Husky High – Reporter relives WTIC memories of UConn title
- Today Magazine Online
- Jun 30
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 31
• Commentary • This article has won an SPJ award in 2025 and first appeared in our monthly Today Magazine
By Christopher DeFrancesco
Special to Today Online and Today Magazine
• Editor’s Note — The UConn men’s basketball team excelled throughout the 1990s and closed the decade by winning the program’s first NCAA title in 1999 — in this article, a veteran Connecticut journalist and UConn graduate reminisces about the Huskies’ historic triumph
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UConn’s 1999 national championship still stands out for me, a quarter-century later. I was five years out of college and three months into my first full-time broadcast journalism gig. It happened to be at the flagship radio station for UConn sports, WTIC NewsTalk 1080.
I had a love-hate relationship with UConn basketball going back to the 1989-90 Dream Season. When Tate George’s improbable buzzer-beater in the NCAA Tournament lifted the Huskies past Clemson to advance to the program’s first Elite Eight, I developed an irrational resentment over the popularity of these college basketball players.
At that time I was in high school, and as an enormous NHL fan I had little use for basketball.
My still-forming frontal lobe couldn’t process how amateurs playing an inferior sport could be more popular and beloved than the professionals we had playing the world’s greatest sport, right here with the Hartford Whalers — as if you had to choose Huskies or Whalers, you couldn’t support both. It wasn’t so much that I was fearful of losing the NHL franchise at that time; I was just immature.
By fall 1991, I was a freshman at UConn, still not digging the whole basketball vibe. But I eventually came around — by my sophomore year I had joined the sports department at the student radio station, WHUS 91.7 FM, and was part of a group that took turns broadcasting games on the radio, including both men’s and women’s basketball. I embraced the sport and the teams as I fell in love with calling games on the radio.
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By my senior year, 1994-95, I was on the short list of student broadcasters for the most coveted games, men’s and women’s. That meant road trips, which after the regular season meant the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden and NCAA Tournament games in places like Miami, Salt Lake City and Oakland. What an amazing experience!
After graduation the dream of doing play-by-play for a living slowly died, but I had a journalism degree to fall back on, and that set me on a path to join the WTIC news staff.
Along the way that path crossed with the editor of this media outlet — we overlapped for five months in 1996 at the Imprint Newspapers, a collection of weekly community papers in Greater Hartford.
January 1999 is when I started as the overnight newsman at WTIC. The WTIC/UConn Radio Network already had an outstanding play-by-play man, Joe D’Ambrosio. As an aspiring play-by-play man in college I was envious of him, but I respected his work; there was no denying he was as good as they come. Point is, by then, I had nothing to do with the UConn games on the radio.
But the 1999 title game was memorable for me because the nerve center of the UConn Radio Network was the same radio station that employed me. The broadcast feed went from St. Petersburg, Florida, to the 19th floor of the Gold Building in Hartford — WTIC’s home until the move that summer to Farmington, where the station still is today — and from there, to all the UConn Radio Network affiliate stations.
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I remember being in the newsroom, with the game on both TV and radio. I don’t remember if the broadcasts were synchronized, but I do remember the CBS microphone picking up Khalid El-Amin hollering, “We shocked the world” — and of course Joe’s famous call on the radio: “UConn? You bet! Huskies 77, Duke 74!”
Bob Joyce was at the UConn Radio Network controls, cutting the highlights for the postgame. He was almost too busy to stop what he was doing to connect with my high-five.
I of course had my lead story for my local news breaks all through that overnight, and that would be the lead story throughout the morning, not only during news at the top and bottom of the hour, but of course also sports with Scott Gray at 15 and 45 minutes past.
It had been five years since I called a UConn game on the student radio station. The players who were there during my college days were gone. I didn’t really have a connection to the team or the broadcasts anymore. My heart was still broken by the Whalers leaving in April 1997.
At that point Connecticut was in between losing the NHL and supposedly gaining the NFL — we would learn a month later the Patriots were backing out of the deal to move to Hartford. UConn was all we had for big-time sports. And that night, it was more than enough. +
Christopher DeFrancesco is a communications professional at Farmington-based UConn Health — he was an award-winning reporter and anchor for WTIC Radio NewsTalk 1080
This article won a second-place award in the 2025 contest of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Connecticut chapter — DeFrancesco has received two other SPJ awards for his work in Today Magazine — this commentary article originally appeared as a key component of the April 2024 cover story in Today Magazine, our monthly publication:
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In case you missed it, DeFrancesco and Today editor-in-chief Bruce Deckert were colleagues at the Imprint Newspaper group — then owned by the Journal Register Company
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• 2025 SPJ contest – Today Tops CT Mags Again In SPJ Awards
• Today didn't publish a news story for the 2019 and 2020 SPJ contests — Today Publishing received one award in 2019 and two in 2020 •
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