regan-Pyne, recording secretary of the Mohegan Tribal Council, said in a statement that Nike had consulted and worked with the tribe, and that members of the tribal council and the Council of Elders, the chief and the medicine woman had all been involved. The tribe’s chief, Lynn Malerba, told the outlet that it mattered for the Mohegans to decide the images associated with the tribe and the team: “We own this narrative.” She said all three looks would refer to the tribe, including a Mohegan symbol first painted on bark and on traditional baskets, whose 13 dots stand for the 13 moons of the year and the 13 sections of the turtle shell on which, in Mohegan tradition, mother Earth was created. One jersey honoured Gladys Tantaquidgeon, the tribe’s former medicine woman, an anthropologist and author who died in 2005; Wikipedia says that jersey was blue, with repeating symbols for the path of life along the sleeves and canoes at the neckline.

The Connecticut chapter is closing. ESPN reported on 27 March 2026 that the franchise was being sold to the Fertitta family, owners of the Houston Rockets, and would play one final season in Uncasville in 2026 before relocating in 2027; Wikipedia says the team will be renamed the Houston Comets.

For a design guide, the Connecticut Sun show how an owner’s own culture can supply both a team’s name and the details of its uniforms, from a ribbon of domes in the logo to a word in the tribe’s language across the chest. Compare the Orlando Magic, the Nike guide and the WNBA. For this guide we use sun orange, navy and gold with a narrow sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Connecticut Sun’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.