Coming back to the same gym where former superstar basketball player Jen Papich spent much of her teenage years, has been a nostalgic experience. Now a second-year assistant and youth development coach for the Lady Foxes, Coach Papich is determined to give back to the program that shaped her life in so many ways.
“Throughout my life, my coaches were, and remain, my biggest role models,” says Jen, a 2010 Fox Chapel Area High School graduate. “I am a firm believer that a good coach can be instrumental in an athlete’s life; I have experienced that firsthand. It has been an honor to give back to a school that gave so much to me.”
This season, she will continue to pass on the tenets of coaching that she has learned. She says, “We have a group of dedicated and talented student-athletes who have unlimited potential and strive to get better each day they are in the gym. The girls have made it really enjoyable to go to practice every day, and I am grateful for all of them.”
One of her top goals is to teach some important lessons she has learned over the years – the importance of maintaining a positive mentality when expectations are not met.
“The most important thing I try to convey to these girls is that as we grow up, in basketball and in life, it is inevitable that we will make mistakes,” she says. “We, as coaches, understand and expect these things to happen. When a mistake is made, I try to reinforce the next play mentality, such as, ‘How do you respond when things don’t go as planned and you are faced with adversity?’ I want each student-athlete to control what she can control and learn from the things that she can’t. I also try to convey that having the opportunity to play high school basketball, or sports in general, is such a unique opportunity. I want my athletes to enjoy their experience with sports, and to take advantage of the opportunities they are given.”
It’s a coaching philosophy that head coach Marty Matvey also subscribes to and why he views his assistant as extremely valuable to the team.
“Jen coaches like she played,” says Coach Matvey. “She is a seasoned veteran due to her playing experience, demeanor, and thoughtful personality. She is a fantastic leader who leaves no detail untouched and uses her elite-level playing experience and competitive spirit to help lead the young ladies toward our collective goals.”
Jen replies, “If I can make half the impact on these girls as my coaches had on me, I will know that I have done my job.”
Earned Players’ Respect
Coach Papich’s experience and accomplishments, both on and off the court, have been an inspiration to the players. However, many of them were only 7 or 8 years old when she played for the Lady Foxes. They might not have had the opportunity to watch the four-year starter in action as she led the Lady Foxes to win two WPIAL Class 4A Section 2 championships and advance to the PIAA Sweet 16. But they probably had heard about her legacy before they met her – she is a member of the Fox Chapel Area High School 1,000-point club, was named to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Fabulous Five, earned Associated Press honors as an all-state player, and was a scholarship recruit at Gannon University.
At Gannon, the Fox Chapel Area native continued her success as a four-year starter. While she was pursuing her bachelor of science degree in biomedical engineering, she made the university’s sports history books as the seventh all-time scorer with a career total of 1,534 points, is seventh in blocking, and ranks fifth in steals. Just as importantly, Coach Papich was consistently named a Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC) scholar-athlete and was a two-time All-American. In February 2020, the former Foxes player was inducted into the Gannon University Sports Hall of Fame.
10 Years Later
The hall of famer says “basketball is basketball” and not much has changed since her active playing days. A lot of teams are still doing most of the same, tried and true drills that she did, but, in other ways, she says she has noticed some huge differences in 10 years. One of them is the influence of social media.
“Smartphones are increasingly more common, giving students access to limitless data at their fingertips,” says Coach Papich, who has little time for social media due to a busy schedule that includes just wrapping up her master of engineering degree from Case Western Reserve University.
She continues, “Although technology can serve as a platform to bring people together, social media introduced a wide range of social pressures that just didn’t exist when I was younger. I do believe, in general, that more students put undue pressure on themselves to perform and how to look, act, and think in a certain way because of social media influences. This puts more pressure on coaching staffs across all levels of competition, so it becomes even more important to create some perspective at a younger age. First and foremost, high school sports should be fun. It’s one of the last opportunities athletes have to play a game they love with the friends they grew up with, the ones they learned the game with. Of course, we want to win championships, but, more than this, we want our student-athletes to enjoy the journey and to positively grow in the process.”
In retrospect, Coach Papich says the lessons she learned in high school were more about what it meant to work for something and learning invaluable time management skills. College was different.
“It was really the first time I gained perspective on sports and life beyond basketball,” she says, “Basketball was a gateway to a good education, but it also allowed us to give back to our community and effect change. I would never trade my time playing basketball for anything.”