When Texas Director of Women’s Athletics Christine Plonsky was a youngster in a suburban town southeast of Pittsburgh, she dreamed of someday being a writer for Sports Illustrated.

She grew up with a love for reading and writing words. “I was reading myself to sleep from the time I can remember,” she said.

As a student-athlete at Kent State, she studied journalism and played basketball, and those passions coalesced into a job as women’s sports information director – while she was still a student.

Upon graduation, she thought she would go work in the sports department at a newspaper. But jobs were hard to find, and jobs for women covering high-profile sports like football and basketball were even scarcer.

So she followed her on-the-job training at Kent State – which also included such activities as sitting on an athletics council, learning what to look for in hiring coaches, and discovering how to build relationships with administrators, faculty and the university president – through the open doors of a career in intercollegiate athletics.

With help from mentor Dick Sapara, Plonsky landed a job at Iowa State, and that led to gigs at Texas, the Big East Conference and then back at Texas.

“There really wasn’t a path besides that,” she said. “All of those experiences were things that Kent gave me.”

Contributing to Plonsky’s success over time has been her involvement in athletics on a national and even international level – within the NCAA, the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators and USA Basketball. Such service is time-consuming, but she said it affords her the opportunity to build relationships all over the country.

But her journalism training has never left her.

“I think like a journalist in every part of my work,” she said. “It is always about public perception. I analyze issues very much like an investigative reporter would … I appreciated public relations work, but I appreciate more the people who are in the journalism business. I don’t get intimidated by people in the media because I’ve been on the other side of it and I understand what they’re trying to do.”

Plonsky also enjoys the competitive side of athletics.

“I don’t think I could be in a business where it wasn’t about gaining something, putting yourself out there, taking a risk and getting a reward,” she said. “Sometimes that reward might be failure, too, because you learn from adversity. For a coach, that is part of your daily routine, but for the rest of us, it’s about assembling a team that can work together and be successful.”

Christine Plonsky knows how to make news.
Photo courtesy of The University of Texas.