J
ust a few years ago, Lynn Hickey introduced her new football coach, Larry Coker, in the most modest of settings. “We had one football and one helmet that we used as props at press conferences,” laughed Hickey, the athletic director at UTSA.
The Roadrunners now are in their third season of football, but Hickey still is driving them down a path of firsts: This year marks the school’s inaugural season in Conference USA.
“When [consultant] Bill Carr came in and did a feasibility study for football in 2006, he said our dream conference would be Conference USA,” Hickey said.
Charting a new course is nothing new for Hickey. As a young athlete, her dad took her to see the Wayland Baptist Flying Queens, a women’s basketball barnstorming team in Oklahoma.
She was hooked by the sport. That love of basketball led her into coaching and, eventually, to the AD job at UTSA and to a spot on the NCAA men’s basketball committee, where she served for five years. She was just the second woman to be named to the committee.
Those experiences helped shape Hickey’s vision for UTSA. “Because of where we are now, there’s a lot more visibility nationally, but you also deal with increased pressures and increased expectations on the financial side,” she said.
— Michael Smith
“When I think of leaders who exude integrity, Lynn Hickey is at the top of the pyramid. You know the old saying, ‘You either have it or you don’t’: Lynn has it 10 times over. It is always a joy to work with a person who is reasonable, rational, prudent and objective, and Lynn represents that at the highest level. Our friendship goes back more than 20 years, and those attributes still represent so much of who she is. She is trusted.”
— Gene Smith | Athletic director | Ohio State University
