Connections Sports Edition Hints and Answers (Today’s Puzzle)

Today’s Connections is all about sports, but it plays a little sneaky: several words could plausibly belong to more than one theme. If you’re stuck, don’t brute-force—work category by category, and watch for phrases that feel like they belong to a specific sport or team nickname.

Hints

Yellow (easiest): Think “stadium atmosphere,” especially the kind you’d see at a college game. These are the groups that show up to hype the crowd.

Green: This one points to the physical geography of baseball pitching. The target words are specific parts or labels you’d associate with the mound.

Blue: Alpine skiing disciplines. If you’ve ever seen a winter broadcast, you’ll recognize the event names that sound like they belong together.

Purple (toughest/bizarre): This category clues “Queen City teams,” with the city specified by a blank. It’s basically a “city nickname → sports team name” kind of leap.

Answers

Yellow group: band, cheerleaders, dance team, student section

Green group: bump, hill, mount, rubber

Blue group: combined, downhill, slalom, Super-G

Purple group: 49ers, FC, Hornets, North

If you found the purple set tricky, you weren’t alone—“Queen City” can send you in a few different directions. A good tactic is to identify the city first (from the “Charlotte __” framing), then map that to the most familiar team-name fragments that fit the blank.