From the time Laurie (Milligan) Vizzini started playing basketball on the playground in elementary school, she was never looking to fill her team with the best players.
She wanted teammates she could play with, players who were going to put forth an effort on the court and who were going to meld together to make each other better. It’s an ethos that has stayed with Vizzini for decades on and off the court.
Even though she considered soccer her first love, as soon as Vizzini stepped on the basketball court, she and everyone around her saw success. At Tigard High School, she led the Tigers to four straight state championship tournament appearances. In college, she became the first man or woman in NCAA history to play in four straight national title games.
If that wasn’t enough, Vizzini also won three straight state titles while at Tigard as a member of the girls soccer team.
After bringing all that success and winning to those around her, it was time for Vizzini to be honored recently, as she was elected to the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame this year. Even with the honor, Vizzini is thinking about how she can use it to help others around her.
“It’s an honor, and I’m proud to be amongst this amazing group of people,” she said. “But what I do with this award matters. How am I using it to love on other people, to inspire other people, to encourage the people? This world is hard and life is hard, and there are more people that tear people down than build people up. I want to be one of those people that builds people up.”
Vizzini’s playing career came to an end in college thanks to a knee injury, and after she graduated, she started training younger players. She’s been doing that for more than 20 years, and while she said she doesn’t have as much of an interest in coaching, she had a front-row seat to one of the most accomplished coaches in basketball history in college when she spent four years playing for the legendary University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach Pat Summitt.
“She was the boss,” Vizzini said. “She was the one telling us what to do, demonstrating how to do it. So she was very hands-on. She expected more out of us than what we were able to give, and that was scary. It was hard, but I respected her. She recruited good people, quality players that knew how to work and get after it.”
Vizzini first caught the eye of Tennessee when she was 15, and a Tennessee assistant coach saw her play in a club tournament. She wrote Vizzini a note that Summitt was going to watch her next game. At the time, Vizzini didn’t know who Summit was.
“She walks into the gym with all her orange on, and her three national championship rings, and people are getting autographs,” Vizzini said. “I thought, ‘That must be her.’ We’re warming up, and then we start the game, and I think she left right after the first quarter. All I could think was, ‘Great. I’m sure I made a great impression on her if she left so soon.’”
After the game, Vizzini got a handwritten note from Summit saying she saw all she needed to in warmups, and she wanted Vizzini at Tennessee.
“She wrote that I worked hard in warmups and was attentive,” Vizzini said. “She said I wasn’t just running through the drill, and that I was encouraging my teammates. That’s just the type of player they wanted.”
While at Tennessee, Vizzini won three straight national championships, the first three-peat in women’s college basketball history, which was capped off with a 39-0 season. She played with Chamique Holdsclaw and Tamika Catchings, both of whom went on to play for 10-plus years in the WNBA and were elected to the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
While Tennessee was far away, Vizzini said she liked living in Knoxville. She compared it to a suburb of Portland, but maybe a little bit slower. Beyond the basketball team’s success, she said it was fun to be on campus and getting to know a rather self-assured freshman quarterback for the football team named Peyton Manning.
But more than the athletics, Vizzini said she liked her business marketing classes and still keeps in touch with some of her marketing professors. That was something her parents talked to her about before she chose Tennessee. Vizzini had offers from more than 100 schools to play basketball, but they told her to pick somewhere she thought she would enjoy if she got injured and couldn’t play.
Tennessee had a good business and marketing program, so the choice was easy, Vizzini said. She did end up getting hurt her junior year, but pushed through the injury to play a bit her senior year and finish out her career.
After college, Vizzini returned to Oregon to work for Adidas and executive Sonny Vacarro, who is known for signing Michael Jordan to Nike when he worked there, and then signing Kobe Bryant to Adidas.
Eventually, Vizzini moved over to real estate and has worked with her mother for the last 20-plus years as a realtor, although her mother retired late last year. She lives in Hillsboro with her 15-year-old daughter and continues to train younger players.
Vizzini tells the younger generation that the chance of playing collegiately is slim, but there is so much more sports can bring to their lives beyond just success on the court.
“It’s others-focused,” she said. “How can you contribute to the whole? Even though you may not go to play on a high level, it’s going to teach you how to be a good teammate, how to be a good coworker, how to build other people up and know that as a collective, you’re going to achieve your job.”
