President Judy Olian. Courtesy: Quinnipiac University
HAMDEN, Conn. — In 2018, Judy Olian moved from her home in California to Hamden, Conn. to accept her leadership role as president of Quinnipiac University. Since the move, she has embraced change and is working to improve the university in many different areas, such as student education and community relations.
“What I’ve come to so appreciate here is the agility and nimbleness around change,” President Olian said. “If you’re an institution that can really turn on a dime, and I’m not saying we can turn on a dime, but it’s a hell of a lot faster than what was possible at the University of California. It’s a tremendous advantage and asset.”
Since beginning her tenure at Quinnipiac, President Olian has developed a strategic plan to better the university. This plan involves four pillars, including preparing students for careers in the 21st century, developing inclusive excellence, improving the wellbeing of the community and fostering lifelong learning and connections.
“I think the community embraced the change and the strategic plan,” Olian said. “Hook, line and sinker really embraced it. There’s an aura of excitement around change.”
In order to develop strategies to improve aspects of a university that was so new to her, President Olian spent her first few months simply listening.
“If you’re able to listen, you’ll learn an awful lot,” she said. “So, I tried to do that. I went around and met with the deans, the staff, the student groups, the government, and tried to see what people loved about Quinnipiac and where they saw opportunities. That formed the basis for our strategic planning process.”
Also included in the plan are new fields of study, such as environmental sciences, and an increase in data analytics across the curriculum to ensure students are data-savvy entering the 21st century workforce.
Although President Olian is focused on student education, her focus on student wellbeing is just as intense. She announced that the university has plans to launch a large wellness center in order to take care of both cognitive and emotional readiness in students, in addition to career readiness.
“The wellbeing center is going to be facilitated by physical fitness facilities, a wellness service center and programming,” Olian said. “Whatever it is that you need as a healthy foundation for life, we want this to be a part of the foundation.”
Another substantial announcement made during her presidency was the reveal of the Rocky Top Pub on the York Hill Campus. She believes the pub will improve social interaction between students and alumni.
The current interior of the future Rocky Top bar, On the Rocks. Credit: Peter O’ Neill
“There will be games in the People’s United Center. Having a beer if you’re of age or just grabbing food if you’re not is a part of college,” Olian said. “You learn every time you connect socially. We also want people to have fun at Quinnipiac, and this is a part of having fun.”
The atmosphere of new leadership and change is felt not only by President Olian but by members of the student body. Junior Student Government Vice President Sophia Marshall believes President Olian has made a huge impact on the culture of the campus and the administration.
“She makes it a point to really engage with the student body and in student events,” Marshall said. “I think she’s come in with a really great plan to renovate the school within the next five to 10 years.”
Marshall immersed herself into student government during her first year at Quinnipiac. At that time, former president John Lahey was in charge. However, she says she already sees differences between the two leaders.
“While President Lahey had a great tenure, he wasn’t as responsive to students towards the end,” Marshall said. “She’s come and created an immense, positive impact on the campus.”
In addition to working on Quinnipiac-focused initiatives, President Olian is determined to build a stronger connection with the surrounding communities of Hamden and North Haven.
“I think we’re crossing that rubicon and people are starting to see the value that Quinnipiac brings,” Olian said. “Obviously, it’s tremendous economic value.”
According to the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, Quinnipiac contributed over $3.1 billion to the Connecticut economy in 2017. Students themselves spent nearly $100 million in the surrounding community.
Although the economic contribution is substantial, some Hamden residents do not enjoy the experience of living in a college town, which is something Olian has realized.
“I think that sometimes there’s a little bit of frustration for some residents in some parts of the community that students are not respectful enough of their neighbors,” she said. “Of course, we are chagrined any time we hear of an episode, though they are rare.”
In 2015, Mayor Curt Leng stated that Quinnipiac students, for the majority, are good students. However, there are some issues with students not being compassionate and respectful neighbors in the community. Since then, he says he has seen improvements.
“I am thankful for the improved efforts to address these important neighborhood issues that the university has taken, including the great outreach efforts and commitment shown by Vice President and Chief of Staff Bethany Zemba and others to work on this issue in collaboration with the town,” Mayor Leng said.
President Olian continues to work on improving the university and its relationship with the surrounding communities.
“What we want is for everyone to appreciate the value of having students and a university in their backyard,” Olian said.
HAMDEN, Conn. – With only about three months left, first, second and third-year students at Quinnipiac University are nearing the end of their living situations this school year. Many questions will appear in the coming months, but the most important one on everyone’s mind seems to be centered around differing living experiences.
Many Quinnipiac students trek off-campus for housing in their collegiate career. Quinnipiac offers several housing options, and two for their second-year students located on the Mount Carmel and York Hill campuses.
“Then there’s a bunch of them [student houses] in the neighborhood which could bring up some negativity with families,” local property manager Ari Gorfain said. “The Washington Avenue, School Street, and Whitney Avenue areas are [student] populated, and those are the better places for them.”
Students that choose to remain on campus are entered into a lottery system hosted by the school. This lottery system randomly assigns a number that leads to priority choosing when housing is made available. Students who receive a higher lottery number may be added to another student’s room who holds a lower one.
Quinnipiac recently sent out housing contracts that need to be completed by March 6, 2020. The Quinnipiac lottery for housing opens March 27, 2020, which although an early date, doesn’t deter landlords from acting sooner than the school.
Gorfain was able to touch upon his process of filling up off-campus houses.
“Most of the time it’s friends of friends, and if friends have been at the house and like it, they reach out the sooner the better,” Gorfain said. “It starts all the way from day one of school.”
Some students are reached out to well before the second semester even begins. First year student Matteo Naclerio remembers when he was first approached about off-campus housing.
“I remember seeing a group chat notification about housing,” Naclerio said. “An upperclassmen I met in early September was reaching out to fill houses in the beginning of October. It put me in a weird spot because I was just taking my first exams and didn’t know anything about housing at that point.”
Current third-year Student Justin Arrichiello was extremely opposed to living on main campus. His situation differed from most, as he transferred to Quinnipiac University in the Spring semester of his first year. Arrichiello took shelter at Aspen Glen Apartments with some friends who were renting.
“When housing selections came, they came pretty quick, and that was before I made a bunch of connections with people that lived on my floor,” Arrichiello said. “I would much rather take living with people that I know over having a good housing situation.
A look at the “Hill” living option on Quinnipiac’s Mount Carmel Campus | Photo by John Morgan
“I slept on his couch instead of sleeping in my dorm room. I brought all of my clothes to Aspen, parked my car at Aspen, kept my toothbrush in his bathroom. I did everything there.”
Gorfain had this to say regarding the benefits of off-campus housing, “I feel like they like their independence more. Kids are growing up a lot faster when they hit their sophomore or junior years, and they want to be in a house with their friends.”
Students that live off campus seem to share similar concerns about transportation. Cars seem to be the main concern, and students seem to rarely be in favor of testing the shuttle system. Third-year students Michael Trezza and Stephen Brisman had several comments regarding the convenience.
“We really wanted to be on our time with driving to campus. We didn’t want to have to wait for shuttles,” Michael Trezza said.
A look at the “Village” living option on Quinnipiac’s Mount Carmel Campus | Photo by John Morgan
“I had five of us on York, and thirty of us on the main campus. We just didn’t want to take the shuttles,” Stephen Brisman said. “I didn’t want to hike to the garage [to get my car], when I can just get an apartment and park right next to my door.” Many off campus houses run through a funnel of students. Those who graduate in the upcoming year and/or are moving on from their residence work with their landlords to find possible replacement tenants.
The previous students living in that house attempt to build a level of trust with their landlord, and their landlord a level of trust with those who follow.
Many students are pulled from social media groups, athletic teams, and on campus organizations. The commonality of these demographics revolves around numbers. Landlords have the opportunity to take common interests and put them under one roof.
Whether regarding early activity, random roommates, or transportation and convenience issues, some Quinnipiac students are pushing to get off campus. To them, this appears to be the safest bet when it comes to playing the lottery.
Student athletes often garner attention for their 20-to-40-hour work weeks they have in season, and the juggling act they must put on between academics and athletics. But an unsung group of students suffer a similar schedule, with much less fanfare and reward.
Emma Carman, a senior at Quinnipiac, was originally intent to walk on to the Acrobatics and Tumbling team. However, a back surgery in her sophomore year of high school prevented her from remaining on the team as an athlete. But she was still passionate about the team, and was determined to contribute.
“I told the head coach, Mary Ann Powers that I still wanted to be involved with the team anyway I could be,” Carman said, “so she gave me this wonderful opportunity and I am so thankful for that.”
Emma Carman filming an Acrobatics and Tumbling meet courtesy Emma Carman
Despite no longer being a student athlete, Carman still put forward just as much effort and time commitment as she would have as a student athlete.
“I go to every single practice which is about 20 hours a week during the championship season. The championship season for our sport runs from the beginning of October until the end of the school year,” said Carman, “Our national championships are held the last weekend in April, so we are practicing 20 hours a week for almost eight months.”
On top of attending and filming all practices, Carman’s responsibilities include traveling on the road with the team to things such as film and record transactions made on the road, filming home meets, organizing packing lists and so many other little details throughout an average week. Indeed, Carman, like other managers at Quinnipiac, is truly an integral part of the team.
