A Nebraska Cornhusker legend and longtime professional star, Trimboli was an All-Star at both the collegiate and professional levels. A three-time all-conference selection during her career at Nebraska, Trimboli led the Huskers to the 2002 Women’s College World Series and earned a trio of National Pro Fastpitch championships during her 9-year pro career.
After her retirement as a player, the former slugging star spent several years in the dugout as a coach. A six-year stint as head coach at Regis University ended in 2016, though she did dip her toes back into the collegiate waters in the fall of 2018 when she assumed the helm of Northern Colorado on an interim basis while the school searched for a new head coach.
Nebraska fans, Big 12 softball fans, and pro softball fans alike could probably tell many stories and recall many memories about Trimboli, and it just so happens that telling stories and recalling memories is what the ex-softball great’s new entrepreneurial venture is all about.
LivingRoots is Trimboli’s new company, a project many years in the making. Originally her brain child as a project en route to completing her Master’s degree, several years of work and fine-tuning led to the unveiling of the LivingRoots brand in late 2018.
Not dissimilar to the idea of a digital time capsule, LivingRoots is an online platform that offers families the opportunity to privately capture their legacy in various forms, and preserves the shared memories digitally so that they can be saved for posterity and passed on to future generations.
For Trimboli, there is a personal connection to the project as much as there would be for just a general user of the site. “For me, both of my grandfathers are gone,” Trimboli shared. “And I’m the last generation that actually met and remember them. So where are they going to go? Where does their story go? I remember them, obviously; my parents remember their dad. But if we don’t capture these stories, then where are they going to go?”
The entrepreneurial spirit is not new to Trimboli, though she has learned to embrace that side of herself in more recent times. “I think I have [always had it], but I just didn’t recognize it,” she shared. “I remember even in elementary school, I would get in trouble for selling stuff to other kids. I would sell candy and gum, watches, keychains, cars. I was always selling stuff!”
Never far from the game, after her career on the field and in the dugout ended, Trimboli began a team training company called NT Athletics, LLC, through which she works with teams and coaches throughout the state of Colorado.
Even though softball is no longer numero uno on her list of daily activities – managing a start-up business is no small task – some of the lessons that Trimboli learned during her years on the softball field have stuck with her and come in handy as she pursues her new endeavor.
“I think some people believe that [entrepreneurship]sounds glamorous and cool, but it is very hard,” Trimboli noted. “And it’s really scary. But I think that’s one of the best things about having played sports is that I’m not afraid to fail. If people don’t want this, we’ll find that out and we’ll be okay. There is always this constant of ‘oh, what if this doesn’t work?’ but that doesn’t scare me off from pursuing it, because I faced that so much in sport.”
In addition to the option of adding a chronological timeline, with photos; videos; and other memories shared along the way, the LivingRoots system is not designed solely to hold the memories of family members who are now gone, but also to assist in creating and holding onto memories of children and families that can be looked back on with fond memories in years to come.
Trimboli says that her ultimate goal with LivingRoots is to create a place where memories past, present,, and future can be shared in one place for generations to come. “I think it would be so great for my great, great grandkids to be able to know what I did and how I lived,” she shared. “Not necessarily ‘oh, I did this on a Wednesday night’ or something like that, but that I played for Nebraska, these were my coaches, my friends. This was my first home purchase, my first child… LivingRoots is meant to capture all of the big moments in life.”
