Night after night, Latresa Mazzulla waited in a gym parking lot in Johnston, Rhode Island. Practice would end, the other families would drive off, and Joe Mazzulla’s mother stayed in her car, sometimes for an extra hour, because her son would not leave the court.
Today that son is the head coach of the Boston Celtics and the NBA’s reigning Coach of the Year. Latresa lives in California, and she has never spoken publicly about any of it.
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What’s known about Latresa Mazzulla
Latresa Mazzulla is the mother of Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla. She is African American, comes from Los Angeles, and raised Joe and his two younger siblings in Johnston, Rhode Island, with her husband, Dan Mazzulla. She keeps a private life and has never given an interview.
Because she has stayed quiet for so long, a fair amount of what gets written about her is wrong. There are no interviews to quote and no public statements to check against, so the blanks get filled with guesswork.
Is Joe Mazzulla’s mother still alive?
Yes. Latresa is alive and living in California, which the Boston Globe confirmed when Joe took over the Celtics in 2022.
A number of websites claim she died of cancer when Joe was a boy. That is not true. The parent Joe lost was his father, Dan, who died in April 2020 after being treated for brain cancer.
A childhood between Los Angeles and Johnston
The home Latresa and Dan built brought together two parts of the country that rarely meet.
Dan was Sicilian and Rhode Island through and through. He starred at Bryant College, played pro basketball in Chile, then came home to run Johnston’s parks and recreation department and coach local kids for years. People in town knew him well. One former opponent told the Boston Globe that Dan was a “Johnston street legend” and remembered a fistfight the two had during a 1973 semi-pro game, long before they became friends.
Latresa grew up in Los Angeles, a world away from a small New England town. The family spent summers in her California hometown, then came back east when basketball season started. Joe came up moving between the two.
That mix is where his own background comes from. His father was Italian American and his mother is African American, which makes Joe biracial.
The faith Joe credits to his upbringing
Faith runs through how Mazzulla carries himself on the sideline. He keeps a rosary made from a piece of the original Boston Garden parquet floor, and he brings up the Gospel in press conferences. In October 2025, he said on a Catholic podcast that he hopes to be ordained as a deacon.
He ties all of it to the house he grew up in. “I was very fortunate, mainly because I just grew up in an environment where faith and Catholicism was a normal part of life,” Mazzulla said. “I grew up half a mile down from a church. I went to church on Sundays and went to Catholic school, K through 12th grade.”
Latresa and Dan ran that household together, and both raised their children in the faith.
Why Dan Mazzulla is remembered and Latresa is not
There is a lopsidedness to how this family is remembered.
Dan Mazzulla is everywhere in the public record. Johnston named a recreation center after him. NBC Sports Boston gave part of a documentary to his influence on his son. The morning after the Celtics won the 2024 title, someone left Celtics gear on Dan’s grave, and the picture spread widely.
Latresa is in almost none of it. When Joe brought the championship trophy to the Rhode Island State House in September 2024, he thanked his wife, his children, his players, and the people back home who gave him rides and looked after him as a kid. He did not mention his mother. He has talked openly about losing his father, telling NBC Sports Boston it took him four years to grieve Dan fully. About Latresa, he says almost nothing.
This is not a slight. A town grieving one of its own keeps that name loud, and Dan was one of its own. The result, though, is that the woman who raised the same three children, and who waited in that gym lot for her son, is the least visible person in a very visible family. By every account, she wants it that way.
Joe Mazzulla’s brother and sister
Joe is the oldest of Latresa and Dan’s three children. His brother, Justin, played college basketball at George Washington and then Vermont, and now works as an assistant video coordinator for the Utah Jazz. His sister, Gianna, played for their father at Johnston High School.
Once the guesswork is set aside, here is what holds up about Latresa herself:
- Her name is spelled Latresa Mazzulla. The Boston Globe and Wikipedia both use that spelling, not “Latrese” or “Joanne.”
- She is African American, from Los Angeles, and she is alive and living in California.
- She raised Joe, Justin, and Gianna in Johnston, Rhode Island, with Dan Mazzulla, who died in 2020.
- She raised her children in a Catholic home that Joe credits as his foundation.
- She has never given a public interview.
Her age, her line of work, and how she and Dan met are not in any reliable record. Anyone who states those things is guessing.
From a Johnston gym to NBA Coach of the Year
The only reason her name comes up at all is what her son became. Joe Mazzulla left Rhode Island at 17 for West Virginia University, reached a Final Four, went undrafted, and started coaching at the Division II level. He joined the Celtics staff in 2019, stepped in as interim head coach in 2022 after Ime Udoka was suspended, and won the NBA title in 2024 at age 35.
In May 2026, he was named NBA Coach of the Year, the first Celtics coach to take the award since 1980. His record in Boston stands at 238 wins and 90 losses, the best in the league over that run.
All of it goes back to a gym parking lot in Johnston, where Latresa waited in the dark for a kid who would not come off the court. She never asked for credit for those nights, and she has never said a word about them since.