The importance of managers is not lost on the teams they put their hearts into, either. Coaches and players alike can go on for hours in regards to just how important their managers are. Tricia Fabbri, the coach of the women’s basketball team at Quinnipiac, was especially grateful for her group of student managers.
“They bring so much professionalism, responsibility, they carry themselves, they are a valued member of the program,” said Fabbri, “without them we are not running at a high capacity.”
Tricia Fabbri walking the sidelines courtesy Liz Flynn
She continued to rattle off the variety of different details and responsibilities she gave to her managers, from setting up the chairs and water before a game, to running drills with the clock, to minor things as simple as knowing which shoulder to go over when giving a player their water. To Fabbri, each responsibility, no matter how seemingly minor or unnecessary, is crucial to the team’s success.
“The orange slices at halftime are so important to our players,” said Fabbri, “to make sure that they are getting that real natural sugar to go out there and play that second half.”
Much like with her athletes, Fabbri expects her managers to be ready and prepared at a moment’s notice to meet each player’s individual needs, because in her mind they are a crucial part of the team.
“Players get picky in the heat of the game,” said Fabbri, “and as a valued member of the team you better get it right.”
Paige Warfel, a senior forward for the Bobcats, believes it is easy for the work that managers do to go unnoticed, but that in her and her teammates eyes, they are just as much a part of the team as the athletes are.
“They are 100 percent a part of this team, as much as any other person,” said Warfel, “you know we’re all in this together and they play a huge roll, just like we do.”
Paige Warfel running back on offense courtesy Liz Flynn
Taylor Herd, a senior guard for the Bobcats, agreed with Warfel.
“They just brighten up the team’s day,” said Herd, “because they are always with us and are also students, but they have a different perspective than we do.”
As Warfel and Herd said, managers truly are a part of the team in just about every sense imaginable. They put in similar time commitments, travel with the team, and are a crucial to how the team functions. Yet, not only is their work often overlooked, there is no record of any of it at all.
The sad reality is that unlike with student athletes, there is no basis or standard for what a manager’s workload should typically be, and how they should be compensated. The only national resource they have, the National Association of Collegiate Basketball Managers, could not be reached for comment and has no information available.
Of the schools reached out to regarding stats on their managers or others, not one school could offer a single nugget of information.
Every school which was reached out to was unable to find one piece of data that could serve to represent the hours of work their managers had put into their programs. Only the Athletic Compliance Officer at the University of New Hampshire had an idea of where such stats might exist, and that was also a dead end. Mike Stefanelli, a former four-year manager for the UNH men’s basketball team, had some answers.
Much like other managers, Stefanelli recalled 20-to-40-hour work weeks, filled with the same various responsibilities and travel obligations as his colleagues. Yet for all his contributions to the team, he was only rewarded with spring internship credit in his junior and senior years. Yet to Stefanelli this was not an issue.
“I did this because I managed teams for four years in high school,” said Stefanelli, “and I realized that it was something I loved, something I had a passion for.”
Stefanelli was able to manage the time commitment of being the for UNH for the entirety of his four years at UNH, but not all students can meet the demands of the job for their full enrollment. Between academic demands and extracurricular demands, some managers have to make the decision to leave the team for the sake of their futures. Even with thousands of dollars on the line.
Francesca DePalo, now a Senior at Quinnipiac, came to the school in large part due to the hockey program and the opportunity to be a manager. She signed a contract with the team, treating her as a volunteer year one, and 1,000 dollars towards her tuition in the second year, with that number increasing by 1,000 each following year. DePalo loved being a manager, doing many of the same duties and responsibilities as Carman, but realized her senior year that she had to make a choice between her position and her future.
“My grades were slipping as I went into my senior year, and I realized that I needed to make a choice for my future,” said Depalo, “so I stepped down from being a manager to focus more on my career and my other responsibilities.”
Those responsibilities included her position as the President of the Quinnipiac’s Association of Women in Sports Media and her role as manager, as well as being a full-time student. Since stepping down from her position, DePalo has seen her grades rise once more, and has felt a weight lifted off her shoulders. But despite having to leave her post as manager, Depalo only had fond memories of her time with the teams.
“Being able to be a part of the program and seeing the behind the scenes was so cool, and I made so many connections,” said DePalo, “plus I learned a lot of time management skills, so I definitely wouldn’t change a think about my time as manager.”
So yes, it is an issue that a job with this many responsibilities is not tracked and regulated to a greater extent, and it does leave open the door for exploitation down the line. But that is not the story of most collegiate managers. Warfel may have put it best when describing college managers, even if she singled out her sport specifically.
Francesca Depalo at a Quinnipiac Athletics event courtesy Francesca DePalo
“They do this strictly because they love basketball and love being here,” said Warfel, “and I have a lot of respect for them for that.”
Photo by: Jordan Wolff (Quinnipiac has two Bobcat statues, this one is located on the York Hill Campus outside of the People’s United Center)
The NCAA has 347 Division I schools, and Quinnipiac University is one of them. Quinnipiac started out in the NCAA’s second highest conference known as Division II and has faculty and coaches who can describe what the transition process was like.
One of those members is Senior Associate Athletic Director Bill Mecca. For the last 41 years, Mecca has served as an assistant men’s basketball coach (1978-91), head tennis coach, assistant director of athletics and head men’s basketball coach (five seasons).
The one thing that’s resonated with Mecca is Quinnipiac’s increase in population.
“Back In 1978, Quinnipiac had probably around 1100-1200 students and if you could spell Quinnipiac back in the day, then I probably gave you an academic scholarship,” Mecca said. “In terms of where we were academically, we weren’t even close to where we are now.”
Canva By: Jordan Wolff
Photos Courtesy of Quinnipiac Athletics: Quinnipiac Athletics five coaches who’ve been a part of the University for over 20 years. Four of them had no previous affiliation with Quinnipiac, except for Dave Clarke who graduated with a Master’s Degree in 2010.
In 2019, Quinnipiac has 21 Division I athletic programs, five coaches who have 20-year tenures, and a staff of 38 members. It has a soccer, field hockey and lacrosse complex built in 2017 and a rugby team that plays on campus. The York Hill campus has a re-named People’s United Center (from TD Bank) dedicated to hockey and basketball.
Courtesy of Quinnipiac Athletics: Athletic Director Greg Amodio is speaking at the inaugural reception of the new Soccer, Field Hockey and Lacrosse complex opened in the fall of 2017.
The gradual transition started in the mid-1990s.
In 1995, Quinnipiac programs were in Division II athletics. The school was known as Quinnipiac College, and the mascot was the Braves.
Quinnipiac College took a chance, as they hired Fairfield Stags alum Tricia Fabbri as their first full-time female head coach.
Courtesy of Quinnipiac Athletics: Tricia Fabbri, then Patricia Sacca was hired from Fairfield University in 1995. She was inducted to the Fairfield University Hall of Fame in 1998.
“It was different back then because there were very few full-time coaches and administrators that made up the athletics department,” Fabbri said. “It was small, but I was really excited to put a program together because I was the first full-time female coach hired.”
Canva by: Jordan Wolff
The men’s programs remained the same throughout the history of Quinnipiac Athletics. The number women’s programs increased significantly, adding Indoor Track, Outdoor Track, Ice Hockey, Rugby, and Acrobatics and Tumbling.
In Fabbri’s first season, the Braves went 2-23 overall, 1-15 in conference and 1-13 at home. The Braves were also in the Northeast Conference (NEC) in which Fabbri details how difficult it was to navigate.
“The level when I initially started was not as competitive as it needed to be at that time,” Fabbri said. “I didn’t get out and start recruiting and we had a lot of ground to make-up, and not a lot of time to do it. There was a lot of catch-up to be done to get competitive in terms of resources from Division II to Division I to get in place.”
Besides the competitiveness, Mecca explained that Quinnipiac athletics didn’t have much exposure in Division II athletics.
Courtesy of Quinnipiac Chronicle: Mecca currently provides color commentary for Quinnipiac Athletics, along with hosting an annual Golf tournament named after him.
“Division II is one of those places in college athletics, where in my opinion you’re in no man’s land.” Mecca said. “My philosophy is either go Division III, where you’re focusing on the wellness of the athletes and the student-body. Or, go Division I where there is a commitment to go to the next-level.”
Division II was a place where Quinnipiac could still offer scholarships to athletes, but weren’t funded enough to be in the NCAA’s highest conference.
A part of going to that next level was Jack McDonald. McDonald was hired as the new athletic director in August of 1995, and had a chance to sit down with former Quinnipiac president John Lahey. In that discussion, McDonald was very candid on what direction the college needed to take.
“He thought that Quinnipiac’s academic reputation was national Division I-caliber and he’d like the athletic department to catch up to the academic reputation of the school,” McDonald said. “I thought that Quinnipiac would be a great Division I school.
Maybe not the upper echelon of Division I schools, but at the time there was about 321 Division I schools and Quinnipiac would easily fit among those group of schools.”
The men’s and women’s tennis teams each made their mark in 1996-97 (last year in Division II). The men’s team finished 18-1, and went 9-0 in conference play. They were inducted into Quinnipiac’s Hall of Fame in 2014.
The women’s team went 16-2 and also went 9-0 in conference play. They were also inducted into Quinnipiac’s Hall of Fame in 2014.
