Colleen Nicewicz and the art of the next possession

On February 24, 2007, Colleen Burke's college basketball career reached a difficult ending. Babson lost to Mount Holyoke, 73-71, in double overtime in the conference semifinals. Burke, the senior captain who would later be known as Colleen Nicewicz, finished with six assists and four rebounds. Other teammates supplied the bigger scoring totals. Her contribution included getting the ball to someone else.

A box score is a wonderfully unsentimental document. It has no space for intentions, no column for how convincingly a captain addressed the locker room. Six assists mean six baskets credited to teammates after her passes. They are small entries in a game that ended two points short. They also offer an unusually concrete place to begin a profile of an executive whose work has repeatedly involved helping an organization move into its next phase.

Today Nicewicz is Launch CEO at Triple Aim Partners. Between the basketball court and that title lie a business degree, an MBA, a beginning in accounting and acquisitions, a vice presidency at athenahealth and a turn running Groups Recover Together. The sequence is easy enough to put on a résumé. The more interesting question is what happens between the lines: how someone goes from evaluating businesses to taking responsibility for one, then hands that responsibility on.

Basketball offers a useful lens for that question, provided we resist pretending it explains everything. A captaincy does not predict an executive career. An assist cannot tell us how someone negotiates a transaction. But the game gives this story a starting point with actual stakes, an actual result and a reminder that individual contributions and collective results have to coexist. Even an excellent pass cannot guarantee the final score.

The second half belonged to the team

There had been a happier result a few weeks earlier. On January 11, Babson and Wellesley went into halftime tied at 23. Babson then scored the first 11 points of the second half. Burke supplied four of them. The team won 68-38, with its senior co-captain contributing eight points and six rebounds.

That game contains a tidy lesson about the limits of a single number. The final margin makes the evening look comfortable. The halftime score says otherwise. Burke's eight points do not dominate the report, but four arrived during the run that changed the game. Timing can give a modest contribution weight. Anyone who has sat through a meeting that finally becomes useful will recognize the phenomenon, although meetings rarely reward the breakthrough with a scoreboard.

At Babson, Nicewicz earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, graduating in the class of 2007. Her coach was Judy Blinstrub. When Blinstrub retired in 2023 after 39 years at the college, Nicewicz joined the alumni paying tribute. She emphasized the relationships the coach had built and the lasting connection she still had with her and other former players.

The detail that makes her tribute memorable is where she imagined herself next: beside the coach in the audience. “I am thrilled to sit next to her in the stands,” she said. It is a pleasing reversal of their old arrangement. The coach who spent decades directing the action could now enjoy it with a former captain. A program's life continues in those seats, long after the players' final eligibility has expired.

“I am thrilled to sit next to her in the stands.”Colleen Nicewicz, on coach Judy Blinstrub’s retirement, 2023

The guest list outlasted the season

The Babson connection also appears in a less competitive setting. An alumni wedding announcement records Colleen Burke and Rob Nicewicz, both members of the class of 2007, marrying at the International Golf Club in Bolton, Massachusetts. The accompanying group photograph brings together people from their college community. Blinstrub was among the guests, alongside alumni from several classes.

It is a small social detail, but it gives the basketball chapter an afterlife. The people who had shared college years did not disappear when the diplomas arrived. A coach appears on a wedding guest list; a former captain later celebrates that coach's retirement. These are ordinary ways a community persists. They are also more revealing than the word “network,” which can make friendship sound as though it needs a quarterly performance review.

There is no need to turn the photograph into a management theory. Its appeal is precisely that it is a photograph of people together, dressed for a day away from work. In a career usually described through organizations and titles, it restores some scale. Nicewicz's professional story belongs to a person whose college ties continued beyond the court and the classroom.

Learning to read a business

Her early professional work was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, in public accounting and mergers and acquisitions advisory. She later earned an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. Her LinkedIn education record places those graduate studies between 2012 and 2014; a 2013 MIT Sloan CFO Summit program also lists her among its MBA candidates.

Accounting, advisory work and graduate business study provide different views of the same object. An account records what happened. A proposed acquisition asks what an organization might be worth under different ownership. A management problem asks what people can actually deliver. The distance between those questions is where much executive work lives. A spreadsheet can be balanced while a plan remains awkward to execute.

Nicewicz eventually became vice president of Transformation and Business Operations at athenahealth. Her responsibilities included corporate initiatives associated with the company's 2018 sale. That role placed her inside an organization undergoing a change in ownership, rather than solely in the position of an outside adviser examining a proposed deal.

The progression matters without requiring a heroic account of it. Public accounting and acquisition work came first; an operating role followed. Her titles describe increasing proximity to decisions and their consequences. A transaction may have a closing date, but the organization still has a morning after. Someone has to continue the work, make the new arrangements usable and translate corporate decisions into a functioning business.

Growth needs more than a bigger chair

Nicewicz joined Groups Recover Together in 2019 and became CEO in January 2020. In 2021, the company announced a $60 million Series C financing led by Oak HC/FT. That same year she received a Gold Stevie Award in the Achievement in Growth category of the Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

The capital and the award are two distinct markers. One records an investment in the company's next stage. The other recognizes growth during her leadership. Neither can do the daily work on its own. Expansion creates more decisions, more dependencies and more people who need to know which responsibilities belong to them. A larger organization cannot be run simply by making the chief executive's calendar smaller and its meetings longer.

Late in 2021, Groups added to its senior leadership structure. Matt Trudel became chief operating officer, while Emily Alexanderson was promoted to chief expansion officer after earlier roles at the company. Those appointments are a practical detail in the growth story: separate people were taking responsibility for operations and expansion.

Nicewicz's own writing also returned to the people doing the work. In a January 2022 article, she described interviewing employees to understand the support and resources they needed. The exercise begins with a straightforward action: ask the people in a role what would help them perform it. It is less theatrical than announcing a new corporate philosophy, and considerably easier for an employee to answer.

Her later participation on a Babson advisory board adds another connection to the college. The institution's five-year center report lists her among its board members. The relationship had acquired a professional dimension alongside the athletic and social ones. Student, captain, alumna, adviser: the same institution appears at different distances throughout her life.

A captain can leave the court

In September 2025, Nicewicz announced she was finishing her time leading Groups and handing over to Cooper Zelnick. He had already spent years inside the organization, moving through regional and senior leadership positions before becoming CEO. Her farewell described leaving the company “in great hands with Cooper Zelnick.” She also said she would be cheering on him and the team.

A leadership transition offers a different view of achievement from a financing announcement. It puts attention on continuity. The departing executive's name gives way to someone else's, and the organization carries on. In this case, the successor's long tenure made the handoff part of a continuing company story, with an experienced colleague taking the next turn.

Nicewicz now holds the Launch CEO title at Triple Aim Partners. The title places her at another stage of company-building. Her career has moved through examining businesses, participating in corporate transformation, running an organization and returning to a role explicitly concerned with launch. Read that way, the résumé contains several beginnings rather than a single ascent toward a permanent chair.

The basketball ending remains useful here. Babson's semifinal loss was real; so were Burke's six assists. The result did not erase the contributions, and the end of the season did not end the relationships. Years later, her coach was still someone she wanted to sit beside. Years into her executive career, a successor was someone she said she would cheer on.

Perhaps that is the most interesting way to read this sequence. There are moments when Nicewicz is responsible for the action and moments when she steps into the stands. Both belong in the story. A business title records who holds the job today. The next possession asks a more practical question: who is ready to receive the ball, and what can the team do with it?