Jennifer Azzi after basketball

After basketball, Jennifer Azzi has career and family at 51

What’s an extremely rewarding pastime while sheltering at home during a pandemic?Growing tomatoes is a good one. So is cuddling a newborn.

Jennifer Azzi and her wife, Blair Hardiek, are doing both, though one is decidedly far more profound and important than the budding Brandywines in the newly planted garden below their Mill Valley home.

Camden Therese Hardiek Azzi was born on the afternoon of April 24, joining 3-year-old brother Macklin in the Hardiek Azzi family. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, it has been a perfect time to relish family bonding.

“COVID has almost been like a rebirth for us,” Hardiek said, “spending all this time together.”

It has been that way for many new or growing families. And while bringing a new baby into a world full of uncertainty and anxiety has its challenges, this crisis has also brought a dramatic reassessing of what is truly important in life. And, for most, family has come out on top.

Azzi, the former Stanford star and University of San Francisco basketball coach, is now associate vice president of development at USF. Hardiek is a global technical director for the NBA Academy women’s program, developing talent around the world and helping young women from other countries land at Division I schools. Between their two jobs, the couple is almost always on the go, traveling the world. But not now.  “This is the longest stretch we’ve been without being on a plane that I can remember,” Azzi said.

Both were busy working from home during the late weeks of Hardiek’s pregnancy, and they brought their work along to Marin General in case labor took a long time. It didn’t. Hardiek, 35, was surprised to see her contractions coming so close together and let the nurses know the baby was on her way. Camden arrived shortly after.

Azzi and Hardiek have been married for five years. Macklin, a whirling cyclone of boy energy who enlists every visitor to shoot hoops or help repair his toy tractor, was born in February 2017. He’s a proud big brother to “Baby Sister.” He’s so excited that he can barely contain himself,” Hardiek said.

For many Bay Area sports fans, Azzi will always be the young girl from Tennessee who helped lead Stanford to its first NCAA title, but she is now 51. No one blinks an eye when men become parents in their 50s, but it is definitely more unusual for women.

“I don’t really think about it,” Azzi said. “But my athletic career was so long — not that time froze but I played professionally for 13 years. I wasn’t doing things that my peers outside of athletics were doing. Once I was out of the athletic world, I started thinking more about career and family.

“Also, my late start is being with the right person.”

Azzi made news in 2016 when, while introducing Warriors president Rick Welts for an Anti-Defamation League award, she announced that she was married to Hardiek. “You just get to the point where it’s so stupid to not be honest,” she said at the time. Still, the news was groundbreaking, coming months after the Supreme Court upheld the legality of same-sex marriage and making Azzi the only “out” Division I coach at the time. (She stepped down from coaching in September of 2016.)

She now works on developing community relationships for USF. One of her main involvements is the Silk Speaker Series. She has interviewed Steve Kerr and Billie Jean King, among others. Recently, she moderated a Juneteenth online discussion between Stephen Curry and Clarence Jones, the director of USF’s Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice. She and Curry swapped stories about taking their children to Black Lives Matter protests and important lessons for a new generation. 

She and Hardiek also run Azzi basketball camps. Because of the coronavirus, they have held just one camp in Sausalito this summer, limited to small groups, following strict COVID-19 protocols with much of the action taking place on outdoor courts.

Azzi enjoys seeing parents dropping off their kids and their family interactions at pickup, just as she enjoys getting out of the car with Hardiek, Macklin and Camden in a stroller, ready for a day on the courts. “Our little entourage,” she said. “I’m just glad life didn’t pass me by.”