In 1998, Quinnipiac declared its intent for Division I athletics. McDonald still had some groundwork in front of him. He first had to see which conference Quinnipiac could start in.
McDonald said how Quinnipiac put out multiple applications, but it was ultimately accepted into the Northeast Conference. Another step was trying to elevate the Men’s Ice Hockey Program.
In 1998, McDonald founded a whole new league called the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Hockey League. The MAAC was the men’s ice hockey team’s first Division I hockey conference and it included AIC, Army, Bentley University, Canisius College, UCONN, Fairfield University, Holy Cross, Iona College, Mercyhurst University and Sacred Heart University. The Braves went 22-4-2 in its first season in the MAAC and lost in the semi-finals to Canisius College 5-2.
More change was upon the college two years later.
Part Two: Change the Game
In 2000, Quinnipiac changed its name from Quinnipiac College to Quinnipiac University. Quinnipiac expanded its programs and were now able to grant master’s degrees. Fabbri felt it was time not just for athletics, but for the entire community.
“I thought it was appropriate,” Fabbri said. “Lahey and his administration were growing the graduate programs here, so it was a very paralleled move to keep step in time that we are now broadening what we have to offer our students with moving from college to university.”
Some programs saw immediate results. The 2000 women’s soccer team went 13-6-1 and won the NEC tournament, while the Quinnipiac field hockey team went 12-8 overall and 10-2 in the NEC. Both programs respectively made the Quinnipiac hall of fame in 2010 and 2012. The Quinnipiac Hall of Fame is a place where the University honors there most impactful members, clubs, and athletic programs.
The men’s ice hockey program continued its rise in 2001, as they went 20-13-5. They went 15-6 in the MAAC and defeated Mercyhurst 6-4 in the MAAC title game to advance to its first ever NCAA tournament. They were also inducted into the Quinnipiac Hall of Fame in 2012.
McDonald also started to do some broadcasting duties for the Braves, and discussed how putting hockey games on TV affected the process.
“We wanted people to turn on NESN looking for a Bruins game and they’d see Quinnipiac playing UConn or Fairfield,” McDonald said. “Television was a great way of getting exposure for hockey in Boston and basketball in New York.”
Quinnipiac decided to adjust its mascot two years later. In 2002, they officially changed its mascot from the Braves to the Bobcats.
According to USHCO, this was a suggested move from Lahey as he noticed that Colgate University changed its name from Red Raiders to Raiders.
Quinnipiac Vice President of Public Affairs Lynn Bushnell, stated that, “Quinnipiac’s women’s teams were offended by the use of the Lady Braves moniker, and graphic representations-logos and mascots-were similarly burdened,” the release said. “The institution, out of concern for these sensitivities, had stopped using human representations of Native Americans years ago.”
According to a Quinnipiac Chronicle article by Viktoria Sundqvist, the university’s main factor of choosing Bobcats was due to how common they are in the New England area.
Fabbri remembers how important this adjustment was for the future of the university.
“I think that was a little bit to go with the sign of the times of being politically correct in what was happening in the landscape of college athletics,” Fabbri said. “It really fueled a conversation with Lahey and McDonald. I had nothing to do with making the decision, but I was happy with the move of going from Braves to Bobcats.
The athletics department was also going through transition as they hired Northeastern alum Mike Medina in 2004 as Assistant Athletic Director for intramurals.
Courtesy of Quinnipiac Athletics: Medina graduated with a journalism degree from Northeastern University and currently serves as Quinnipiac’s Director of Fitness and Recreation.
Hockey and basketball didn’t have an arena to play in and programs were still participating in the NEC. Programs were able to wear whatever uniform they desired, but Medina shared how that’s no longer the case.
“One of the things we’ve seen is how the Bobcat has evolved,” Medina said. “We’ve had a rebrand of some of the athletic marks, in particular with the Adidas contract that has started. Prior to that contract, all of our teams wore whatever uniforms they wanted. We’ve seen the consistency of the Bobcat stay, but we’ve seen these tweaks that’ve enhanced the image of the university.”
Part Three: blueprint for success
In 2006, the Quinnipiac men’s hockey team was admitted into the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference. A year later, approximately $52 Million was spent to design and open the TD Bank Sports Center on Quinnipiac’s York Hill campus.
Photo by Jordan Wolff: This was named the TD Bank Sports Center until September of 2017, as TD Bank’s sponsorship came to an end in favor of People’s United Bank.
Prior to that, Mecca revealed how the hockey team practiced at 11 p.m. on Sundays in East Haven. They had an opportunity to join the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference because Vermont decided to switch to the Hockey East conference. Mecca also shared how the university reacted when ECAC representatives came to visit the campus.
“We had put on emphasis on the fact that whatever we were going to do for the men, we would also do for the women,” Mecca said. “They brought bulldozers there and parked it on the side of the road. As they were driving people by in the car to show them where we we’re going to build this state-of-the-art facility, there was this bulldozer that wouldn’t start. It was on the side of the hill, signaling that we were ready to go,”
In 2009, Quinnipiac added a women’s rugby team. They won back-to-back-to-back national championships in their 10-year history.
The rugby team won its first and the inaugural varsity championship in 2015, defeating Army West Point 24-19. Quinnipiac Assistant Director for Athletic communications Nick Solari was a junior journalism major at the time, and remembers how special it was seeing it in person.
“Coach (Becky) Carlson has done a great job with that group,” Solari said. “It wasn’t your typical show up to the game and report on what you see. For the longest time, everyone associated men’s ice hockey as the team going to the national championship. They went to two frozen fours when I was a student there. Simultaneously, women’s rugby was competing for national championships too.”
Courtesy of Quinnipiac Athletics: Solari attended Quinnipiac from 2012-16, along with covering sporting events for the Quinnipiac Chronicle.
How does everything stand today? The Bobcats saw 21 conference championships and 33 NCAA championship appearances in McDonald’s tenure.
Each program elevated to the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference in 2013, with the field hockey team joining the Big East conference that includes the #1 UConn Huskies in 2016.
Courtesy of Quinnipiac Chronicle (Photo by Anna Brundage): The Quinnipiac 2012-13 Hockey team’s reaction after loss to Yale
The men’s ice hockey team made it to the Frozen Four in 2013. Quinnipiac scored 1:49 into the game and added two more goals in the first period, to make it a 3-0 lead. They held on by a final of 4-1 to advance to its only NCAA championship game.
They faced their in state rival Yale Bulldogs, and were tied 0-0 entering the second period. Yale’s Christian Bourbonais scored with four seconds left in the period to make it a 1-0 game. Yale scored three unanswered goals to win by a final score of 4-0.
The women’s basketball program has won 52 straight conference games and had a memorable run in 2017. They advanced to its first NCAA tournament, where they upset the #5 Marquette 68-65 in the first round. They faced #4 Miami in the round of 32, and won 85-78 to make it to the Sweet 16.
The Quinnipiac baseball team had a historic 2019 season. They faced Fairfield in the MAAC championships and it went to extra innings tied at five. In the bottom of the 13th, junior infielder Evan Vulgamore scored on a wild pitch to send Quinnipiac to its second ever NCAA tournament.
The Bobcats traveled to Greenville, North Carolina to face the #10 East Carolina Pirates. Quinnipiac got out to a 2-0 lead with a homerun from Vulgamore. East Carolina stormed back to make it a 3-3 game, but the Bobcats senior outfielder Liam Scafariello hit a go-ahead two-run homerun to make it a 5-3 game. Quinnipiac held on to win its first ever NCAA tournament game.
The numbers show that success has come with athletic expansion, McDonald still wants athletics to continue its aggressive nature.
“One of my mottos is even if you’re on the right track, if you just stand there you’ll get run over,” McDonald said. “Whenever you’re winning games or having success, you never stop thinking ahead. You can never stop advancing yourself in any phase of life, not just athletics. It’s important to keep moving forward.”
Imagine a LinkedIn-style site for college athletes who want to attend a new school. Aaron Falzon experienced the real thing.
“I put my name in,” said Falzon, who now attends Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. “I went to go write my 20-page paper. 30 minutes later I had four emails, two texts and five missed calls, and I was like, what is going on?”
Aaron Falzon warms up for his first home game at Quinnipiac against Albany. (Photo by Liz Flynn)
Welcome to the NCAA Transfer Portal, where the students can enter their name into a system that serves as a gateway to the vast reservoir of colleges seeking top athletic talent.
The NCAA opened the portal Oct. 15, 2018, to give students the opportunity to change schools without the hassle of sitting out a year per long-standing transfer rules.
The portal gives athletes a chance to seek opportunities – the role of college in general. But it has turned into something much, much more, even for mid-major Division I schools such as Quinnipiac.
Quinnipiac men’s basketball head coach Baker Dunleavy has recruited five transfer students, including one through the portal in Falzon. The portal is a profound development for the school.
“The wave of transfers isn’t going anywhere,” Dunleavy said. “It’ll only get bigger. It’ll only get more popular. I think player movement and freedom is something that continues to grow.”
The Good
The Bobcats took advantage of the portal to land Falzon, who previously attended Northwestern, a Big Ten school. Dunleavy found him on the portal and sent one of those emails that overwhelmed the Massachusetts-born player.
