Women’s basketball titan and President of the Connecticut Sun, Jen Rizzott stopped by Quinnipiac on her most recent speaking tour on March 31. She talked about the trials and tribulations she’s encountered over her career, and how she overcame them.
To say Rizzotti is a basketball legend might be an understatement. Rizzotti was part of the first UConn’s women’s team to win a national title. They did it by going 35-0, the second ever undefeated season in the women’s college game. As the star point guard, it earned her an appearance on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Quinnipiac’s Associate Vice President for Conferences and Events, Shannon LeGault, who helped set up the event, shared these memories fondly.
“[Jen] played at UConn while I was also in college,” LeGault said. “She might have been a little older than me, but I remember watching her on TV. She’s been a legend in the sport for a long time, so it’s great to have her back.”
LeGault arranges lots of opportunities for students to engage with the wider Quinnipiac and Connecticut communities. On the same day as Rizzotti’s event, she was juggling an engineering career fair and figure skating practice for local residents and their families.
LeGault was particularly excited to get ahold of Rizzotti, whose team had actually reached out to Quinnipiac first. The university sponsored the event, which included some extra perks.
“There was a discount off of the space rental in exchange for opportunities for the students to be able to attend, but also for some promotional benefits on both ends,” LeGault said. “There’s going to be some opportunities for their team to either come talk to a class or have students follow them and do a shadowing opportunity at Connecticut Sun.”
This partnership would be incredibly valuable for the lucky students able to attend, and forming these lasting connections was a point that rang true for Rizzotti’s entire talk.
Rizzotti took the audience at M&T Bank Arena’s University Club through her whole professional life, from her time at UConn interacting with legends like Geno Auriemma and Dawn Staley who became good friends, to her coaching career at Hartford and her eventual firing from George Washington which led her to becoming the president of the Sun.
What she learned from Auriemma seemed to set the framework for the rest of her life. He was player-centric, perhaps a bit ego-centric, but always held people accountable, and none more highly than himself. She offers all her successes, as a player, coach and executive, to this mindset of radical empathy and transparency.
“I think that it’s just about creating a culture where you care about how other people feel,” Rizzotti said. “You put yourself in their shoes. You give each other grace, right? Like you never know what someone is going through in their life, like when they show up that day as a player or a staff member, and so always assume positive intent.”
These were ideals instilled not just by Rizzotti, but by Quinnipiac’s own women’s head coach Trish Fabbri.
One of her stars, graduate student Jackie Grisdale attended the event and found this to be true. Grisdale has played for Fabbri for the past five years, and now that she’s exhausted her grad year, must move on to bigger and better things. A lot of Rizzotti’s talk, particularly her career pivots, resonated with Grisdale, but she found ways to tie those lessons back to her own coach.
“I think empowerment is big. Jen spoke to that, and then Coach also,” Grisdale said. “I think something that Coach Fabbri does is encourage us to be our true self and to let our competitiveness, our passion show. You can’t fake passion and Coach Fabbri doesn’t. Jen doesn’t. They are true to themselves, and I feel like the way that they inspire the people that are following them to also be true to themselves is so cool.”