The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Budding power couple
Former UConn star Collier building a future with trainer-turned-fiance Bazzell
When Napheesa Collier and fiancé Alex Bazzell step out of their respective basketball fast lanes to relax and recalibrate at their St. Louis home, they often prepare for a night in by heading out.
“We’re big into movie theater popcorn,” Bazzell said. “We’re very specific about it. We’ll actually drive up to the theater, get the popcorn, drive home and then watch a movie at our house. We’re one of those.”
They’re also a burgeoning basketball power couple, unique in that Collier is a WNBA All-Star and an Olympian and Bazzell is a trainer with an increasingly high profile, having worked with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, Trae Young — and his wife-to-be, of course.
Bazzell began training Collier after her freshman year at UConn in 2016 and they began dating midway through Collier’s junior season. They were engaged in Oct. 2019 with plans to marry in Nov. 2020 but, due to the pandemic, the ceremony was rescheduled for Nov. 6 in the Dominican Republic.
“We’re excited to get it done and really start our lives,” Bazzell said.
Both of their careers have taken off, each crisscrossing the country in pursuit of certain basketball and business goals.
Collier, 24, was the 2019 WNBA rookie of the year and is a two-time All-Star for the Minnesota Lynx. Two years after leaving UConn as a two-time AllAmerican, she is in Tokyo with Team USA as a firsttime Olympian. Collier arrived at UConn soft spoken, in the background on a loaded team that finished 38-0 in 2015-16 for the program’s 11th national title, and left a refined player and outwardly charismatic person.
“She’s become more confident,” Bazzell said. “It wasn’t that her personality started changing. She started allowing other people to see it. UConn, we always talked about, you have to take advantage of your time there because that’s arguably the pinnacle of women’s basketball — at any level. It was a shift of, ‘Hey, you’re probably going to be more marketable if you start showing who you are,’ and that’s what she started doing.”
Collier, 24, grew up in in O’Fallon, Mo., and Bazzell, 31, just 12 miles east in St. Charles, where in high school he was a two-time All-State player. He went on score 1,300 points at Division II Lindenwood, where he finished as the program’s career assists leader in 2013.
Bazzell became a professional trainer in 2015, as Collier was finishing off one of the most decorated high school careers in Missouri history. His first clients of impact were Doug McDermott (now with the Spurs) and Bobby Portis (Bucks). His main clients over the years have been Irving, Young, Caris LeVert and Carmelo Anthony — his core four, so to speak, with waves of other players hiring him for individual workouts at various times in New York or Los Angeles.
Bazzell worked out four college players in advance of the draft — Jalen Suggs of Gonzaga, Josh Christopher of Arizona State, Jason Preston of Ohio and James Bouknight, UConn’s first lottery pick since 2012.
“Man, he’s extremely talented,” Bazzell said. “He’s got a lot of potential.”
Bazzell met Bouknight through a pre-draft show that featured several top picks, a project tied to the basketball education platform he founded with Anthony called Through The Lens. The video service features numerous NBA and WNBA players giving lessons on life and sport, and was inspired by the friendship Bazzell and Anthony shared with Kobe Bryant. Young, Anthony, Collier, Candace Parker and others have been featured in Through The Lens courses.
Bazzell has been in New York since January and will spend the next month or so in L.A. in advance of NBA training camps. He chats with Collier about 10 times a day on FaceTime. Not necessarily about wedding planning. Collier’s mother, Sarah, has taken the lead.
“It’s an exciting time,” Bazzell said. “We have to plan out our future and our lives together and figure out how that all mixes. It’s a consistent puzzle, but we feel like we have it down pretty well. We’ve been in a long-distance relationship for three years now. We know there are times when we may not see each other for a month and a half. We both trying to fulfill something short term to set our families up long term.”
Team USA, which has won six consecutive Gold medals, plays a semifinal Friday against Serbia. Through four games, Collier, the youngest player on the team, is averaging 3.6 minutes and hasn’t scored.
“She’s had a blast with her teammates,” Bazzell said. “They’ve all known each other a while, and she was around KD a lot the last year and a half because of my connection with Kyrie and Kevin. So she has people to lean on. She’s just trying to soak in as much as she can.”
The couple’s weeklong honeymoon in the Dominican will lead into a relaxing winter together as newlyweds. Collier and Bazzell will spend a few weeks in St. Louis and then probably time in New York, where Bazzell was working during Collier’s junior year at UConn.
“She was asking me to come up on a weekend to help her train in Storrs, and it was an easy commute,”
Bazzell said. “We just started naturally spending more time together, going to movies, hanging out. The hard part was just trying to figure out how quiet we wanted to keep it, because we didn’t want a lot of attention. But it was just an easy progression.”
Bazzell had gotten to know Collier’s parents, Sarah and Gamal Collier, through training.
“You’re trying to, one, win their approval from a training standpoint,” he said. “And it’s a whole different ball game when it comes to dating their daughter. So that was an experience in itself. But they were so welcoming and they’re just good people, cool people. They saw the writing on the wall. We thought we were being a little more secretive than we were. We thought no one knew and it turns out everyone knew.”
Collier has elected not to play overseas this winter. The couple can enjoy the holidays together. That doesn’t mean the difficult decisions in this relationship have been made.
“She loves scary movies,” Bazzell said. “I’m not into that. If I’m in the doghouse, we’re forced to watch a scary movie. She loves comedies, too. I’m more of a drama person. Whoever chooses dinner, the opposite person gets to choose the movie. I always try to get the movie.”
Snacks are easily agreed upon. Popcorn. From the theater. There’s no machine in the house.
Good wedding gift, probably.
“It would save us a lot of money,” Bazzell said, “instead of going to the theater and paying the $14.”