Why did Falzon leave a major school outside of Chicago to attend Quinnipiac in suburban Hamden, and play in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference with its one-bid status for the NCAA Tournament?
“I wanted to go to a place where I have an opportunity to play and have the chance to win a conference championship,” said Falzon of Newton, Mass. “Also, the bonus when I come here is being close to home. Mom and Dad can drive to every game.”
Dunleavy, in turn, saw Falzon as a player who fit the team’s culture.
“For us, we can be really opportunistic with transfers when they fit our culture and our identity and really being disciplined in knowing when that’s the case,” Dunleavy said. “With an Aaron Falzon, that was the case. We were really aggressive to recruit Aaron.”
The Bad
Jaden Daly, a sports writer for A Daly Dose of Hoops, has been covering New York-metro area men’s college basketball for 10 years. Daly has seen both sides of the story: the high-major schools bringing in players that out-matched their competition on the mid-major front and the mid-major schools taking advantage of this chance to recruit the nation’s top talents.
Between grad transfers ,players in the transfer portal and players that have entered their names in the draft teams will look very different come end of the summer. Roster management has become as important as any aspect of coaching for high major programs. @CollegeGameDay
“The lower level schools are losing out because now it’s created a marketplace where if you are a higher major and you’re losing out in recruiting, it’s a ripple effect with the one-and-done’s. You have to go to the next best option,” Daly said.
That next option? Well, it’s plucking the best of the best from conferences like the MAAC. In the portal era so far, Quinnipiac has not been a team that has had to see players leave to other schools. However just three years ago the Bobcats were forced to wave goodbye to their two top scorers in Mikey Dixon and Peter Kiss. Dixon joined St. John’s in the Big East and Kiss is now playing at Rutgers in the Big 10.
Mikey Dixon (left) and Peter Kiss (right) pose together during their freshman year at Quinnipiac. (Photo by QBSN)
This has been the issue for mid-major teams in the last calendar year with the portal.
“If you’re a high major coach, you see a 15, 20 point per game scorer that goes into the portal,” Daly said, “why not take a shot at him? If you’re not able to get a one-and-done like a Kentucky or Carolina or Duke is going to get, you have to find some way to keep up with the Joneses.”
The Jury’s Still Out
On the other hand, mid-major schools need to compete with each other, and Quinnipiac’s program is no different: it needs to find talent flying just below the major-school radar. The transfer portal facilitates that effort.
Jessica Hegmann-Grasso, the MAAC’s associate commissioner said, the transfer portal gives these types of schools, especially in her conference, ways to get a hold of the players they would not be able to typically recruit out of high school.
“The transfer option does benefit the mid-major conferences, like ourselves. Being able to get access to those players that may go elsewhere and then come back to us,” Hegmann-Grasso said, “we do benefit from that.”
MAAC men’s basketball has gained 20 transfer student-athletes for the 2019-20 season, while losing 11 in the portal.
Hegmann-Grasso did point out that we are only in year two of the portal process. There is so much still to come.
“It has only been two years. It’s still new. Like anything else it takes that adjustment period to see how the full reaction will be from it. Right now it’s waiting and seeing.”
One thing that it has already accomplished is it has made it easier for the student-athletes to explore all of their options.
“The process to dealing with the transfers prior to the portal was a lot more restrictive, a lot more interaction and conversation,” Hegmann-Grasso said, “where the portal is now making it a little bit more free.”
Is it free enough? Not for ESPN’s Jay Bilas.
Now, Quinnerly will play as a 24-year old, redshirt senior. For what purpose? The NCAA’s transfer policy is an unholy, unjustifiable mess. If Quinnerly played softball or all but five other sports, he could transfer at semester and be immediately eligible. https://t.co/tju0iA1kGJ
The transfer portal has continued to progress this freedom that the student-athletes desire. Phillip Lamar Cunningham, a professor of media studies who formerly served as co-director of the sports studies program at Quinnipiac University said that the portal, itself, has legitimized the power that the student-athletes can have. Though, he does not believe it has had an outstanding impact on the landscape of college athletics.
Falzon stands with his teammates before his first home game with Quinnipiac.
“The transfer portal, like most NCAA initiatives, is a little late and doesn’t necessarily change much as much as it capitulates to the forces that they already had to give way to.”
Knowing that you have options is an important part of a young athlete’s mindset, and those are really on full display all the time now.
“For a small school like Quinnipiac, the benefits are if you’re an elite college athlete, you are coming home,” Cunningham said. “If you are someone that’s on the cusp of a major conference team but you can’t really break through, you can possibly come here [Quinnipiac] and be a star. We see this in every sport. If you are a star in a mid-major you are suddenly more attracted to more established teams.”
The new rules have led to confusion over the transfer portal’s role. For Hegmann-Grasso and her colleagues in the MAAC’s league offices, they just would like to see it play out a bit more.
“I think it’s just too early to start changing anything because it took a while to get to this point, and to just change it right away?” Hegmann-Grasso said. “I don’t think we do our due diligence of really setting up a system, even though some were in favor for it and some were not.”
It’s just the start of more and more changes in college basketball, and so far, Quinnipiac can call itself a beneficiary. So far.
On Wednesday afternoon, over 175 students and faculty gathered in the Quinnipiac Center for Communications and Engineering auditorium to participate in an open forum regarding the issue of inclusion on campus. This event comes in the wake of multiple negative events occurring in the past few weeks, such as racist language being used in the dorms and a professor tweeting her discontent with Chick-fil-A on campus, which became an outlet for hateful commentary on Twitter.
Pictured (left) Kevin Parker director of health and wellness, (middle) Vice President and Provost Jennifer Brown, (right) Elyssa Wrubel, senior english major.
“I do think it was helpful in the sense of informing students as there were topics discussed today that I know other students didn’t know as well as myself,” said Tyler McNeil a junior public relations major. “Most notably for me was that I was unaware that faculty here did not have ‘clock stop’ with their tenure.”
The “Clock stop” policy that McNeil mentions is when a school allows faculty and staff to stop the clock on their way to achieving tenure. This would be beneficial if professor or staff member fell extremely ill, or had to leave for maternity/paternity leave. Right now Quinnipiac does not have this policy in place so if a professor were to have to leave, their eligibility for tenure would be in jeopardy.
This was the email sent to the entire student body regarding the racist language used in the dorms.
This was the email sent to all students, faculty and staff inviting them to this open forum, discussing the topic of inclusion.
On top of the discussion regarding clock stop, around five students and seven faculty members stood up in front of the room and voiced their concern about different topics of inclusion on campus. These ranged from the LGBTQIA community, racial minorities being underrepresented, religious discrimination, handicap accessibility and more executive support for faculty and staff when it comes to school policy.
Specifically, Austin Calvo, the student government president spoke about the issues when it comes to ADA violations on campus and how the schools SGA has tried in the past to fix inaccessible pathways to buildings and residential halls.
A sociology professor, Jim Buccini, voiced his unhappiness with how unwelcoming this campus feels to students of minority races. He used his son’s experience of touring the campus and how at the end of the tour he absolutely did not want to attend Quinnipiac and was disappointed that his father taught at such an uninviting school.
Another student, Andrew DePass, a junior Biology & Computer Science major also talked about the issues of race on campus and discussed the toxic academic environment many minority students face in class. He said that this feeling is created when professors allow students of the majority to use their freedom of speech to say things that immediately make minorities feel inferior and/or alienated.
This open discussion is a product of Quinnipiac President Judy Olian’s strategic plan, which pushes the importance of diversity and inclusion in a competitive and creative work force, but for the past few weeks, Quinnipiac’s community has not been living up to its ideals.
Over a week ago, an email was sent to the student body from the university’s Office of Residential Life about racist language and actions being used in the dorms. The director of Residential Life, Mark DeVilbiss, stated in his email, “The university is committed to a culture of inclusion, openness and civility and is strongly opposed to discriminatory words and actions.”
Then two weeks before the email was sent, journalism professor Margarita Diaz expressed her discontent on Twitter with the use of Chick-fil-A on campus, due to their non-inclusive beliefs. The tweet blew up and users began attacking her and the community. The school newspaper also published an opinion piece that took her view and twisted it into something very different from the original intent of her comment.
This is the packed CCE Auditorium as faculty, staff and students listened intently.
After the constructive conversation concluded, Don Sawyer ended the discussion by promising there will be more open forums throughout the year and that over time, there will be change.
Vice President Don Sawyer addresses the crowd and helps lead the discussion on inclusivity on campus.
“When changing campus culture an hour is not gonna do it, a year might not even do it, but it will happen over time,” said Sawyer.
It’s an interesting paradox – Earth’s population is growing exponentially, currently estimated at some 7.7 billion people. Why then, does it seem like the world is only getting smaller?
Although it’s on a much smaller scale, the Quinnipiac Bobcats are an interesting example of this phenomenon.
Quinnipiac University is a small private institution in Hamden, Connecticut. Most of the students who attend the school are from the American Northeast, and approximately 97 percent of the student body comes from somewhere within the United States.
However, it’s on the athletic fields where Quinnipiac’s commitment to international recruitment really shines.
In their never-ending search for team success, the coaches of Quinnipiac’s 21 Division-I teams have reached out overseas. International recruitment is a growing part of the collegiate athletics industry, and it’s something that has become a distinct part of the Quinnipiac Bobcat identity.
