Jill M. Pizzotti has been named the second DePaul women’s basketball head coach since 1988.
The longtime Blue Demon and Lombard, Ill. native first joined DePaul’s staff in 2011, quickly rising to the associate head coach position in 2014.
Pizzotti held the associate position until former head coach Doug Bruno was sidelined with health complications, taking up the interim role. After Bruno stepped down on March 28, DePaul began a search for their next head coach, ultimately running with Pizzotti, who effectively head coached the Blue Demons the entire 2024-25 season.
With Pizzotti as the interim, DePaul finished 13-19 last season, 8-10 in Big East play. The Blue Demons finished sixth in the conference standings, losing to Xavier in the first round of the Big East Tournament on March 7.
Pizzotti fills the position with both head coaching and recruiting experience in the past. She was the recruiting coordinator until her interim call up, a position she held at West Virginia University in 2010-11. The same month Pizzotti joined the Blue Demons in June 2011, ESPN ranked West Virginia’s 2011 recruiting class No. 22 in Division I. DePaul was ranked one slot behind Pizzotti’s Mountaineers at No. 23.
Before West Virginia, Pizzotti spent nearly five years as the women’s basketball manager at Nike, working with nearly all of the NCAA’s top-25 women’s basketball programs.
She is also the second-winningest Saint Louis University head coach, a program she headed from 1996 to 2005 and led to a first ever postseason tournament berth in the 2003 Women’s National Invitation Tournament. When she was hired at DePaul, Bruno said, “Going head-to-head with Jill’s Saint Louis program was a monumental task for every coach in the first ten years of Conference USA.”
A basketball player herself, Pizzotti led Southeast Missouri State to four consecutive conference championships. She was a two-time team captain, recipient of the team’s Most Inspirational Player Award, and had the highest GPA of any graduating senior on the team.
Pizzotti takes on a program that will have to go forward without superstar Jorie Allen, who is out of NCAA eligibility, as well as five players who have entered the transfer portal.
