Jody Conradt Retires

[GoHorns1]

Conradt completes 49 notable years after joining UT in spring 1976 as the first fulltime women’s head coach in two sports – basketball and volleyball.

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AUSTIN, Texas – Jody Conradt, who built University of Texas Women's Basketball and Texas Women's Athletics into a respected, enviable broad-based collegiate powerhouse, is retiring from fulltime appointment. She most recently served as special advisor to Longhorns Vice President and Folger Family Athletics Director Chris Del Conte.

Effective December 31, 2025, she will continue as a department volunteer, providing input and support as requested or needed. She also will complete a nine-year tenure on the NCAA Infractions Committee in August 2026.

Conradt completes 49 notable years after joining UT in spring 1976 as the first fulltime women's head coach in two sports – basketball and volleyball. Prior to moving the Longhorns' women's programs into the NCAA championships structure in 1982-83, she coached in the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) era, had teams that dominated the Southwest Conference for most of two decades and coached teams for 10 years in the Big 12 Conference. Her teams won a staggering and historic 183 consecutive games against SWC opponents from January of 1978 to February of 1990.

She retired from coaching following the 2006-07 season with 900 career victories, 10 SWC and two Big 12 Conference regular season titles, nine SWC postseason tournament championships and one Big 12 Conference postseason tournament crown, one AIAW Final Four and three NCAA Final Four appearances and the first perfect season (34-0 in 1985-86) in NCAA women's basketball history. That 1985-86 team captured the only national basketball title at Texas.

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Prior to Texas, she was an athletics administrator, coached volleyball, basketball and other sports and was a physical education instructor at Sam Houston State (1969-73) and UT Arlington (1973-76).

Conradt was the first women's coach not required to teach collegiate classes upon joining UT. She coached volleyball for the first two years and then served former Texas women's AD Donna Lopiano as basketball coach and associate athletics director for all women's sports for the next 15 years. She conceptualized the academics support structure for women student-athletes, hiring fellow Baylor graduate Dr. Sheila Rice to head those services in 1977 and then Dr. Randa Ryan in the 1990s. She also insisted upon important career readiness/life skills programming and mentorship as part of academics services, along with behavioral/mental health and intervention for disordered eating.

In the late 1970s, Conradt sought the services of former NCAA shot put champion Dana LeDuc to develop her team with strength and conditioning programming as he was doing with men's sports. She also was instrumental in recruiting first Becky Bludau Marshall and later Tina Bonci (1985) to oversee sports medicine/wellness services specifically designed for elite female student-athletes. The protocols in these units were considered best in class and eventually expanded under the direction of Conradt and legendary men's athletics director DeLoss Dodds to provide services for all men and women student-athletes.

As conference realignment altered the college athletics landscape in the early 1990s, Conradt was named director of UT's eight-sport separate women's athletics department in spring 1992 when Lopiano became executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation in New York City.  In the same month, undergraduate women on several UT club sports teams filed a Title IX lawsuit against the University, seeking more scholarship and participation opportunities for women.

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Conradt and Dodds worked with UT administration and UT System Board of Regents to settle the lawsuit in May 1993, which resulted in adding three varsity sports: women's soccer (fall 1993), softball (fall 1996) and rowing (fall 1998). Conradt hired accomplished hall of fame caliber coaches, including Chris Petrucelli in soccer, Connie Clark in softball and Carie Graves in rowing. She also performed both basketball coach and AD jobs for nine years (1992-2001) before returning to basketball coaching solely in April 2001. Her 2003 team reached the NCAA Final Four and won both Big 12 regular season and postseason tournament crowns. Texas also won the 2004 Big 12 regular season title.

To date, eight of UT's 11 women's sports have won national championships, and the three others (golf, soccer, beach volleyball) are well positioned to vie for one in the near future.

Texas Athletics emphasized class attendance, graduation and career readiness long before NCAA governance required "life skills" programming. Conradt's basketball team members were media personalities, brand ambassadors, polished public speakers and ultimate representatives of the University and attracted deserved attention and fan support from UT faculty and staff, government civic leaders, politicians, artists and musicians and authors.

Texas women's basketball attendance soared to 8,000-plus in the mid-to-late 1980s, creating a model that many other institutions and athletics departments sought to emulate. Schools sent representatives to Austin to learn about Texas Women's Basketball frameworks for media coverage, tv and radio exposure, fundraising, sponsorships, marketing and community engagement.

Donors, keenly interested in the academic futures of Texas women student-athletes, eagerly established endowed scholarships at then UT-established levels to underscore the emphasis on the importance of student-athletes attaining a college degree to launch their career sustainability and personal success. Conradt and her fellow coaches structured mentoring programs for successful and high-profile female professionals to meet with female student-athletes and encourage them to pursue careers in areas considered ground-breaking for women.

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Intuitively sensitive to her team's burgeoning public profile after winning the national championship in 1986 and achieving the first sold-out NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four in Austin in 1987, Conradt worked with Dodds, Lopiano and former men's basketball coach Tom Penders to establish the Neighborhood Longhorns Program in 1989. More than 5,500 fifth-through-eighth grade students from more than 30 grade schools and middle schools from Austin Independent School District and other districts participate in NLP programming, which includes after-school tutoring by UT students and student-athletes and emphasis on class attendance and good grades, which lead to such rewards as UT campus visits for museum and college department tours, Texas Longhorns men's and women's sports events and a scholar award event that honors high achieving students with savings bonds for future college education.

The NLP returned to Texas Athletics' department structure in 2025 after being administered for several decades by campus operational units. Conradt continues on the NLP Advisory Board, citing the program as one that allows the University to reach across the community and impact and incentivize youngsters to work toward attending college someday. An official credit hour course in service learning was launched in fall semester 2025 within the College of Education, with more than 30 students tutoring students in a pilot at Gus Garcia Young Men's Leadership Academy. The course will continue under leadership of Dr. LaToya Smith, executive senior associate AD for student services in athletics and NLP advisory board longtime member and UT graduate Howard Nirken.

Conradt is in nearly every athletics hall of fame. She was just the second woman after Delta State legend Margaret Wade to be inducted to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. She is both an inductee and emeritus board of directors member of the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville. She has been a trusted Women's Basketball Coaches Association leader and led its ethics committee during her years as head coach.

In March 2026, she is being honored along with higher education notable Ruth Simmons with the History-Making Texan Award from the Bullock Texas State History Foundation as part of annual Texas Independence Day celebrations.

(UT)

Edited 1 hour ago by GoHorns1