How do you think an athlete gets recruited? It seems simple enough – a coach finds potential student-athletes, talks to them, watches them play and maybe offers them a scholarship.
That’s not the case for many of Quinnipiac’s international recruits.
Meet Queenie Lai. A junior from Hong Kong, Lai could almost describe her recruitment process as “reverse recruiting.” Lai was an exceptional golfer back home, but wanted a new challenge on the links at a more competitive level. After an admittedly-late start to the recruitment process, Lai took it upon herself to achieve her goal of playing U.S. collegiate golf.
“I had to play in the States for a whole summer of tournaments, state-to-state,” Lai said. “And, I had to contact at least 50 schools and the coaches and introduce myself and ask if they were interested in recruiting me. Eventually, I landed on Quinnipiac and the coach I have right now. He was one of the nicest, and that meant a lot to me.
“I had to do most of the work.”
It’s certainly a much different story than the common assumption of university-paid travel, lavish dinners and unlimited budgets. However, Lai is not the only Quinnipiac athlete with an unconventional recruitment story.
> “I had to do most of the work.”
— Queenie Lai on recruiting
Courtesy: Quinnipiac Athletics
Bianca Strubbe was at a crossroads. After playing field hockey in her native Poland for 14 years, Strubbe needed a break. She traveled to the United States, settling in West Hartford as an au pair. Her love of field hockey not yet entirely quelled, Strubbe went to a Quinnipiac field hockey game at the suggestion of her host family.
After liking what she saw on the field and in the state-of-the-art facilities, Strubbe decided to bring field hockey back into her life. She played and coached at a local HTC field hockey club team, but never would have found college field hockey if not for a friendly co-worker, who informed her that she’d likely be eligible to play in the NCAA.
“I didn’t know that, to be honest,” Strubbe said. “None of my friends or Polish players know that we are very welcome in the U.S. playing in college. We don’t have any agencies, we don’t have any connection with U.S. colleges, so, to be honest, we don’t know that we have the chance to earn our degree and play field hockey here.”
Now in her second year as a graduate student at Quinnipiac, Strubbe has made a seamless transition. She’s the team’s leading scorer this season, and her English has improved immensely, thanks in part to her choosing journalism for her major.
Although foreign students are often taught English, the field hockey team is careful to keep an international influence around to keep their players comfortable.
“It’s good to have someone who has the same accent as me,” Strubbe said. “We feel comfortable, we don’t feel afraid to talk. It’s good to have international students around you.”
Courtesy: Quinnipiac Athletics
> “We don’t know that we have the chance to earn our degree and play field hockey here.”
— Bianca Strubbe
Quinnipiac women’s ice hockey forward Sarah-Eve Coutu-Godboutdidn’t quite have that same luxury. Although she was one of seven international players on the team her freshman year, all Canadians, she was the only one who predominantly spoke French. Fortunately, head coach Cassandra Turnerdid her best to help Coutu-Godbout adapt.
“Cass knew right off the bat that I couldn’t really speak English, so she was very patient,” Coutu-Godbout said. “She sent me recommendations and books to read to practice my English, as well as helping me with all the stuff I needed to do. For me, that’s exactly what I needed. The integration here in the U.S. was pretty smooth because of the coaches.”
Much like Strubbe, Coutu-Godbout wasn’t initially aware of the opportunity she had to play in the United States, albeit for different reasons.
“In Quebec, they want to maintain all the Quebec players in Canada. It’s kind of against them to go to the U.S.,” Coutu-Godbout said. “So a lot of the teams won’t help you get a spot on a (U.S.) team, so I was pretty much doing it by myself.
“The girls (in America) can be recruited at 13, but in Quebec, it’s another world. They want to keep it away, they don’t want you to come here.”
Even though her peers didn’t want Coutu-Godbout to play college hockey stateside, she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I really enjoy it here,” Coutu-Godbout said. “I think it’s the perfect choice for me, and I’m really happy about it. I never looked back on it.”
> “In Quebec, it’s another world. They want to keep it away, they don’t want you to come here.”
— Sarah-Eve Coutu-Godbout
Courtesy: Quinnipiac Athletics
How much can you learn about someone through a computer screen? According to the coaches at Quinnipiac, quite a bit.
“This generation is a little different,” men’s soccer coach Eric Da Costa said. “Unfortunately, communication is a little bit harder in terms of getting on the phone and having a phone conversation, so we do a lot of Skype, we do a lot of WhatsApp, FaceTime, just trying to get that time with the guys and figure out who they are, what they’re about, what makes them tick, and (if) that fits into what we do here.”
If Da Costa and his coaching staff have the ability to travel overseas to visit a player, they will. More often than not though, the soccer team recruits its players over the internet due to budgetary and travel restrictions.
“We have to be cautious about how we spend our money,” Da Costa said.
According to Da Costa, it’s easier to recruit international soccer players than Americans.
Courtesy: Quinnipiac Athletics
“Recruiting the American kids is actually a lot more difficult for us,” Da Costa said. “They want the glitz, they want the glamour. They know the differences between the institutions in terms of prestige or popularity, so they look their nose down at us.”
Once coaches have a good experience with a player from a certain area, they are more likely to revisit that region in future recruiting. Take Quinnipiac field hockey, for example. Head coach Becca Main has presided over the program for all 25 years of its existence, and has designated “pockets” of international talent. The team likes to focus its recruiting efforts in areas like South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain, where several successful players have come from before.
Field hockey is uniquely positioned for international recruiting, compared to some of Quinnipiac’s other sports. According to Main, international players are the preferred recruits for the program due to their added experience.
“(International recruits) have almost 10 years on an American student – they’ve been playing 10 years longer,” Main said. “In general, most Americans have been playing 4-6 years, max. … You get (an international) coming in, they’ve got 16 years (of experience). They’re just better at playing the sport.”
With all of the different languages and cultures on the team, Main tries to make sure that each international player has at least one other teammate who speaks their language. It could be hard to mesh all these different pieces together, but creative thinking from the coaching staff makes it all fit.
“I think the best thing about our international players is that, the ‘groupthink mentality’ – we don’t have that anymore,” Main said. “We have the ability to think outside the box.”
Courtesy: Quinnipiac Athletics
Athletic recruitment is one thing, but these are still “student”-athletes. The players must fit into Quinnipiac’s academic profile, and the admissions department gives very clear outlines to the coaches about what requirements each student-athlete needs to be accepted into Quinnipiac, from English language scores to academic grades.
Andrew Antone, director of international recruitment and admissions at Quinnipiac, says that once the students get to Quinnipiac, the school has several resources to help international students adapt.
“We have a global partners program where students are mentored by upperclassmen, and say, ‘OK, this is how you make the transition,’” Antone said. “We have global education, where they can be with other students. We have an international student orientation, which I think is a big help for them.”
To continue to attract international students, the university has initiated a new “Strategic Plan” that emphasizes globalization among the steps toward becoming the university of the future. Antone believes that the strategic plan will help make Quinnipiac even more appealing to international students.
“Especially with the new strategic plan, I think you’re going to see that number (of international students) grow, given what we’re offering,” Antone said. “The way that we’re looking forward … I think what the strategic plan does is force us to look within and change some of the policies and the way we do things to enhance everyone else’s experiences.”
In all, there are about 70 international student-athletes from more than 20 countries. That may not sound like a lot with Quinnipiac’s student population of over 10,000 and a core of student-athletes almost 500 deep.
To the international players though, it’s not about the numbers. It’s about the experience – an experience that has made Quinnipiac athletics more diverse, and more talented.
“I feel like I’m experiencing the same college experience as other people,” Lai said. “I wouldn’t say it’s any different than how they’re experiencing it.”
Quinnipiac isn’t as well-known as some other Division-I programs. None of the 10 international students interviewed said they knew anything about Quinnipiac before they were first recruited. Once they hear about all the school has to offer them, it’s hard to say no.
“We’ve closed those gaps with this (soccer) facility, obviously our institution, our campus,” Da Costa said. “At the end of the day, an international kid and his family want to go to a place where they’re cared about. They want to go to a place where they can study and play at two high levels. They want to go to a place where they can feel safe – and enjoy.
Quinnipiac held its annual parents weekend, where students got to be reunited with their families.
Parent’s Weekend had a full itinerary for everyone to enjoy, but for many parents the weekend was more about getting an inside look into their children’s college lives.
Families wait on the quad for President Olian to start her address.
“I didn’t get to move my daughter in at the beginning of the year, so this is the first time I’m on campus and I came to see what has improved or changed since the last time I was here,” said Kate Marcouillier.
Saturday’s events included an artisan fair, dean’s receptions, food stations, athletic games, the presidential address and family bingo. The events of the day started with a family breakfast at 9 a.m. and concluded with a family fest on the quad with food trucks at 6 p.m.
Parents and families had the option of following the itinerary or spend the day relaxing and going to the events when they wanted.
One family poses with Boomer the Bobcat on the quad.
“This is very relaxed,” said Debbie Hopkins. “We went to the dean’s reception to meet the dean of engineering because our son is a civil engineering major. We went to the chili station and our son showed us around campus while we were waiting to go to the cooking class we signed up for,” added Debbie Hopkins.
Many families walked around with paper shopping bags they received from the bookstore along with a goodie bag they received upon arrival.
