Transition Is Calming for Rizzotti

Patience, Jen, patience. . . .

She never showed much of that when she was leading Connecticut to the national championship in 1995.

Jen Rizzotti was--and remains--a point guard with an attitude. She yelled at her teammates on the court, demanding maximum effort. Her fans called her “the Riz.” “Scrappy” fits her playing style as she comes up on her third WNBA season in Houston.

An unforgettable moment in the brief history of the late American Basketball League: In a 1998 New England-Long Beach game, Rizzotti took an elbow from Andrea Nagy flush on her nose. Rizzotti landed flat on her back, blood spurting everywhere.

She was on the deck for, oh, about three-tenths of a second--then was up, charging Nagy with clenched fists, a howl of rage, and an expression on her bloody face that evoked images of a wounded boxer, not a basketball player.

I remember thinking, “If I’m a coach, she’s my point guard.”

But Rizzotti is more than a player. She’s also, at 27, the youngest Division I coach in America, at the University of Hartford.

As such, she must turn down her fire. Coaching success, she sees now, is not simply about games, but instead involves years. Years of patience.

“I’ve learned how many years it takes to get a program up and running, how much patience it requires and it’s hard for me because I’m not patient,” she said.

Hartford went 8-19 the season before Rizzotti was hired. They finished 14-14 her first season and are 10-10 this week. Hartford’s attendance average, 330 two seasons ago, is 1,232.

The Hartford job fell out of the sky on her shortly after the 1999 WNBA season.

The athletic director, Pat Meiser-McKnett, had hired only one previous basketball coach--Geno Auriemma when she was at Connecticut.

She needed to hire another, though, and soon, in late summer 1999. She had not considered Rizzotti but attended a Houston-New York WNBA playoff game at Madison Square Garden.

Suddenly, she knew who she had to hire. It made so much sense--a Connecticut women’s basketball icon, with a long winter off-season.

“I was amazed when she called me about the job,” Rizzotti recalled.

“I thought about it for two weeks. Then I thought, ‘What, am I crazy? Of course I’ll do it.’ ”

She said the hardest part has been the recruiting.

“I enjoy recruiting, but it’s really hard to get the players you need to build something,” she said. “If I talk to a kid who’s been contacted by Notre Dame or Rutgers, I say good luck and move on.

“Basically, the top-10 programs recruit the same 50 to 75 kids. So I have to work very hard at scouting, finding a kid that maybe Fairfield or Holy Cross don’t even want but maybe I see something in her that they don’t. That’s where the hard work is.”

As for her playing career, she’d like a trade. She has been sitting in Houston for two seasons.

“I’m a scrappy, leadership kind of point guard and Houston hasn’t needed that,” she said.

“Maybe there’s a team out there that does.”

TOURNAMENT TURNABOUT

USC, after getting an extension for applying to host the 2005 NCAA women’s Final Four at Staples Center, pulled the plug.

“I had a long talk with [Athletic Director] Mike Garrett,” explained Lisa Love, associate athletic director.

“We looked at the workload that would be required of us for a Final Four and decided, with our building a campus arena during part of that time, our energies would be put to better use by bidding on NCAA basketball and volleyball regional events for when the arena is completed.”

Portland is a 2005 bidder, it was learned.

LIST DWINDLING

With the news out of Storrs, Conn., that Connecticut senior Svetlana Abrosimova’s college career is over because of a foot injury, the so-called “Big Three” of April’s WNBA draft is down to the “Big One.”

Only a month ago, the top three were--choose your order--6-foot-6 Australian center Lauren Jackson, Tennessee’s Tamika Catchings and Abrosimova.

Then word circulated that Jackson might bypass the WNBA and play her first season in Europe, for much more money. But Wednesday, various Australian basketball Web sites reported her saying that she would sign with the WNBA.

Catchings, last season’s Naismith Award winner, blew out her knee Jan. 15 and had surgery Monday. Abrosimova went down Thursday against Tennessee with what was first called a foot sprain but which later proved to be a ligament tear. Her surgery is today.

MOVING ON

Marianne Stanley, the former USC and California coach who last summer was an assistant with the Sparks, has joined the Washington Mystic staff.