WOONSOCKET – The two newest additions to the Mount Saint
Charles Academy coaching staff don’t have much in common, but one thing’s for
certain:
They have a strong admiration for the school that they will
serve as head coaches.
For Christina Batastini, who will take over this winter as
the girls’ basketball coach, her admiration began last winter, when during her
daughter Ryanne’s Catholic Athletic League game in the Mounties’ gymnasium, she
took a good look at the facility and the rest of the campus and was impressed
with what she encountered.
For Drew Brissette, who will take the field next spring as
the softball coach, he admired the school from afar, when as a teenager in
North Smithfield, he privately “envied” the school and his friends who attended
it. He wore the Northmen’s Green & Gold as a baseball player during his
freshman and sophomore years, but now he’s anxious to don the Mounties’ Red,
White, & Blue.
When it comes to high school girls’ basketball in Rhode
Island, Batastini is one of the all-time legends. One of the greatest players
to take the court in this state, the 1996 graduate of Classical High, who was a
Parade Magazine and a Nike All-American) continued her hoop career at Stanford
University, where she starred on three Pac-10 championship teams, and played
professionally for four seasons in Europe (in Italy, Norway, Sweden, and
Switzerland).
After finishing her career as a practice player for the
WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, she turned her attention to coaching. She started out
as an assistant coach at Brown University, before spending seven seasons as the
head coach of the Lincoln School. Under her guidance, the Lynx went from a
winless team to a four-time Southeastern New England champion. She stepped down
after the 2012 season and focused on coaching her daughter’s hoop teams, which
ranged from ages 5-9, as well as operating her Batastini School of Basketball,
which offers state-wide camps, team clinic, and individual instruction.
She didn’t think she’d be coaching on the high school level
again, but when she visited the campus again, as well as met with the school’s
president, Alan Tenreiro, and athletic director Ray Leveille, who was last
season’s head coach before stepping down to take over as Mount’s full-time A.D.,
she knew she really wanted the job.
“It really sounded like they had a sustainable plan for the
future of their students,” she recalled. “It was exciting and it was something
I wanted to be a part of. And my daughter is in fourth grade, so the timing was
really important to me that I coach at a school that she could possibly attend
someday.
“She visited the school and loved it, and it really felt
like a good fit, not only for our family, but in terms of their vision for what
they want their athletic programs to look like.”
“Christina has succeeded as a player and coach at every
level: professional, college, high school, and scholastic,” Tenreiro said in a
press release. “Between her athletic and academic accomplishments, she embodies
the student-athlete ideal we encourage at Mount Saint Charles. Our girls team
has a strong winning tradition, and we’re confident they’ll have even more
success under Christina’s leadership.”
Bastastini, who also works for the state’s Department of
Health, inherits a team that went 7-11 and returned to the Division II playoffs
last season, and with some of the top players from that squad expected to
return to the team this season, the new head coach hopes to be competitive.
“I took a brief look at our schedule and most of those teams
that we’ll be playing, at least when I played and was involved coaching high
school basketball, were once Division I programs,” Bastastini added, “so it
seems like there’s a really strong group of teams in this division.”
As for her long-term goals?
“Each year, I’d like to grow on the past year’s success,”
she noted, “potentially move up to the top level if it’s feasible, and then
ultimately grow the program to where it becomes an absolute ‘have-to’ – in
terms of if you are a middle school kid or a student-athlete and you want to
play college basketball, that you feel compelled to look at Mount Saint Charles
because of the program that we built in the course of time that I’ll be there.”
While Bastastini was officially named the head coach last Thursday,
it wasn’t long before Brissette got the nod to lead the Mounties’ softball
program, which will be returning to the Division I ranks after spending the
past two seasons in D-II and reaching the finals in 2017.
Note: Mount Saint Charles is off to a 3-0 start
