AUSTIN, Texas — University of Texas Executive Senior Associate Athletics Director and Chief of Staff Chris Plonsky has been named to Sports Business Journal’s 2026 Class of Champions: Pioneers & Innovators in Sports Business. Plonsky was acknowledged earlier this week in Los Angeles on the CAA World Congress of Sports.
In addition to Plonsky, the distinguished six-person Class of 2026 consists of James Brown (CBS Sports broadcaster), Steve Greenberg (Allen & Co.’s sports activities specialty apply), Andy Lansing (Levy), Billy Payne (former chairman of Augusta National) and Arn Tellem (Detroit Pistons vice chairman). This 12 months’s Champions are acknowledged not just for their success in finance, media, faculty sports activities, concessions and different sectors, but additionally how they influenced the business total by their work and ahead considering.
In practically 4 many years at The University of Texas, Plonsky has advocated for the development of the Longhorns’ girls’s applications whereas serving to the athletic division develop into one of essentially the most profitable within the nation. Plonsky has labored in faculty athletics since 1976, the place she was a three-year basketball student-athlete and undergraduate media relations assistant at Kent State University.
Plonsky has served in her present position as Chief of Staff and Executive Senior Associate Athletics Director since September of 2018. She has served as UT’s senior girl administrator for NCAA and convention conferences because the late Nineties and beforehand was Texas’ girls’s athletics director from 2001-17. Plonsky labored because the supervisor of athletics exterior companies for males’s and girls’s athletics from 1993-2017 and served as girls’s sports activities info director from 1982-86.
In her present position, Plonsky supervises workers leaders in scholar companies: educational/studying, compliance/threat administration and sports activities medication/well being and wellness/power efficiency. The latter space consists of diet, behavioral well being and utilized sports activities science. With the ever-growing modifications of NIL, Plonsky assists with 4EVER Texas, the programming that pertains to student-athlete profession readiness, management improvement, branding and private improvement.
Plonsky’s contributions outdoors of Texas Athletics have been huge, together with serving as previous president of NACDA, NACMA and Women Leaders in Sport. Among her many honors, she has been inducted into the NACMA, CoSIDA and Texas Sports halls of fame.