“I didn’t come last year so I felt like I needed to make up for it and bought my daughter quite a few things from the bookstore,” said Pattie Donovan.
Other families chose to get off campus and enjoy some activities in Southern Connecticut.
“My daughter suggested going apple picking because the weather was perfect and it is something to do in the area,” said Pattie Donovan.
“I took my family to Wood-n-Tap, the local restaurant in Hamden to show them a small piece of student life. I go there all the time with my friends, so I wanted to share that with my family,” said Lacey Ventura.
President Judy Olian speaks with a parent after her address.
Parents’ Weekend events change year to year.
“Last year there was Rocktopia and no one showed up so I think that’s why they didn’t do it this year,” said junior, Ashley Cotto.
Last year’s Parents’ Weekend included many of the same events. However, last year some of the events were more in depth.
“The dean’s reception last year included short presentations from a couple professors in each school and this year they didn’t have that. I wish they did the same thing as last year because I wanted to meet some of my daughter’s professors,” said Arlene DePinho.
Daughter Olivia DePinho said, “We got to paint pumpkins last year, so I was looking forward to doing it again with my parents this year but they aren’t doing it, which is kind of sad. But I am looking forward to the food trucks later today.”
Besides the food trucks Family Bingo was a large hit with parents and their young kids who came and visited.
President Judy Olian began her presidential address by singing and dancing to Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen. She concluded her address by saying, “We are only getting started, let’s go Bobcats.”
It has been 10 years since the editors ofThe Quinnipiac Chronicle stepped down from their positions to form the student-run off-campus newspaper,The Quad News. It has been 10 years since student journalists took it upon themselves to develop their own media outlet after they believed university administration was denying their first amendment rights and censoring their work.
It has been 10 years and yet, nobody seems to remember.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Quinnipiac 2010 graduate and one of the founding members of The Quad News, Matt Andrew said.
In 2008, the returning editor in chief, editors and applicants for editorial board positions handed an empty manilla envelope to their advisor, announcing their resignation from The Chronicle, the official student-run newspaper at Quinnipiac University.
“In the end, at the end of 2008, we all resigned,” Andrew said. “We handed them an empty manilla envelope and said ‘We’ll see you later.’”
The Quad News was an off-campus, student-run independent publication created in 2008 by frustrated members of the university paper. Following a decision made by the university to take control of the on-campus paper, The Chronicle, by selecting editors going forward and constraining the publication of content, the staff realized they had had enough. Tired and disappointed by the university policy they believed was censoring their content, they disbanded to create their own publication.
This crisis began in 2006 when the paper published on its website and front page an article regarding an incident with two Quinnipiac basketball players. After the story appeared, the university imposed a new policy that prohibited the paper from posting material online until the print edition had been published. Things proceeded normally, until a year later, just before the start of the fall semester, an incident on campus got the attention of student journalists.
“Somebody on our staff had heard about somebody writing on a freshman’s dorm who was African American, all of these racial slurs on her door,” Jason Braff, the Editor in Chief of The Chronicle at the time, said. “We investigated, we found out more information, we ended up speaking with the student who had the racial slurs written on her door, we contacted the Hamden Police Department, we were reaching out to everybody putting this story together. We felt like it was a very important story and the students should know about it and people outside of the campus should be aware of it too.”
The story was newsworthy, but The Chronicle could not publish it online.
So, Braff, in his first semester at the helm of the paper, had to make a decision: Should the piece be published although it would break university policy, or should the editors shelve it until the publication of the first issue? The editors thought a way to get the story out, without breaking the policy, would be to publish a single sheet with the article and distribute it on campus. But before they could do that, they heard from then-President John Lahey who persuaded them to wait by offering them an exclusive interview.
In order to avoid any conflicts with the administration, The Chronicle editors chose to save the story for the first issue, which was scheduled for Sept. 12.
“In the 24 hours news cycle, even back then, there wasn’t really Twitter or Instagram or anything – we wanted to publish it online,” Andrew said. “And the school wanted to basically read the article and kind of have oversight over it, before it was published online, kind of limiting first amendment rights. They kind of wanted control over the information that was being disseminated rather than letting the students act as journalists and kind of provide that information.”
Quinnipiac University is a private institution. Unlike public universities, students give up certain rights when agreeing to attend the private school of their choice. Student journalists deal with the specifics of these rights daily in their reporting.
Private institutions face many challenges compared to public universities when it comes to accessing sources within the administration.
Current chair of the journalism department Margarita Diaz was the faculty advisor to The Chronicle at the time these policies were put in place by the administration.
“They understood that they [student journalists] were not doing public relations and their job was to cover what was going on on campus, and that sometimes that would reflect negatively on the university. And the university had a lot of trouble with that,” Diaz said. “They would not call it this, but it was about prior review. It was about being able to look at what the paper had and prepare a response if necessary before the outside media got wind of it.”
In a December 2007 statement, the faculty of the Quinnipiac University School of Communications voiced their opinions to the administration regarding student media policies and the changes the university administration was trying to enact.
“Basic First Amendment values are a focus in all of what we teach,” the statement said. “Therefore, the faculty of the School of Communications considers any attempts to restrict the access of student journalists to administrative sources and attempts to control the manner in which student media may disseminate information as threats to the basic principle of free expression and contrary to the mission of the School.”
In response,Vice President for Public Affairs Lynn Bushnell emailed the school a reiteration of the policy manual and what was expected of both faculty and student journalists in four bullets:
Scanned email courtesy of Margarita Diaz
No media outlet is to be contacted or responded without prior consent to John Morgan or Lynn Bushnell. This includes WQAQ, Q-30 and The Chronicle.
Student media can no longer be viewed as internal owing to the ability of external media to access these stories immediately. What appears in the student Chronicle likely will be picked up by the New Haven Register and other media outlets. The media considers ALL administrators to be representatives of the University, speaking on behalf of the university.
While this policy also applies to faculty, it is understood that faculty have the ability to speak to media without specifically representing the University. However, faculty should exercise caution in presenting their views on University-related matters by clearly stating that they do not represent the university.
Members of the division of athletics (coaches, administrators) should work through the office of athletic communications in regard to media contact. That office is responsible for contacting me directly in any special or sensitive circumstances prior to responding to media queries.
The email ended with Bushnell noting that the policy is ‘routine,’ but must be re-stated due to recent examples where the rules had not been followed.
In the spring semester of 2008, the university administration created a media task force to review student media policies. After it completed its work, the task force recommended a change of policy: Chronicle editors would now be selected by the university deans.
The result: a staff-less newspaper and a group of journalists determined to create uncensored news by becoming self-sustaining and independent.
“I remember sitting in the School of Communications and all of us were there, I think Margarita Diaz was there, and we were just like ‘This is the start of something new,’” Andrew said. “We were literally just throwing out names, a business plan and coming up with everything. It was a really cool moment for us to all come together, and we all had each others’ backs.
“We were kinda like family, we were friends. Nobody wanted to let each other down and we all just kind of came together in solidarity and decided this is what’s best. In the end, that was what was best.”
And thus, The Quad News was born.
Essentially establishing their own business, the founding members of The Quad News created their own bank account, outsourced for their own website, recruited people for positions such as a business manager and web designer and, themselves, went door-to-door gathering advertisements from local businesses. The students became completely self-made. Through their efforts selling merchandise and fundraising they were able to successfully create and run the independent paper.
“We had a whole web staff, we had a business group, we met every single week as a group and then throughout the week as editors meeting with writers and publishing stories,” Andrew said. “Instead of a weekly publish, we were publishing three times a week like Monday, Wednesday Friday or something like that. We were all in on it.”
The Quad News staff faced many obstacles in their five-year existence at Quinnipiac. Members were unable to formally recruit writers in and out of the classroom per university restriction and could not table as an outside business.
“We were doing outreach again to classrooms and Mark Thompson [Executive Vice President and Provost] said we couldn’t do that and sent us an email,” Andrew said. “The three of us, we went to his office and had this whole meeting like ‘Listen, we are students, we want to reach out to the students. We’re just trying to garner our attention for the Quad News,’ and he was just like, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ So I asked him, ‘Where in the handbook does it say we can’t do this?’ and he couldn’t give an answer.
“They hated that we were going to classrooms and, from their perspective, wasting other students’ time. We literally tried to pay the school, as paying students, with money that we raised through advertisements with the Quad News, we tried to pay for a table in the Student Center as an outside vendor and they wouldn’t grant us that as the Quad News.”
One of The Quad News’ first meetings. Jason Braff stands in red (right). Photo courtesy of Margarita Diaz
As if recruiting wasn’t difficult enough, Quad News staff editors and members, such as Jennifer Swift, were not allowed to meet or reserve rooms on campus.
“Being a student at a university where I’m paying to go to school but still feeling like an outsider, has to get outside press access to events and you can’t recruit on-campus,” Swift said. “We couldn’t reserve a room on campus for a meeting and it was like – for what? You’re a journalism school, how are you not going to let us do this?”
While many members of the paper expressed this same anger about being treated as if they were not students of the university, Bushnell defends that the university has the right to deny a non-affiliated organization the use of school property.
“I think administration generally has a right and responsibility, if it’s not a sanctioned club or organization, that we do have the right to limit their use of the property, of the facilities and I think that holds true today,” Bushnell said. “It’s always a gray area when it’s a non-sanctioned organization, but it’s comprised of students.”
