Laura Gentile is proud of her roots. The former three-sport Sachem star spoke about her sports journey recently on a podcast about leadership with writer Don Yaeger and credited much of her grit and determination from high school hoops coach, Risa Zander.
“It was an honor and privilege to play for her,” she said. “To this day she is probably the toughest most motivating coach I’ve ever had.”
Gentile, the SVP of Marketing at ESPN, is an inductee of the Sachem Athletic Hall of Fame and Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame. She played field hockey at Duke.
She loved fielding grounders in softball and enjoyed applying herself strategically to score goals in field hockey, but it was Sachem basketball that presented undeniable memories of school spirit and player-coach lessons.
“We just had a tremendous high school coach who had built an incredible program at Sachem,” she said. “I could have stepped away from basketball in tenth grade but I just wanted to play for her. She got the most out of us. I was an average basketball player but I played my heart out for her.”
Zander, also an inductee of the Sachem and Suffolk Halls, built a girl’s basketball power that lasted multiple decades.
“She was like the Pat Summit of Long Island basketball and she was all in,” said Gentile.
The podcast is largely about leadership and Gentile’s rise to power at the sports giant. She speaks about taking ownership of goals, working as a team and the value of association.
“Leadership is earned,” she said. “You don’t wake up one day a leader. You get better with age. You have more life experiences, more perspective, more maturity, greater context to process things.”
Listen to the full podcast here.
For the record, Yaeger did pronounce Sachem correctly in the podcast, which we love.