Spring can be such a beautiful time for the Western Hemisphere. Flowers bloom, the sunshine feels warmer and daylight lasts longer. But more recently for a modern country such as America, the springtime month of March has been chosen to also represent National Women’s History Month — a month that many members of the athletic department deem important.
“For me, it’s really a time to reflect and celebrate,” Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Lisa Campos said of what National Women’s History Month means to her. “People forget that women didn’t have the opportunities that we have today, and we have to really reflect on that. We’ve got to remember that that was once the norm to not include or value women, how far we’ve come but then also how much further we need to go.”
Campos was hired by UTSA seven years ago to serve as the university’s second female VP for the athletics department. Since her start, she has helped guide the school toward unprecedented success. With her help, the school fundraised and received million dollar investments to build a new basketball and volleyball training facility, the Park West facilities and the Roadrunner Athletics Center of Excellence, which Campos oversaw.
“When I first got here seven years ago, the vision for the building we’re in today was supposed to be football only,” Campos said about the RACE. “We really shifted that way of thinking. We have close to 400 student-athletes. They don’t all have a division one sports medicine area or a weight room so we had to really reenvision and reimagine a facility that would become the hub of UTSA athletics to serve all of our student-athletes.
“We knew that our soccer team and our track and field teams needed the support in that facility. We know softball and baseball are the next projects that need that support. So at the end of day we thought, ‘How do we support these student-athletes to not just be successful in competition, but academically and in life?’ That’s what we’re really striving for by building all of this. When we first opened this building, I had student athletes coming to me saying, ‘Now feel like a true Division I student-athlete.’ It had such a major impact on how they felt.”
Now, three men’s teams have or will get new homes, but now five of UTSA’s women’s teams have already received or will receive training facilities over the next two years. But none of this would have come to fruition without an excellent staff behind the teams that have earned these facilities, afterall, it takes a village. With the hiring of head coaches such as Karen Aston and Vann Stuedeman and coming into the role already having Ki Kroll, three programs in particular have reached new heights.
“Being a female athletic director and knowing those opportunities are really important,” Campos said about the role she plays as a woman in a leadership role. “To me, it all starts with hiring great coaches and great staff who are supporting our student-athletes, but our female student-athletes in particular, need these types of role models and need to see and feel and experience really great success and mentorship.
“For Karen Aston to be our women’s basketball head coach here at UTSA, we are so blessed and privileged, and to think about the experience that she’s bringing to UTSA. There was never any doubt that she was going to lead us into what she has this year. Then to hire Vann, with her experience and how, in a short time, she’s turning that program around. Ki’s been here for a couple years now – his philosophy and how he’s recruited the student athletes, it starts with the head coaches and then the people we’re surrounding our teams with.”
It is so important that the women in the athletic department at UTSA feel supported. Without them the women’s basketball team would never have earned its first AAC Regular Season Champions title before their season even ended. The softball team and the women’s tennis team’s both earned their respective programs best starts ever with a 5-0 start and 13-0 run. The women’s track team also earned second place in the American Indoor Track and Field Championship.
“The most satisfying thing is just to see all the work they put into this, academically and competitively, and the hours that they spend in the classroom for their academics, but then to go through all this to prepare for that competition, the eyeballs on women’s sports just continues to increase exponentially, and our women deserve that, they deserve that exposure that they’re getting,” Campos said. “I want to encourage all of our students and our fans to come support because not only do they have such a great product and they’re winning and they’re fun to watch, but this is they’re doing it for San Antonio, and they’re doing it for UTSA, and that that’s the fun part, is watching all their hard work play out In the field and being able to do it in front of big crowds of people who support them. It goes again to that theme of honoring our past, remembering our past and then just celebrating our now and our future.”
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