Throughout it all, and to this day, members of the journalism department, of which only Richard Hanley, Margarita Diaz and Karin Schwanbeck still remain as current faculty, stayed firm in their decision.
“This idea that the students were somehow doing irresponsible journalism that was somehow going to place the university in a position of legal vulnerability is entirely false,” Diaz said. “And I have no problem saying that, but this is the line, and I think they still think it is.”
Looking back, Bushnell notes that, at the time, the administration did not fully understand the influence the Internet was going to have on journalism. If a similar situation occurred today, she isn’t sure the university would respond the same way.
“We were probably shortsighted in understanding what online publishing was going to mean in reality,” Bushnell said. “The best hindsight is 20/20. If we had to do it over again, would we take those same steps? I think probably not. That’s easy to say now 11 years down the road where everything is on our phone and we expect instant information.”
Although The Chronicle, as well as any student media outlet on campus, are now allowed to publish material online at any time on any day of the week, the concept of going through the Office of Public Affairs office is nothing new to the university.
“I have always, pretty much, been the point of contact for probably since then [2008], if not before then,” Associate Vice President for Public Relations John Morgan said. “I have always been the person that all media has to contact and that includes all external media too. That means if they want to come on campus they need to work with our office.”
Quinnipiac’s Student Media Information Manual states that in order for students to speak with or interview university administration/staff, students are required to contact Morgan prior to contacting the employee. This is also mandatory for athletes, coaches or administrators.
Screenshot from Student Media Information Manual.
This concept of being granted ‘permission’ to speak with an administrator rather than directly going to that person for a response brings in the debate of true journalism versus public relations.
“Any organization does not allow you to just come in and talk to their employees,” Morgan said. “Organizations have a spokesperson and obviously I can’t be expected to know every higher education topic from top to bottom, that’s why we have departments and we work with them, you call us, I put you in touch with that person, you’re getting an authentic answer. I’m not sitting with them going over bullet points as to how we want to position it unless it’s something critical, but the run of the mill stuff they just rely on their own expertise to share that information.”
While it may be ‘required’ to contact Morgan before speaking with an administrator now, this was not always the case.
“Before the racial incident, student journalists could contact any administrator directly,” Diaz said. “The policy was changed by administration to be able to monitor the student journalists. The issue is simply that they realized students were doing real journalism and they had to be ready to respond.”
College Recruiter defines Public Relations as working to improve and monitor a client’s branding. Journalism, on the other hand, is defined as being ‘beholden to the truth,’ not to the image and opinions of clients. The line between the two has been one students have been fearful to cross at Quinnipiac.
Although Morgan does assist students by directing students to the right person to contact, he has also prevented them from contacting or interviewing an administrator if he does not deem it necessary or appropriate. In the nature of public relations, he is protecting the university, but when it comes to journalism, he is blocking students from what could be a crucial side of the story.
“We find that student media, as part of the learning process, is inclined to make a lot of mistakes,” Bushnell said in a recent interview. “Things blow up in people’s faces because of hearsay or rumors. That’s why some people will only respond in writing and some people won’t even respond at all.
“I think that it’s important to recognize that as journalists in training, you have responsibilities too. Just because you’ve heard something repeated over and over and over again doesn’t make it true.”
Contacting the public relations department is a known requirement before speaking with certain university members, yet there are cases in which a student either purposefully or by accident have broken this unspoken rule. In these cases, it is understood that ‘consequences’ are to follow.
“I’ve never actually said the word consequences,” said Associate Director of Campus Life David McGraw, who advises all of the student organizations on campus, including student media. “I do not know of any black and white punishment that you would get. It’s probably the biggest question of what the actual consequences would be that, at least for me, no one has told me, ‘If they do this, this is what will happen.’”
As the rumored ‘consequences’ loomed over students 10 years ago, the same threat, if you will, still stands now. For McGraw, such punishment would depend on the importance of the topic being covered and the extent that it was taken to.
“Being a private institution, I will say the university, in theory, does hold that power still that I could get a phone call that says, ‘We will not fund The Chronicle anymore,'” McGraw said. “This day and age with first amendment and all that kind of stuff, I do think the university would definitely take a different stance on it. We also have a new president who I think would probably approach the issues that happened 10 years ago differently than our previous president did.”
With similar guidelines still intact 10 years later, the question arises of: Were the efforts of The Quad News all for naught?
Andrew, the former Quad News managing editor and later editor in chief, recognizes that the emotions that fueled the founding editors may not be present among the current student body.
Ten years later, the editors of The Quad News have moved on from their days at QU. Where are they now?
“In the end it’s hard to duplicate that passion in other people if they didn’t experience it like you did. It’s hard to get students to want to be involved in general,” he said. “To get them to support something that’s not sanctioned by the university is even harder.”
A topic not taught or discussed in classrooms or among student media, the memory of The Quad News and their fight for the journalistic integrity of Quinnipiac has become just that: a memory.
“They did something different and it was just swept under the rug, like it’s off the grid, nobody knows about it,” said Logan Reardon, a current journalism student previously involved in The Chronicle. “I feel like we should know more about that.”
In a survey of 22 Quinnipiac communications students, 14 responded that they had never heard of The Quad News. Eighteen responded they believed there to still be censorship going on at Quinnipiac.
Some of the original members of The Quad News. Featured sitting in front Brendan Rimetz (left) and Matt Andrew (right). Photo courtesy of Margarita Diaz.
A decade later, Andrew hopes that, despite the fact that The Quad News failed to outlast those who restrained them, hindered their progress and denied their rights, that the mindset of what it means to take action rather than shy away lives on in the paper’s wake.
“I was always fired up,” Andrew said. “I was so passionate about the Quad News that I would do anything to make it survive and make it successful, within reason. But it was something I truly believed in and I would go a great lengths to make sure that it was going to be successful.
“Nobody else was doing the Quad News. We were like ‘This is something we’re going to do, we’re not going to back down, we’re not just going to get pushed around. We’re going to do something great and that we truly believe in and we’re not going to give up on it.’”
Quinnipiac clinches yet another MAAC championship.
As the buzzer sounds, head coach Tricia Fabbri eagerly storms the court with her team, making sure she hugs each and every person she can find.
Her family – who, from the 25th row in a mostly empty arena, berated the referees endlessly throughout the game – comes down and gets their chance at a hug. A long embrace between the family, tears inching down some faces, and then it’s back to business.
The next day, she’s in her office preparing for the NCAA Tournament.
Fabbri and her five seniors celebrate the 2019 MAAC title. (Photo by Morgan Tencza)
Fairfield University to Quinnipiac University.
It’s a short, 30-minute drive north on I-95.
For the last 32 years, Tricia Fabbri’s life has been defined by those two schools. And for the last 25, the 30-minute drive has been a staple of her daily life.
It all began in 1987, when a 5-foot-11 forward from Delran Township, New Jersey was a freshman on the Fairfield women’s basketball team. Tricia Fabbri – then Tricia Sacca – was a bruiser on the court, tallying 1,622 career points and 1,037 rebounds – both ranking her among the program’s top five.
That fall, though, Tricia found something that she didn’t go to Connecticut expecting to find.
Paul Fabbri graduated from Fairfield in 1987 – just a few months before Tricia arrived – and stayed at the university as a part-timer in the sports information department. He worked with the women’s basketball team during Tricia’s freshman year.
After three All-MAAC First-Team selections, Tricia stayed with the Stags as an assistant coach until 1995, when she saw an opening at Quinnipiac College – a Division II school in nearby Hamden.
“I thought, ‘Hey, I’m ready to become a head coach at 26,’” Tricia said. “I knew a couple people at the University of New Haven who made some calls to (then-Quinnipiac AD) Burt Kahn. I’m still convinced (I was hired because) Burt had two golden labs, and when I went into his office for the interview they were very happy to see me, I was unfazed and we had a good conversation.”
That was a monumental year for the young couple. Tricia and Paul got married in 1995, and both started new jobs that summer – new jobs that each of them still hold 24 years later.
Tricia went to Quinnipiac, while Paul started teaching and coaching baseball at Ridgefield High School, as the couple resided – and still does – in Stratford, a town neighboring Fairfield.
Quinnipiac wasn’t an ideal landing spot for Tricia. It was a lowly Division II program coming off back-to-back 4-22 seasons and it hired a new athletic director – Jack McDonald – soon after Tricia was hired.
“If you have aspirations to be a head coach, you have to start somewhere,” Paul said. “Quinnipiac was in the area and it offered a great opportunity for her just to start and have her own program.
“I think you have to take a risk, but never did I think it would become what it’s become.”
Tricia inherited the program and won 15 games in her first three seasons. Despite the on-court struggles, McDonald and then-Quinnipiac president John Lahey were determined to elevate the university to Division I.
“It was a difficult time,” McDonald said. “She had no full-time assistant coach. She had an office next to the elevator, as big as a closet. The proper support was not there for her. The first three or four years were a real struggle.
“To top it all off, we then dropped on to her, ‘Oh, coach, now you guys are Division I.’ We were playing a Division I schedule with Division III resources.”
Quinnipiac didn’t finish above .500 until Fabbri’s sixth year, but that year was almost her last.
On Dec. 4, 2000, Fabbri nearly left Quinnipiac.
