A Message From Bill St. Jean

Hello, I serve as the Associate Director in the Center for Leadership & Civic Engagement. In my role, I work with students, organizations, and teams to enable them to perform community service and volunteer activities on campus or off.

RIT students complete thousands of volunteer hours within our local community and beyond every year. Our center has connections with several community non-profit organizations from a multitude of topical areas including food justice, homelessness and equitable housing, environmental and sustainability, animal welfare, health and wellness, and education and youth development.  We can assist you in making connections to an organization that fits the interests of you or your team.

This year, student-athletes have made a huge impact in our community.

The food drive benefitting RIT FoodShare (pictured above) at the All-Athlete Meeting in August contributed over 1,000 food items which directly supported fellow RIT students.

The Student-Athlete Advisory Committee coordinated the annual Adopt a Family event. Each team adopted a family and a total of 24 families were provided a Thanksgiving meal.

Over 50 student-athletes and Athletics staff members participated in the Hunger Project, creating over 20,000 packaged meals for the Rochester community.

If you or your team is looking for a community service project, volunteer activity, or to create an on-going volunteer relationship, please reach out to me and we will help you set something up!

Be on the look-out for more information regarding our Spring Semester service projects including Framing Frenzy, where we will partner with Flower City Habitat for Humanity and build house frames here on campus to be used in building new homes in the Rochester community.

Greetings From RIT Women's Basketball

As I reflect on all our program has accomplished in the past fifteen years and in particular, the past five seasons, I am completely humbled and filled with gratitude for how incredible this journey has been for us. As with most success, ours certainly has not been linear.

In 2008, I took over a program that had one winning season since 1987. As a young coach with only three years of college coaching experience prior to RIT, I spent the first 3-5 years building a foundation and discovering who I was as a leader in the process. I made a TON of mistakes along the way, and there were many, many times I wanted to throw in the towel – it was just too hard.

After speaking to one of my trusted mentors, I received the best advice in my professional career – he said, “Amy, you don’t become a better coach from leaving your program and going to work for someone else who is more successful… you become a better coach by coaching, figuring out who you are in the process and making a lot of mistakes and learning from them.”

I am forever grateful for this advice from one of my mentors, Mountain MacGillivray, who is a highly successful coach at LaSalle in Philadelphia. Now, in my fifteenth season at RIT, I can reflect on how I embraced the hard, found out who I was (and wasn’t) as a leader, recruited players who reflected my values, and embraced the overall process of building a program.

A Liberty League Title and three straight trips to the NCAA including a trip to the Sweet 16 in 2017-18 is a byproduct of trusting the process and learning into the hard – and I am thrilled to see what our 2022-23 team can do to continue the trajectory of our program and return to the Big Dance.

We haven’t had a team this deep since 2017-18, and it would take too long to go through each individual player and what they bring to the table… but fans can expect a fast paced game with talented guard play, great point guard play and versatile forwards who can play multiple positions. A deep team increases the competitive edge at practice, and we are already reaping the rewards from having multiple options from our bench.

We work on and talk about our culture every single day, and we have a strong commitment to trusting the process and focusing on our effort, growth and using mistakes and challenges as opportunities. If we focus on the right things, the wins will take care of themselves.

GO TIGERS!

Amy Reed - RIT Women's Basketball

From The Desk of Coach McVean

We welcome the new season looking to challenge for a spot in the Liberty League Tournament and challenging for a conference title. With a veteran group returning and continued improvement, there are high hopes.

Returning for their fourth seasons are Kevin Ryan and Keegan Ocorr. Each are expected to be solid performers we can lean on to provide consistency. Ryan led us in scoring, rebounding and free throw percentage last season, while Ocorr finished second on the team in assists.

Junior Matt Caggiano and sophomores Brock Bowen and Andrew Fox provide added firepower, scoring and rebounding. In addition, juniors Kenny Wilburn, Mark Osime and Brandon Weiss, sophomore Chase Dickens and first-year Joe Harrington will see plenty of action.

Last season, we finished second in the Liberty League averaging 76.8 points per game, but were tenth defensively. The team has devoted an enormous amount of time and effort this preseason to improve our overall defense. It is a work in progress, but we are getting there.

Our captains this year include senior Chris Mattair, Ryan, Ocorr and Bowen. We look to them to for leadership as we get into the heart of the season.

We traveled to Canada for two exhibition games during the October break, allowing us to have 10 early practices which was of great benefit in preparation for the season.

The early portion of our schedule included home games against Nazareth and St. John Fisher in the Mark’s Pizzeria Crosstown Shootout, and victories over Canton and La Roche to win the Harold J. Brodie Tournament during Thanksgiving weekend. We host Liberty League rivals Bard and RPI to close out the fall semester.

We believe this year’s team will shore up the little things to propel us towards team success and improve as the season progresses. We hope to see lots of RIT students and members of the local community fill Clark Gym to see cheer on the Tigers.

GO TIGERS!!!

Bob McVean – RIT Men’s Basketball

Tigers In The News