Women’s basketball head coach Jennifer Rizzotti will become an assistant coach for the USA Basketball Women’s National Team during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, according to a release Thursday.
Rizzotti most recently coached Team USA to a 12-0 record and helped earn an International Basketball Federation World Cup gold medal in 2018. Tokyo marks Rizzotti’s second Olympics showing after working as a scout and court coach in the 2016 Rio Olympics.
“I am thrilled to don the red, white and blue once again to help the USA National Team in its quest to win a seventh consecutive gold medal in Tokyo next year,” Rizzotti said in the release.
The basketball coach will accompany in the games assistant coaches Dan Hughes and Cheryl Reeve, who lead the Seattle Storm of the Women’s National Basketball League and WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx, respectively.
Rizzotti got her first taste of USA Basketball in 1996 when she was a member of the USA William Jones Cup gold medal team and has since worked on seven USA Basketball coaching staffs. She launched her USA Basketball coaching career in 2006 as an assistant of the U18 National Team and earned USA Basketball National Coach of the Year in 2011, according to the release.
Rizzotti joined the Colonials in 2016 after spending 17 seasons at Hartford where she garnered a .527 win percentage, three America East Coach of the Year awards, four regular-season titles and five conference championships.
