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• 2022 Special Awards Announcements and Features
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• Past Rising Star Award Recipients

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Ali Paquette – Middlebury College, Assistant Director of Athletic Communications

CoSIDA Rising Star Award (College Division)

by Jon Holtz – Slippery Rock University, Director of Athletic Communication

How will a young woman with a degree in biology end up on stage in Las Vegas this June, winning an award that recognizes excellence in athletic communications? The simple answer is, she invested in herself and made it happen.
 
Middlebury College Assistant Director of Athletic Communications Ali Paquette will be one recipient of a Rising Star Award winner at this year’s CoSIDA June Convention. To those that know and work with Ali on a regular basis, that comes as no surprise.
 
A talented, passionate and dedicated young professional in our field, Ali is a bright light and a shining example of the next generation of athletic communicators that are poised to carry our profession for decades to come.
 
 
A 2013 graduate of Salve Regina University and a collegiate track and field athlete, Paquette took a job working in a lab after graduation, immediately putting that biology degree to use. Yet, something was missing.
 
“I had been involved with sports my whole life and all of a sudden I wasn’t part of a team anymore” says Paquette. “I felt like something was definitely missing, so I decided to go back to school to see if I could find out what that was.”
 
While working full-time, she enrolled in the sport management and athletic administration graduate program at Southern New Hampshire University, making an investment that would ultimately pay significant dividends.
 
As part of her coursework, Paquette needed practical experience hours through internships or volunteering. She approached Middlebury College, a NCAA Division III institution in western Vermont, and asked if she could do those hours there. Although she only needed a couple hundred hours to satisfy her requirements, she quickly fell in love with athletics and would end up spending nearly a thousand hours (!) each year for two years working at Middlebury.
 
“I was really lucky that Middlebury took a chance on me and let me do my internship,” she recalls. “The athletic director also let me get experience in a lot of different areas, but I found myself falling in love with communications. It took a bunch of things I loved doing and combined them into one profession.”
 
After earning her master’s degree in 2018, Paquette left the biology world and jumped into athletic communications full-time at NCAA Division III Wesleyan University (in Middletown, Connecticut).
 
“I have to thank (Director of Athletics) Mike Whalen at Wesleyan for giving me a chance and bringing me on board,” says Paquette. “And I really need to thank my current Director of Athletics, Erin Quinn at Middlebury, for bringing me back in 2020. Mike and Erin both really embraced my passion for the profession and my drive to want to grow. I feel like that isn’t always something that happens everywhere, so I am very grateful to have worked with both of those leaders that supported me and encouraged me.”
 
Quinn gave her a full-time opportunity at Middlebury in January of 2020 – in the same department where her husband, Ryan, also serves as a football coach and the director of strength and conditioning.
 
Quinn is equally grateful to have Paquette on campus.
 
“I am thrilled and not surprised that Ali has been honored with a CoSIDA Rising Star Award,“ he said. “Ali is highly professional and competent in all of the work she does on behalf of Middlebury Athletics and Middlebury College. She is also innovative and collaborative and as such has been a great colleague to work with during her tenure at Middlebury.”
 
This is the second major honor that Paquette has received from CoSIDA in the last two years. She and her Middlebury colleagues were recipients of a CoSIDA ChangeMaker Innovative Award in 2022, given for the school’s “Leaning Into Discomfort” video series which invited difficult and uncomfortable conversations on topics of race, diversity and identity in the campus community.
 
Quinn was quick to note the impact that Paquette has had as a young professional.
 
“Beyond her specific athletic communications work, Ali also serves the department and our college as the Chair of our Athletics Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee and is on the Middlebury Anti-Racism Taskforce,” Quinn noted. “This truly demonstrates her commitment to these important issues, as well as her commitment to the broader mission of Middlebury.”
 
Paquette’s passion for the profession has benefitted more than just the Middlebury Panther student-athletes and campus community. Within CoSIDA, she serves in governance as a member of the Division III cabinet and is a member of the Professional Development and Education Committee. Paquette also is on the executive board of directors at the Eastern Athletic Communications Association (EAST-COMM), formerly known as ECAC-SIDA.
 
Advocacy for our profession and taking up a role as a mentor for future athletic communicators, and especially future women in our profession, is significantly important to Paquette.
 
“It means a lot to me to win this award and it feels nice to be recognized,” she said. “What is more special about this is seeing what the people who have won it before me have gone onto do with their careers. I am just starting on my path. Someone like Rob Knox (former CoSIDA president and current UNC Greensboro Assistant AD) is a great example. He has been an advocate for women in athletics and has done so much to advance our profession. To have my name on this list and to know that I have the opportunity to be a mentor and role model to the next generation is really important to me and something that really excites me.”
 
While winning an award at any convention is exciting, this one will be even more exciting for Paquette as she will be attending her first CoSIDA convention – in a location that she once called home.
 
“I am really excited to attend the convention as I have a lot of colleagues that I have become good friends with who I have actually never met in person, so actually getting to meet people in person is going to be great,” she said. “My husband Ryan is coming for a couple days and for the awards presentation, so that is really exciting. It’s also kind of a return home. I lived in Vegas for a year in eighth grade and I have a few friends that I have stayed in contact with, but that I haven’t seen since then, so I’m looking forward to seeing them again as well.”
 
Paquette sees this honor as something beyond a personal accomplishment.
 
“I hope this also sends a message to young women looking into this field that there are more and more women working in athletics every day and the culture is changing,” she noted. “You have advocates who will support you working in athletics and there are a lot of places where you can thrive.”