Breaking barriers
SCSU’s Criscuolo is operations manager, assistant WR coach
Fittingly, Charliana Criscuolo was talking about her football past and setting up her football future while having her nails done two days before the North Branford High senior prom.
She was in a salon last spring when Southern Connecticut football coach Tom Godek called, offering a job as the Owls’ team operations manager that she would accept and turn into so much more.
“We had been looking for help with equipment, filming, data input,” Godek said. “Slowly and steadily she started to work her way from operations and smaller things like that, and all of the sudden she started to absorb the coaching stuff by being around it. Here we are today and she’s moving deeper and deeper into our playbook.”
Criscuolo, 18, might be the busiest person on the state’s sports scene, a nursing student and now, with her freshman year wrapping up, Southern’s assistant wide receivers coach. She remains the operations manager, too.
Her evolving role on Godek’s staff is among the most unique experiences in college sports, the continuation of a passion Criscuolo developed as a manager for several sports while in high school — and an important showcase for the broadening opportunities for women in a college sport played by, and almost exclusively coached by, men.
Many young women, Criscuolo understands, might have the football interest and the football knowledge — but not necessarily an understanding that they can have the football opportunity. Her persistence in seeking out the job and quickly becoming an indispensable member of the Southern coaching staff shows what is possible.
Which is this, essentially: whatever one properly gameplans for.
“It’s important for young women and young people to see you can do it, that there are different avenues,” Criscuolo said. “I’ve never stepped foot on a field and played but I’m figuring it out and I’m trying to coach in a different way, bringing a new coaching dynamic.”
To sum up what Criscuolo does for the Owls is probably to ask, What doesn’t she do?
She organizes and publicizes camps, running a website and remaining active with outreach on social media. She charts statistics, helps with daily clean-up, fills drink jugs, hauls equipment to and from facilities. She coordinates team gatherings and meetings, handles meal lists and practice music and travel itineraries. The paperwork and emailing, much of it having to do with recruiting, is seemingly endless.
Those are just some of her managing duties.
Criscuolo was promoted to the coaching staff, a role for which she receives a stipend, in advance of the Owls’ March spring practice