Deb Pallozzi has built the Bomber softball program into a perennial playoff contender. She coached the team to its first national championship in 2002, leading the Bombers to a 1-0 win over Lake Forest in the NCAA championship game. She is the school's winningest softball coach, and a 2011 inductee into the National Fastpitch Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Pallozzi led the Bombers to another historic season in 2018, as IC reached the NCAA Division III Championships in Oklahoma City for the 12th time in program history.
Pallozzi completed the 2018 season with an 858-403-1 record over 30 seasons. She reached the 700-win plateau with a 6-5 victory over Kings (4/17/13), making her just the 10th coach in NCAA Division III history to hit the 700 wins mark and just the sixth coach to win 700 games at the same school. Just four years later,
Pallozzi eclipsed 800 wins as Ithaca’s head coach in a home doubleheader against Nazareth on April 8, 2017.
Pallozzi's tenure has featured success at the regional and national levels. Following a 10-19 rebuilding season in her first year, 1989,
Pallozzi's teams have compiled a run of 29-straight winning seasons.
Pallozzi has been named Empire 8 Coach of the Year seven times (01-03, 07, 11-12, 16) and her staff has earned NFCA Northeast Region Coaching Staff of the Year honors five times. She was also named the Ithaca Journal's Kenny Van Sickle Award Winner as the area's top female coach after the 2011 season.
Pallozzi has coached some of the program's most successful players, including 19 NFCA all-Americans and the school leaders in career average, season and career RBIs, season and career hits, season and career runs, season and career innings pitched, season and career wins and season and career strikeouts.
Pallozzi was a graduate assistant coach under head coach
Jane Jacobs at Ithaca during the 1988 season. She coached the pitchers and catchers that year, including all-star Julie Wilcox '89.
Pallozzi is a 1979 graduate of Cortland, where she was a pitcher and outfielder on the softball team for four years. In 2004, she was inducted into the Cortland C-Club Athletic Hall of Fame. Following graduation,
Pallozzi coached and taught at Columbia (N.Y.) High School. She then served as an assistant coach at the University of Missouri, helping the Tigers finish fifth at the NCAA Division I World Series in 1981.
Pallozzi worked as an assistant coach at Albany and then became head coach at Rensselaer, where she spent two seasons.
Pallozzi spent seven years as a member of the ECAC and NCAA Northeast Region softball selection committees for Division III. She chaired the latter committee for six years, and chaired the NFCA All-America committee in 2007.
She previously coached the Jimmie Girls, one of the top amateur softball teams in the Albany area, and guided the Adirondack region softball team at the Empire State Games for two summers.
Pallozzi earned a master's degree in physical education from Ithaca in 1993. Before instituting a fall softball program in 1996, Pallozzi was an assistant volleyball coach at Ithaca. The Bombers reached the NCAA semifinals in 1994 with Pallozzi on the staff.
She spent six years as Ithaca's Senior Woman Administrator, serving in that capacity from 2005 to 2011.
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