Teamwork: Former UHart players who became nurses form support network in COVID-19 era
Lisa Etienne thought she wanted to be a basketball coach. She played at the University of Hartford, graduating in 2009, after helping the Hawks win the conference title her junior year. She coached at Colgate and Sacred Heart.
But it wasn’t as fulfilling as she thought. So she went in a different direction.
In March, she found herself walking into a COVID-positive patient’s room with a coworker in Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in her first assignment as a nurse. The co-worker stopped suddenly; Etienne ran into her.
“She turned to me and says, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I do. I trust my God,’ ” Etienne said. “Ever since that day, that’s kind of how I’ve been pushing forward through this whole crisis. My faith.
I believe in God and I know that He’s there throughout this thing, leading me through it.”
Etienne, 34, is now in Missoula, Montana, working on the front lines of the pandemic as a traveling nurse. But she is not alone — some of her former Hartford teammates are there to support her because they know exactly what she’s going through.
Amanda Weaver, who captained the Hawks her senior year when they won their last conference title
in 2011, has been a nurse for the last five years. Erica (Beverly) Thomas, the first Hartford player to score 1,000 points and pull down 1,000 rebounds, will graduate from nursing school in May. One of the Hawks’ former assistant coaches, Tanika Price, is a registered nurse in North Carolina, also taking care of coronavirus patients.
“At Hartford, our goals were bigger than ourselves individually and that kind of translated to our adult lives,” Weaver said. “As we see it now as nurses, this is also much bigger than ourselves.
“I think it speaks for Tanika and Erica and Lisa and myself indirectly, we all take pride in doing whatever we can do to make a difference. Does it surprise me that we all ended up here? Not really. We all have the same values and the same desire to help, outside a global pandemic, but especially now.”
Within this group of athletes — from Price’s freshman year when the Hawks won their first America East championship in 2002 to Weaver’s senior year when they won their last conference title — Hartford enjoyed an impressive run of five conference championships, six NCAA Tournament appearances and two NCAA Tournament wins under coach Jen Rizzotti.
“I’ve been in highpressure situations before as a player and a coach and now as a nurse,” said Etienne, who was the conference tournament MVP in 2008. “It all feels the same way. Experience is the only way you get better at it.”
Price coached. Etienne coached. Weaver was a physical therapy major. Beverly played basketball overseas upon graduation.
“I know so many people who go into college thinking they’re going to do one thing and end up doing another,” Weaver said. “It’s kind of crazy that we all ended up in the nursing profession.”
Weaver was the first to become a nurse in 2015.
After she was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2012, her appreciation for the profession grew. Once healthy, she enrolled in nursing school at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and graduated as an oncology nurse.
After five years of oncology nursing, she shifted to a job as a workers compensation nurse. But when the pandemic hit, she began to volunteer on her days off in oncology at Johns Hopkins, freeing up nurses to rotate into the ICU or COVID units.
Price, who was an assistant coach at Hofstra after leaving Hartford, started thinking about nursing after she left Connecticut to help her grandparents in Brooklyn, who both had cancer. At the same time, her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and her mother with breast cancer.
She went to nursing school in New York and when she finished, she went to North Carolina in January for a month to visit her fiancé, who is also a nurse.
Then the pandemic got bad in New York and Price never came back, although her home is still in Brooklyn. She is now working at a hospital in Greensboro, N.C.
“I ended up taking my [nursing test] in North Carolina,” Price said. “The first day I applied for a job, I got the job. I still have to figure out what’s going to happen with my home in New York.”
Meanwhile, Etienne was living in Price’s New York home, holding down the fort after she finished her own stint in nursing school.
“I thought I was going to be a head basketball coach at a university by now,” Etienne said. “But coaching wasn’t as fulfilling as I thought it would be. When I started exploring different things that I wanted to do — I always liked the sciences growing up. My sister was a nurse. She said, ‘You have the personality and the work ethic. You’re already an athlete. It’s a physically demanding profession.’
“I went to our local community college and I took anatomy and physiology which is a class everyone fails and it’s a reason why they quit nursing school and I got an ‘A’ and I was like, ‘Maybe…’ and from there, everything went in the right direction. I love my patients, they love me — it was definitely the right decision. But I didn’t grow up saying, ‘I want to be a nurse.’
“I just had to have the courage to let that life go and accept the life that was waiting for me.”
Once she arrived in Missoula for her traveling nurse job, Etienne worked five straight days and slept all day on her day off.
“When I was working in New York, we were drowning,” she said. “Thousands of nurses from all around the country came and gave us support and relief so I was like, ‘You know what, it’s time for me to pay it forward.’ ”
Thomas played in Australia and Switzerland after getting her masters degree at Hartford in 2010. Now she is married with a 3-year-old daughter and two stepchildren. Her husband had a kidney transplant and when he was having dialysis, she decided to become a nurse.
She now lives in Florida and will graduate from nursing school in May.
“They call me ‘Veteran’ in my class,” Thomas said. “I’m like the leader. It feels like I’m a senior on the basketball court, they’re like looking at me to lead the way.
“It’s kind of like how basketball was: they’re prepping us for war. That’s what nursing school is like.”