The Quinnipiac Braves (2-2) hosted the Seton Hall Pirates (2-3) at Burt Kahn Court. The Pirates played in the highly-competitive Big East with teams like UConn and Notre Dame, among others. The Braves led by double digits at halftime, but the Pirates stormed back and won in overtime, 63-58.
“The crowd was disappointed – some people chirped some bad things at Trish,” McDonald said. “I go up to my office and I’m shutting down my computer and all of a sudden she walks in. She looks at me – and if the tears weren’t coming down her eyes, they were pretty close.
“She said ‘Jack, I can’t handle this. You deserve better than me. I want to resign.’ And I said ‘Trish, I’m going to pretend you never said that. Get the heck out of my office, go home, have a glass of wine, kiss your husband and hug your kids and we’ll talk on Monday.’ Frankly, that’s sort of the benchmark moment for the program.”
Fabbri (left) was emotional after the 2018 MAAC Championship Game.
Photo by Logan Reardon
Quinnipiac has had just three losing seasons since that day.
Now, the only tears Fabbri cries are after winning MAAC championships.
“That was the best thing for us, we took a great turn after that,” Fabbri said. “Jack saw the big picture and I just couldn’t see it. He saw the program moving, even if it was a step-by-step path. He believed in what I was doing.”
Off the court, the Fabbri’s were young parents. Their daughter Carly was born in April 1996, and sons A.J. and Paul Henry followed shortly after.
“I remember coming to her basketball camps when I was 3 years old,” Carly said. “I always had a ball in my hand. Growing up I was the water girl for the team and my mom would take me on any away trips I could go on. I loved being on the road and the bus with the team.”
While it was cool to have her mom coaching a Division I team, it did have some disadvantages.
Carly Fabbri cuts down the net after winning the 2018 MAAC title.
Photo from Logan Reardon
“(Tricia) missed Carly’s games when she was playing in high school, same thing with Paul Henry and A.J.,” Paul said. “She missed their games because of her responsibilities and it was extremely frustrating for her.”
Sports are everything in that family. Both of Tricia’s older brothers played Division I college football and each of the three children played in high school. They describe the family as a “team dynamic,” as sports dominate their lifestyle.
For Carly, knowing her mom had to miss some of her games was no big deal. She understood. It was the summer’s that hurt the most.
“I think it really hit home the hardest over the summer when she would go on almost two weeks of being on the road at a time and wasn’t home,” Carly said. “That’s when I would miss her the most. When I was off from school and if I wasn’t able to go recruiting with her, she was just gone for a long time and that’s when I got the most sad.”
As the kids grew older, Tricia’s program began to excel.
Now the Bobcats of Quinnipiac University, Fabbri’s squad won at least 10 conference games for six straight years from 2001 through 2006.
Fabbri credited Kim Misiaszek (‘01) and Colleen Klopp (‘01) – two Connecticut recruits from Old Lyme and Southington, respectively – for getting the team so competitive early in the Northeast Conference (NEC).
Still, people didn’t know what Quinnipiac was.
The name is funky and it’s in the middle of nowhere. So, how was Fabbri able to sell her budding program to recruits?
“As much as recruits will say they choose the school for the school, the coach is a very, very big reason why,” Mandy Pennewell (‘09) said. “It’s somebody that you’re going to love, and love to hate sometimes. You have to be able to handle that relationship at a young age where you are getting critiqued and certain things are expected of you.
“It felt like she was the mother of our herd, and you don’t cross that. You knew you had an environment where you were going to be protected, you were going to thrive and she was going to challenge you and hold you accountable.”
Quinnipiac was – and likely always will be – the “other” women’s college basketball program in Connecticut.
“When I was getting recruited, no one knew what Quinnipiac was,” Pennewell said with a laugh. “Honestly, after I committed, I just started saying I was going to school in Connecticut and everybody would think UConn. If you don’t know women’s college basketball you wouldn’t know.”
Quinnipiac lost to UConn in the 2018 NCAA Tournament Second Round, 71-46. (Photo by Morgan Tencza)
Now in 2007 with a growing program, Quinnipiac athletics changed forever – and people started to know the name. The People’s United Center (then the TD Bank Sports Center) opened on Jan. 27, 2007, moving the men’s and women’s basketball and ice hockey programs to the new $52 million arena.
“The building separated us from other mid-major universities,” Fabbri said. “This is just the brilliance of John Lahey. He wanted to continue to nationally build an academic reputation for the university, and he used athletics as the front porch. He saw athletics as a way to bring the university to national prominence.
“But it also brought a big responsibility, because if you build this, you better have success.”
MacGillivray celebrates his fifth and final conference championship as a Quinnipiac assistant coach in 2018.
Photo by Logan Reardon
Quinnipiac played its first full season on York Hill in 2007-08 (25-6, 16-2 NEC), and that coincided with the first postseason berth in program history. The Bobcats hosted future conference foe Iona at the TD Bank Sports Center in the first round of the WNIT on March 18, 2008, but lost, 71-59.
Still, it was another step for the program. Expectations were high as Quinnipiac brought in Mountain MacGillivray as a full-time assistant in 2009.
“When I got there, I said ‘If we don’t have the best roster in the league, we aren’t doing our job, because we’ve got a great school and a great coach and a great campus and a great arena,’” MacGillivray said. “What happened next was kind of inevitable. You just have to work hard and not make mistakes – and Trish rarely made any mistakes when it came to evaluating players and getting the right fits.”
Pennewell, along with Erin Kerner and Brianna Rooney, were some of the “right fits” that MacGillivray described. The trio graduated in 2009 and each made their mark on the program as part of that first postseason team in 2008.
After those three graduated, the program – and the university – took a detour from the progress they were making.
In April 2009, Quinnipiac women’s volleyball coach Robin Lamott Sparks and her players filed a lawsuit against the university. And as Pennewell, Kerner and Rooney left the school, Fabbri was forced to rebuild on the fly while her administration went through the lawsuit.
“(The Title IX case) really was a low point, but Trish did stay focused during it,” McDonald said. “A sign of a good coach is what you can do in adversity more than what you can do in success. She continued to be someone for all the younger women’s coaches to lean on. She was a rock.”
Sparks was a newer coach at Quinnipiac, so she didn’t really establish a relationship with Fabbri before the case.
“I was only there for about a year or two before the Title IX suit,” Sparks said. “And then after that, no one in athletics wanted to talk to me.”
Fabbri spoke on behalf of the basketball program during the case, but the suit didn’t affect her program in any way. In fact, they tried to avoid it all together.
“To a degree, there was separation by distance (because they were on York Hill and the rest of the sports were on main campus),” Fabbri said. “With that separation, I didn’t really know what was going on to be honest with you. No one was really talking about it because it was confidential. We were physically removed from it so I didn’t really get the ins and outs.
“I played a part in the trial, but I just had to answer everything that came and happened with the women’s basketball program. I was resourced and supported very well. It was just basketball, basketball, basketball questions from me so I just answered them.”
Framed QU Chronicle cover in Fabbri’s office after the Bobcats clinched their first NCAA Tournament berth.
Photo by Logan Reardon
While the program was not directly affected by the trial, the team did suffer back-to-back losing seasons in 2009-10 and 2010-11. It’s up for debate whether that was more related to the loss of their three star players or the trial. Coaches and players will say the right thing, but no one will ever truly know.
The case was settled in April 2013, and Quinnipiac agreed to keep all of its current women’s teams, add scholarships and improve facilities for its female athletes, according to a statement issued by the university.
In 2013-14, Fabbri was faced with another challenge. One year after her first NCAA Tournament bid, Quinnipiac jumped from the NEC to the MAAC.
“There was definitely a step up in competition (to the MAAC),” Adily Martucci ‘17 said. “I think there’s always going to be challenges when you are faced with teams you haven’t seen before. We were getting comfortable in the NEC.”
Martucci saw it all during her years. From her freshman year, the last in the NEC and the first in the NCAA Tournament, to her senior year and a Sweet 16 berth, Martucci likes to say she “joined the team at the perfect time.”
Martucci, along with Morgan Manz (‘17) and Carly Fabbri (‘18) (remember the 3-year-old at basketball camp?), helped bring the program to new heights.
Now, the Bobcats have been to three straight NCAA Tournaments and five of the last seven. It’s a dynasty by every definition of the word – there’s no way around it.
So with everything she’s achieved, what keeps Fabbri at Quinnipiac?
“I’ve had the opportunity to go and talk to the perceived bigger and power conferences. That’s been extremely interesting to go and do. But, just like recruiting, when you yourself are going and getting recruited, you find that the grass is never greener.”
Fabbri was a finalist for the Penn State job after last season, according to Blake DuDonis on High Post Hoops. Despite the reports, Fabbri insists she’s not interested in moving on.
“I’m really happy where my feet are and I still can make an impact within this program,” Fabbri said. “We can still achieve what I personally want to achieve. I really believe that second weekend (of the NCAA Tournament) is sitting there and I always like a challenge. It’s extremely difficult, but it’s also doable.”
If that’s the goal, then so be it. Fabbri holds the key to her future.
If she wants to use that key to make the drive north up I-95 for another 25 years, Quinnipiac will be better off.
But she’s earned the right to make that decision – whether she stays for life, or leaves tomorrow.
