Kendyl Rizea once built a women's basketball program from scratch — no players, no roster, no foundation. Now Pasadena City College is betting she can do it again, hiring the former Chaffey College coach to take over a program that won 593 games and a state championship under its previous coach, but returns no players heading into next season.

Rizea, who led Chaffey the past four seasons, takes over a Lancers squad that finished 14-15 in 2025-26 and was eliminated 78-40 at Palomar in Round 1 of the SoCal Regionals on Tuesday, February 25. She inherits the job from Joe Peron, who coached PCC for 28 seasons and captured the program's first state championship in 2009 before retiring after the 2024-25 season.

The hire, announced May 18 by PCC Interim Athletic Director Dr. Timi Brown, brings a coach who turned Chaffey from a program with no players on its roster into a playoff contender. In her final two seasons, the Panthers went 35-23. This past season they finished 17-13, earned a home seed, and won their first Southern California Regional Playoffs game in 12 years before falling to Irvine Valley in the second round.

"We start building the same way that I did at Chaffey when I took over the Chaffey program 4 years ago," Rizea said. "They had 0 players in the program when I started. Fortunately for me, we're going to have several of the Chaffey players transfer over, and I think that really shows what we built at Chaffey, the trust that's there."

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Rizea played basketball and track and field at Graceland University in Iowa before earning a master's in sports management at Wayne State College in Nebraska. She coached at the International Children's Games, where her Windsor Essex squad went undefeated and won the championship, then worked as an assistant and head coach at College of the Desert before taking over at Chaffey in 2022. She sent seven players to the university level on scholarships in her first three Chaffey seasons.

Rizea's first season at PCC begins in fall 2026.