After three decades of growing winning teams at Quinnipiac, a coach is going to cultivate her garden

On Saturday, Trish Fabbri was planning to tackle her lawn.

“I will be putting the fertilizer down this weekend,” she said. “The weather looks great. Going to get rid of the weeds.”

At some point, she’ll take down the jar of seeds harvested from her father’s marigolds and plant those in her garden. Her dad died two years ago. Maybe the hydrangeas need a little fertilizing. She’ll get the impatiens and begonias for her window boxes.

“I never had the time,” she said Friday. “I always did my window boxes, but it was like, ‘Get it done, beat the clock.’ Now, it’s not to beat the clock – not ‘I gotta go do… I gotta call … I gotta …’

“I’m ready for it.”

A little over three weeks ago, Fabbri, 57, announced her retirement from coaching the women’s basketball team at Quinnipiac, where she started as a head coach when she was 26 years old and Quinnipiac was still a Division II school. She’s coached for 35 years (her first four, she was an assistant at Fairfield, where she played). She brought her teams to five NCAA Tournaments, making a historic run to the Sweet 16 in 2017, when everybody who watched the tournament on ESPN learned how to pronounce the school’s name.

She won 571 games and before she retired, she was one of nine active Division I coaches who won more than 500 games at the same school. On Tuesday the school announced that Roman Owen, an associate head coach at UNLV, was taking over.

This past season, the Bobcats advanced to the MAAC Tournament championship for the second straight year, losing to Fairfield, which got the automatic NCAA berth.

It was a year after they lost their point guard, Gal Raviv, who transferred to Miami. Raviv won MAAC Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year honors in 2024-25 and left Hamden after one season.

Quinnipiac finished with a 27-7 record, 19-1 in the MAAC. After the Bobcats lost in the MAAC final, Fabbri announced that she was done.

“We got back there after losing an incredible player,” she said. “That’s how I want to go out. I don’t want to go out being .500.”

When things changed

It started during COVID, after the tournament runs of 2017 and ’18, when Fabbri’s daughter, Carly, was a senior and ended her Quinnipiac career in an NCAA Tournament second-round loss to UConn in Storrs.

College basketball changed. The transfer portal; NIL. Fabbri knew how to build a program, build relationships and that was all different now. It got harder. When Raviv transferred, that hit home.

“That’s when I said, ‘This modern era – it’s here. It’s in my backyard. I didn’t think it would get here this fast,’” she said.

But other parts of her life were changing too. Her father died in August 2024. He was buying flowers for her mother for their anniversary and had a heart attack and suddenly he was gone. Now her mom was alone in South Jersey and Fabbri, the only daughter of four siblings, was driving back and forth after Tuesday morning practice and coming back Wednesday night before Thursday practice.

“That’s where it started coming to the forefront instead of being in the back (of my mind),” she said. “The lack of flexibility to do what you want to do; but you are doing what you want to do, right? I loved what I was doing. But that also triggered, ‘How much longer can I do this?’”

The thoughts came back during Christmas. Fabbri loves to host her family for the holidays. Her mother and brothers and their families come from New Jersey; her three kids are all home. And she felt like she was on a schedule.

“I was trying to beat the clock all the time and I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” Fabbri said. “Why do I have to be like my hair is on fire?

“They came up and we had a blast. But I thought, ‘I’m so tired.’ Like (UCLA coach) Cori Close said (during the Final Four), ‘I’m tired,’ and everybody’s beating her up and saying find something else to do. I want to host my family at Christmas. I want my mom and my brothers coming up. But it’s beat the clock. Every minute. OK, gotta go. Catch the train. Go here. Go there. I just said to myself, ‘That’s it.’”

A Jersey girl comes to CT

Fabbri came to Fairfield from Delran High School in New Jersey, where she scored a school record 1,711 points. At Fairfield she played for Dianne Nolan and is still the fifth-leading scorer in school history (1,622 points) and fourth in rebounding (1,037). She graduated in 1991 and after serving as an assistant coach for four years for Nolan, Quinnipiac hired her as its first full-time women’s basketball coach.

“I took it and for two years, I remember calling my mom and saying, ‘What did I get myself into?’” Fabbri said, laughing. “I played at Fairfield, we won championships, I saw Dianne Nolan run a tremendous program.

“I mean, I knew we were starting at the ground floor. I was married, I was pregnant with Carly, I said to my mom, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done with my life but I got to do something else; I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got a kid …’”

But Fabbri stayed and the university began its progression toward Division I, which began in 1998.

“What I do take from it now is that I have seen great leadership from (former university president) John Lahey and (athletic director) Jack McDonald, who came in and they had this incredible vision what to do with the university and I was able to watch tremendous leadership at a young age, how it’s done and done well,” she said. “No one at the mid-major level was doing this back then.”

Fabbri brought her team to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 2012-13. Four years later, the 12th-seeded Bobcats upset No. 5 Marquette, then No. 4 Miami, and everybody was talking about Quinnipiac and its storybook run. After the Bobcats lost to No. 1 seed and eventual NCAA champion South Carolina in the regional semifinal, Fabbri came back to Bridgeport to watch UConn play Oregon in the regional final and she got a standing ovation when they showed her on the scoreboard at Webster Bank Arena. Before the Bobcats’ game against South Carolina, UConn coach Geno Auriemma opened his jacket after his press conference to reveal a Quinnipiac shirt.

“That was fantastic,” she said. “A lot of winning, but winning and doing what people thought you couldn’t do here and we did. And doing it with your daughter who’s the point guard, that was over the top.”

The next year, the Bobcats played the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament at UConn as the No. 9 seed and beat Miami in the first round before losing to the Huskies.

“Five NCAA appearances, three in a row,” she said. “Then we went into COVID and everything changed. Everything went upside down, 180 (degrees), to here we are six years later.”

To say Fabbri leaves a legacy in Hamden is putting it mildly.

“For 31 years, she defined Quinnipiac women’s basketball,” Marie Hardin, the university president said upon the announcement of Fabbri’s retirement. “She built a program of excellence and, more importantly, mentored generations of young women who have gone on to be strong leaders and engaged citizens.”

Quinnipiac athletic director Greg Amodio simply expressed his gratitude.

“She has distinguished herself as one of the premier coaches in the nation, and we are eternally grateful for everything she has done to help build Quinnipiac into a perennial powerhouse,” he said in a statement. “Her accomplishments, both on the court and in the community, have been equally transformative throughout the years.”

So she’s done. The window boxes and the lawn and the hydrangeas are calling. She can go to South Jersey whenever she wants to visit her mom, who is 81. Carly, who was her assistant coach last year for the first time, just got an assistant coaching job at the University of Rhode Island. Her son, Paul Henry, is a grad assistant for the University of San Diego women’s team.

Maybe, at some point, she’ll see if she can get into some kind of athletic administration role. Maybe coach again at some point.

But right now? “No,” she said. “I just love the mornings of getting up and not feeling that pressure of who do I have to call, what’s going on…

“I’m really looking forward to a spring and summer with my flowers.”