Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
A standout basketball player from middle school through college, Jill Pizzotti’s lifelong desire to lead from the sidelines propelled her to the pinnacle of the collegiate world when she was tapped to helm DePaul’s women’s team.
Jill M. Pizzotti, who will begin her first season as head coach of the DePaul Blue Demons women’s basketball team this fall, knew from a young age that she wanted to go into coaching.
“Besides loving the sport of basketball, I just think I’ve been inspired by the coaches I had over the years,” Pizzotti says. “I thought they were great people.”
When Pizzotti was in eighth grade, a physical education teacher handed her a brochure for the Doug Bruno Girls Basketball Camp, telling her it was where the serious athletes went. Pizzotti signed up for the camp, loved it and ended up attending for three summers.
She remembers feeding off of Coach Bruno’s energy along with her fellow campers.
“At camp, when he said ‘basketball,’ everyone would yell back, ‘I love it, I love it, I love it!’” Pizzotti says. “We’d be on the blacktop so long each day our shoes would almost be melting. It was all-in basketball.”
Another coach who had a big impact was Lloyd Scholl, the longtime girls’ basketball coach at Willowbrook High School. Pizzotti says Scholl was considered ahead of his time for expecting the girls to put in as much work as the boys.
“Most weekends we would have extra practices where we would scrimmage against the freshman and sophomore boys’ teams,” Pizzotti says. “And we would even practice outside his house on Sundays.”
The landmark Title IX legislation of 1972, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational programs, was still relatively new then and Scholl wanted his girls to earn college scholarships.
“‘There’s gold out there for you, girls,’ Scholl would say,” Pizzotti recalls.
Pizzotti got a scholarship to play basketball at Southeast Missouri State University. She loved the increased competition and intensity of the college game, and was determined to make it part of her professional life.
Starting in 1989, she was an assistant coach for Southeast Missouri, Northern Kentucky University and eventually the University of Indiana women’s basketball teams. She got her first chance to be a head coach at Saint Louis University in 1995. She was the second-winningest women’s basketball coach in the program’s history when she left in 2005 to take a position at Nike.
At the shoe giant, she served as a liaison between Nike and the country’s top women’s basketball programs. She says it was an unbelievable job.
“Anything that was going on in this country, women’s basketball-wise, I was able to attend,” Pizzotti says. “I spent by far the majority of the time on the road visiting with college coaches. It was like a clinic for me, sitting in their practices and seeing how they did things.”
But after five years, the allure of coaching was too powerful and she decided to return to the sidelines. After one season as an assistant coach with West Virginia University, Pizzotti secured a position as an assistant to her former coach Bruno at DePaul in 2011. In 2014 she was promoted to associate head coach.
In August 2024, Bruno suffered a stroke and wasn’t able to return to the sidelines, so Pizzotti was named interim head coach for the entire 2024-25 season.
“My goal was to keep the staff and the players together and working hard,” Pizzotti says. “We all needed that extra level of compassion because we were dealing with not having Coach Bruno around.”
Despite the unique challenges, Pizzotti says the staff and players worked hard and the team ended up doubling the number of in-conference wins from the previous season. In the offseason, Bruno stepped down as head coach and Pizzotti was tapped to replace him.
Looking forward to next season, Pizzotti says she wants to continue winning more games.
“I think it’s a good time to climb the ladder in the Big East. We were picked to finish ninth last year and ended up finishing sixth,” Pizzotti says. “We want to get into postseason play and get the program back to where Coach Bruno had it for a long time.”
The article above appears in the July 2025 issue of the print version of Fra Noi. Our gorgeous, monthly magazine contains a veritable feast of news and views, profiles and features, entertainment and culture. To subscribe, click here.
