Chris Del Conte, University of Texas, Vice President and Lois and Richard Folger Athletics Director
About the program:
The current state of College of Athletic, NIL, Revenue Sharing, Transfer portals, current facility projects at Texas, Building resilient teams, servant leadership in athletics.
More about the speaker:
Chris Del Conte is a proven, well-regarded and nationally recognized athletics administrator who has a long history of leading highly successful athletic departments. In his eighth year at UT and 20th as an athletics director overall, Del Conte has strong ties to the Lone Star State, having spent a dozen years at TCU and Rice before taking over leadership of Texas Athletics on December 9, 2017. His 31 years of experience as a collegiate administrator are wide-ranging
and far-reaching with previous stops at Arizona, Washington State and Cal Poly.
Texas Athletics has had tremendous success during his tenure, winning 15 NCAA team titles and recording 15 NCAA runner-up finishes for a total of 30 NCAA Championship top-2 finishes. During his time at UT, the Longhorns have also posted, an additional 12 third-place finishes as well as a total of 60 top-5 and 86 top-10 team showings at the NCAA Championships, along with 82 Conference Championships (73 Big 12/8 SEC/1 CSCA).
The Longhorns won a league-best eight SEC Championships (twice as many as any SEC program) in their first year in the conference in 2024- 25. The staggering team performances include back-to-back College Football Playoff semifinal appearances from football in 2023 & 2024 (only school to advance to the CFP the past two seasons), advancing to the NCAA Final Four in Women’s Basketball in 2025 as well Elite Eight appearances by both men’s and women’s basketball, while also winning a softball Women’s College World Series Championship in 2025 and advancing to the College World Series in baseball three times during his tenure. Volleyball, Women’s Golf, Women’s Tennis and Rowing have all earned back-to-back national titles in his time at UT. All those accomplishments were topped off by claiming the coveted LEARFIELD Directors’ Cup as the nation’s top all-around, all- sports program in back-to-back years in 2020-21 and 2024-25 to make it for of the past five years overall.
UT snapped Stanford’s streak of 25-straight years winning that coveted trophy in 2020-21, joining the Cardinal as the only program to claim it in consecutive years when UT repeated as winners in 2021-22 and again in 2024-25. After Stanford claimed the title by the narrowest of margins in 2022-23, the Longhorns reclaimed the nation’s all-sports supremacy crown in 2023-24 then repeated in 2024-25. Including a tightly contested runner-up finish in 2022-23, the Longhorns have finished in the top-5 of the Directors’ Cup standings in each of Del Conte’s eight years leading the Longhorns program.
He’s redefining fan engagement and the atmosphere at Longhorn sporting events with enhancements like Bevo Blvd., Longhorn City Limits and Smokey’s Midway on Football gamedays, while also spearheading numerous facility upgrade and development projects designed to keep Texas at the forefront of college athletics. The Longhorns state-of-the-art South End Zone project at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium opened in 2021 while the recently opened and spectacular Moody Center for Men’s and Women’s Basketball was completed for the 2022-23 season. Texas also broke ground on construction of a new Football Indoor Training Facility in the fall of 2024 and is in the midst of some additional renovations and upgrades to DKR-TMS.
Agenda:
6:45am - Coffee & Networking
7:10am - Breakfast Buffet
7:25am - Introductions & Announcements
7:50am - Speaker Introduction
8:20am - Q&A
8:30am - Leave inspired or curious!
