American professional basketball player Elena Delle Donne, who plays for the Washington Mystics of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), is a star to watch. Her career is quite illustrious and has been marked by many great successes, during which she has once voted the most valued player of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Beyond her achievements as a player, Elena’s very public engagement and her later marriage to her partner Amanda Clifton brought her further into the limelight. Read on for more details.
Elena Delle Donne Biography
Born Elena Delle Donne in Wilmington Delaware on September 5, 1989, the prolific basketball player is an American of white ethnicity. She has hazel eyes and brown hair and grew up in a Christian Roman Catholic home. She has an older brother Gene Delle Donne and an older sister Lizzie Delle Donne, she is the youngest child in her family. Elena had her education at the Ursuline Academy and attended the University of Delaware.
Her path to fame began in high school at the Ursuline Academy, where she played both basketball and volleyball. After a good high school diploma, she received a basketball scholarship to the University of Connecticut, where she started, but soon dropped out because she wanted to be close to where she lived. So she enrolled at the University of Delaware, where she received her Bachelor’s degree in Human Services in 2013.
While in Delaware, she started playing on the volleyball team but left the team in 2009 after losing a spot in the NCAA tournament. In 2009, she joined the basketball team and announced that she was playing for the Blue Hens. Elena Delle Donne led the team to numerous wins in various tournaments and competitions until her graduation.
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The same year she graduated, she was named second overall by the Chicago Sky for the 2013 WNBA draft. Because of her outstanding play, she was named the WNBA MVP for the 2015 season. Elena Delle Donne played two NBA All-Star Celebrity Games in 2014 and 2016, but after an injury, that forced her to sit out much of the 2016 season and as her rookie contract expired, Elena was transferred to the Washington Mystics.
Elena Delle Donne made her debut with the Mystics in May 2017, but after a series of injuries, she ended the season with a not-so-high score, as the Mystics lost to the Minnesota Lynx.
She is worth 7 million dollars and receives 800,000 dollars annually.
Health
Elena was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2008 after she was bitten by an infected tick on her family property during her high school years. However, she has been taking supplements to help her body fight the disease. Due to the condition of her sister Lizzie, Delle Donne almost never plays abroad as she prefers to be close to her sister to whom she is very close to taking care of her. But in 2017 she decided to try her hand on the international front and signed a short-term contract with the Shanxi team from China.
Her stay was cut short when Lyme disease reappeared and forced her to return home to the USA.
Girlfriend (Amanda Clifton) Gay Partner
Elena Delle Donne is not as heterosexual as most of her fans would have liked. She is lesbian and has been with Amanda Clifton for a long time, their relationship began in 2013, and in August 2016 she announced her engagement in a Vogue profile. Elena had proposed to Amanda on the same beach where they first met. The lovebirds followed up the engagement by entering into the bond of marriage on November 3, 2017, in a ceremony that led to them being named by The Knot as the dream wedding couple of 2017. Their wedding was consummated on a grand scale, and the remnants of the wedding were given to the poor.
Amanda Clifton attended Illinois State University, where she was a member of the basketball team. She is currently the director of Elena’s basketball academy. The duo has made an unrepeatable mention of how the desire to help the less privileged brought them together. They created the Elena Delle Donne Foundation, to which they invited the guests of their wedding to donate it as their wedding gift. The foundation was created to address special needs programs and Lyme disease research.
Elena Delle Donne’s Body And Height
Elena’s body is definitely her most distinguishing feature. She has an incredible size that can’t be confused anywhere, especially with a woman who is 6 feet 5 inches tall. To complete her very large figure, she is balanced on a weight of 85 kg, which gives her the perfect body mass index. Her other body measurements are 38-28-37, with bust, waist, and hips each being 38-28-37. She wears a bra size 34B, size 12 (US) for the shoes, and dress size (12).
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Genes that are said not to lie, Elena gets her height from her parents, her mother Joan Delle Donne is 5’8″ tall, while her father Ernest Delle Donne, who works as a real estate developer, is 5’8″ tall. As a child, Elena was always considered older than her peers because of her towering height. Her mother once said that when Elena was three years old, she seemed eight years old because of her build and height. She had also experienced some scenarios in which she was ashamed of her height. She once told how embarrassed she felt in eighth grade (she was six feet tall at the time) when they were asked to measure her height with a paper and her paper exceeded that of the others.
She grew so fast that at some point in eighth grade, her doctor advised her parents to consider an injection that would slow down her growth process so that she would look her age. Thank God they didn’t listen to her, because how else could she have become the amazing basketball player she is today.
Elena, for her part, pays tribute to her mother for helping her to love herself without remorse, especially considering that her other sister Lizzie was born deaf, dumb, blind, with cerebral palsy and autism. According to Elena, her sister’s condition helped her to see her body in a whole new light and she soon began to take advantage of her height.
