San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Hall of Fame inducts its inaugural class
Standing at the podium and looking out at a room giving her a standing ovation, former UTSA athletic director Lynn Hickey admitted she underestimated the emotional impact of seeing so many familiar faces.
The Roadrunners' transformative AD for 18 years before giving way to Lisa Campos in 2018, Hickey paused to express gratitude for the event that sparked her return — the foundation of the UTSA Athletics Hall of Fame.
“I'm guessing the previous AD should've done this a long time ago,” Hickey quipped.
Over the rest of her 32 minutes at the podium, Hickey reminded those in attendance why a celebration such as Friday's would not have been possible without her contributions and those of the other five members of UTSA's first Hall of Fame class, which was inducted Friday during a ceremony at Pedrotti's Ranch.
Hickey shared just a few of the stories she said could fill a twoweek speech, capturing the journey of the Roadrunners' athletic department from a budget of $1.8 million to $28 million.
She said she had “no idea what I was stepping into” when she entered the university in 2000, missing both the department's tremendous potential and the amount of ground the program would need to cover to realize it.
Years before she became instrumental in bringing football to life for the Roadrunners, she told then-UTSA president Ricardo Romo during her interview that she thought adding the sports was a bad idea.
“I said, ‘No, sir, I would not start football. We need to concentrate on building the sports you have,' ” Hickey said. “Very astute on my part. Little did I understand that I had walked into a gold mine of opportunity.”
Hickey was inducted Friday alongside one of the other key figures in the foundation of UTSA football — inaugural head coach Larry Coker.
The man who put UTSA on the map for many outside of San Antonio, Coker was on-hand for Friday's ceremony and walked up to the stage to receive his medal, cueing brief comments from a prerecorded video.
“We started UTSA football with one helmet and one jersey,” Coker said. “We had three assistant coaches who recruited a group of players who practiced in a high school stadium for a year without playing games. They also believed in the potential of UTSA, laying the foundation.”
Perhaps the best player Coker ever landed with the Roadrunners, defensive end Marcus Davenport from nearby Stevens, was also a member of UTSA's inaugural class. With Davenport's Minnesota Vikings in action Sunday, his wife and children accepted the honor on his behalf, and Davenport shared comments via video.
Tameka Roberts-Nunez (women's track and field, 1995-98) and Devin Brown (men's basketball, 1998-2002) delivered speeches to accompany their induction Friday, while Steele product McKenzie Adams (volleyball, 2011-13) sent a video from Japan, where she plays professionally.
“Words escape me when I try to say how much it means to me,” Adams said. “To be a part of this prestigious class with all the other candidates and members, it's definitely an honor and something I don't take lightly.”
Friends since the early days of Brown's tenure at UTSA, he and Roberts-Nunez had long traded barbs about the rankings of UTSA's top 25 athletes of the program's first 25 years — a list released in 2006 following a vote of former student-athletes and a department committee.
After years of flaunting his first-place standing ahead of Roberts-Nunez at No. 2, she finally leveled the playing field.
“We had that debate, and I was salty,” Roberts-Nunez said. “I'm not salty anymore, because guess what? You can't get rid of me. We're in this together.”
Roberts-Nunez and Hickey also share a longstanding bond. Then the women's basketball coach at Texas A&M, Hickey believed she had landed RobertsNunez in recruiting, only to find that she “disappeared” when the time to sign arrived.
Coach Gary Blair had instead lured Roberts-Nunez to Stephen F. Austin. But rather than cut ties with Hickey, Roberts-Nunez chose to deliver her a handwritten letter of apology.
About seven years later, when Roberts-Nunez was working as a graduate assistant at UTSA under Hickey, the AD resurfaced the note and returned it to RobertsNunez.
“God works in mysterious ways,” Hickey said, “and we're finally together in the same class tonight.”
Speaking last of UTSA's six inductees Friday, Roberts-Nunez stepped on stage and remarked on the difficult circumstance of having to follow Hickey's emotional monologue.
Hickey, of course, saw a way this all could have been avoided.
Shouting out from her table to the side of the stage, Hickey reminded Roberts-Nunez, “You should've come to A&M!”