July 15, 2011
San Antonio – As a softball player at St. Mary’s University, Lisa Dausin was coached by current St. Mary’s athletics director and head baseball coach Charlie Migl.
She was classmates with Rattlers men’s basketball coach Jim Zeleznak.
And not too long ago, she supervised the school’s longtime softball coach, Donna Fields, in an internship in the athletics office at Northside Independent School District.
So it’s no wonder why Dausin was eager to return to St. Mary’s as the University’s head men’s and women’s tennis coach.
“This is home,” said Dausin, who was recently announced as taking over the program. “It’s always been a dream to come back and do this. But I would not have scripted the timeline. It just kind of evolved.”
Dausin takes over the St. Mary’s tennis program after spending the past 31 years moving up the ranks in Northside ISD.
Most recently, Dausin served for 12 years as the Assistant Athletics Director for Northside ISD before returning to teaching this past school year, when she taught at Warren High School in San Antonio and coached middle-school tennis.
The first female hired in the school district’s athletics office, Dausin served as an extension of the athletics director, overseeing the hiring of coaches and doing legal work pertaining to athletics personnel, among other duties.
At St. Mary’s, she will look to build upon the foundation laid last season, when the men went 5-14 and the women 5-16.
“Everything about coming back here is coming home,” she said. “From coaching again, to the sport, to the university. I walked my first recruit around campus recently, and I was just so proud of how she was treated by everyone.”
Before moving into the athletics office at Northside ISD, Dausin worked at Marshall High School, coaching tennis and assisting other sports from 1980-1994. In 1995, she became the school’s Girls Coordinator.
A St. Mary’s graduate, Dausin has always had tennis in her blood. She played tennis, basketball and softball at St. Mary’s, graduating in 1979 with an education degree with a teacher’s certification. She went on to get her master’s degree in education at Southwest Texas State in 1983. She later completed her coursework for another master’s degree in counseling at Texas-San Antonio in 1998.
Born in Del Rio, she spent much of her childhood in San Antonio, graduating from McCollum High School. Dausin is married to Bryan, a football coach at Warren High School. They have two sons, Ross and Rex.