Parkland Hall of Fame inductee headed overseas after ceremony
Feb. 15—CHAMPAIGN — On Saturday, volleyball star Alexis Braghini joins Parkland College's Athletic Hall of Fame. On Monday, she's heading overseas for the first time for six months.
Even though this is her first trip to Asia, the jet-setting lifestyle isn't anything new to Braghini, who has moved to a new city every few years since she graduated college.
"My mom looks at me and she goes, 'I don't know how you do this,'" Braghini said.
Speaking of jet-setting: this trip is thanks to Braghini's job as an aeronautical analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The NGA is both an intelligence and combat support agency that provides information to various groups including policymakers, the military and first responders.
She can't share many details about her role, but Braghini will be offering forward support to U.S. troops.
Braghini has known she wanted to work with aircraft for a while, but she originally wanted to be a pilot.
Her father pushed her toward different career paths, and Braghini did give engineering a fair shot but "was not cut out for physics and calculus and all that stuff."
Braghini was recruited to play volleyball at Parkland after starring at Centennial High School, where she was named News-Gazette All-Area Player of the Year.
After she graduated from Parkland, Braghini still wanted to get her pilot's license, so her dad got on board.
At Southern Illinois University, she studied aviation management and got her private pilot's license.
"I got my private and I started doing time building for my commercial, was about to get into instrument and decided that lifestyle wasn't for me," Braghini said.
Pilots who already have a private license and are pursuing a commercial license have to get an instrument rating, which proves they can fly a plane based on instruments alone, even in conditions where they can't see outside of the plane.
It's a big step in the technical side of the training process, but as Braghini was deciding that wasn't the direction she wanted to go, she connected with the NGA at a job fair.
"I got an offer to work for NGA on Monday of my finals week of senior year, so that was very fortunate," Braghini said. "Like any job, it has its ups and downs, but overall I have learned so much and I'm very fortunate to be in the position I'm in."
She said that while her job now isn't exactly what she went to college for, having experience as a pilot has been helpful.
Braghini has lived in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., but her most recent move brought her to Dayton, Ohio, where she has been busy packing and preparing to go overseas.
Outside of work, Braghini said she's looking forward to "experiencing the culture and immersing myself in what a non-American society is like."
But first, she'll swing by Champaign for the Parkland Hall of Fame induction (3 p.m. Saturday) and to visit her family for the first time in a few months.
Braghini said that while Papa Del's is a "go-to," she doesn't plan to go out anywhere to celebrate on the big day.
"I go home to experience my parents' cooking," she said.
Braghini was surprised to hear she'd been chosen for the Hall of Fame and is grateful to her teammates from 2010.
"In my opinion, you're nothing without your team, so I appreciate them and the coaching staff like nobody's business," Braghini said.
That 2010 team went to the NJCAA DII national tournament for the second year in a row, while Braghini herself was chosen as NJCAA Region 24 Player of the Year.
She was also selected to the M-WAC All-Conference First Team, NJCAA Region 24 First Team and NJCAA All-American First Team — all in her one year with the Cobras.
It was a great year — especially considering how Braghini remembers not feeling positively toward volleyball at all when it started.
"Whenever I transferred in and everything, I was very down on the sport. I'd lost my love for it, was not really looking forward to it but was trying to remember why I loved it," Braghini said. "Playing with the team that we had at that time, with Molly Goodrich and Melissa McClain and Susie Jean and everyone, it was exactly what I needed to be able to actually love the game again."
