Sara Hernandez was promoted to Senior Associate Athletic Director for Marketing and Strategic Initiatives on July 1, 2025. She spent the previous four years as Associate Athletic Director for Marketing and Strategic Initiatives. Hernandez has been with the athletic department in various capacities since 2007-08, initially as a track & field student-athlete for four years. She then became a media relations graduate assistant for a year and a half before starting full time as the Athletic Marketing and Promotions Coordinator on January 2, 2013. Hernandez was later promoted to Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing.
In her current position, Hernandez oversees the department’s marketing and promotions efforts while also overseeing strategic initiatives including, but not limited to, increasing the department’s activity throughout the Rio Grande Valley, including on and around the Brownsville campus.
A native of Matamoros, Mexico, and a graduate of Saint Joseph Academy in Brownsville, Sara joined the Broncs during the 2007-08 academic year. She immediately became a major contributor, and even got her name in the program records book a few times. Sara finished her running career No. 2 in the indoor 60-meter hurdles with a time of 9.23 in 2009, and No. 3 in the outdoor 400-meter hurdles with a time of 1:03.69 in 2010.
Despite the amount of time Sara had to put into athletics, she always put the student in student-athlete first. She earned AD Honor Roll honors in both the fall and spring of her senior year and Dean’s List Second Honors as a sophomore.
She even found time for extracurricular activities, writing for the weekly student newspaper, The Pan American, and a student magazine, The Panorama. In fact, Sara served as the sports editor of The Pan American as a senior, while also serving as the President of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, running for the Broncs and earning GPAs of 3.0 or higher during both semesters.
Sara graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism-Advertising/PR, and then decided to pursue a Master of Business Administration at UTPA. As luck would have it, the Athletics Department had an opening for a graduate assistant in Athletic Media Relations. She applied for the job and got it.
Now Sara gives back to the athletic program that she loves so much while also gaining valuable experience working in a Division I athletics department.
Sara had wide-ranging responsibilities during her 18 months in media relations. Her primary job became writing the profiles of current and former student-athletes and coaches on the website. Sara wrote much of the content posted over the summer, allowing the website to have fresh content during every workday. She also wrote various other stories and contributed to the improvements of the website.
Sara also gained experience in video work, using a camera to record most of the highlights from baseball games, tennis matches and cross country meets over the last eight months.
Her game day duties for basketball and volleyball have varied, from serving as a stats runner, to writing down a manual record of the game, to calling the game for the stats crew, to producing and engineering basketball broadcasts.
