Posted on November 1, 2024 by Sean Cartell
MBA student Keegan McCain, ’23 came to UTSA with the goal of making a lasting impact on the school’s women’s tennis program. Now she helps shape the lives of the next generation of student athletes on a daily basis.
Keegan McCain
McCain played tennis for the Roadrunners from 2019-2023 and currently serves as a graduate assistant for UTSA’s Student Athlete Academic Services, working directly with the Roadrunners’ football program. After graduating magna cum laude through the Honors College with a B.B.A. in Marketing, she began her MBA in the Carlos Alvarez College of Business and her role with UTSA Athletics.
A year into her graduate assistantship, McCain believes that her experience as a student athlete has been one of her biggest strengths in developing quality relationships in her job. “I understand what it’s like being a student athlete, and I understand that it’s hard. It’s really helped in the sense that student athletes feel more comfortable talking to me about the problems they’re going through and what they’re experiencing,” said McCain.
That McCain would become a collegiate tennis player seems almost destined, though she says her parents never encouraged her to follow any specific sports path. Her mother, Patty, played collegiately at Stanford and competed professionally on the Women’s Tennis Association Tour, winning the 1991 Australian Open doubles title with Mary Jo Fernandez. Her father, Scott, played college tennis at Cal and professionally on the Association of Tennis Professionals Tour. He now owns and operates a junior tennis academy for the top junior players in Austin.
“I picked up tennis by the time I could walk, but it wasn’t necessarily that I had to play that sport,” McCain said. “My parents had thrown me into every sport under the sun. We had a rule in our house that we had to turn 12 before we chose a sport to fully commit to or quit sports entirely.”
McCain excelled at both tennis and academics at Westlake High School in Austin. When it came time to make her college choice, the opportunity to positively affect a UTSA program on the rise strongly appealed to McCain. “My whole belief in coming into a program was that I wanted to leave my mark,” McCain said. “I wanted to be at a school where I could have an impact on the team, an impact on the university and an impact on myself as a whole.”
Competing as a student-athlete requires an enormous time commitment, but an opportunity to become involved on campus with the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee was the start of a new pathway for McCain. “By the time my senior year came around in the fall of 2022, I was involved in nine different organizations, and I was in pretty high roles for every single organization that I was involved in,” McCain said. “I loved every aspect of it even though I didn’t have a lot of time while being a student-athlete.”
Knowing that she wanted to pursue a career in sports, she was presented with the opportunity to apply to the NCAA’s Career in Sports Forum, a highly selective three-day educational program that brings together student-athletes from across the country to help them chart their career paths in sports. “I ended up being selected as one of 200 student-athletes to go to the Career in Sports Forum,” McCain said. “I really loved that experience so much. It helped me narrow down specifically that I wanted to be involved in college sports.”
Through that experience, she learned about the NCAA’s Ethnic Minority and Women’s Enhancement Graduate Scholarship and was one of 13 women to receive the scholarship award. She was also selected to attend the NCAA Emerging Leaders Seminar this past February.
Luckily, she was approached by UTSA’s Assistant Athletics Director for Academic Services Beth Noteware with an opportunity she couldn’t turn down working as a graduate assistant. As McCain enters her second year of graduate school and prepares to graduate this fall, she can envision a career for herself driven by the desire to make a difference in the lives of others. “I am all about impacting student-athletes and leaving the world better than you found it.”
— Sean Cartell
