AUSTIN (KXAN) — It didn’t take long for Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte to find the next Longhorns women’s golf coach.
Ryan Murphy announced his resignation May 31, and not even a week later, Texas announced the hire of Laura Ianello.
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Ianello spent 14 years as the head coach (three years as an assistant) at her alma mater Arizona, taking the Wildcats to a national championship in 2018, and she said it was hard to leave the place she called home for so long. There’s just something about a job at UT, though.
“When I got the call, it excited me in a way I haven’t felt in a long time,” Ianello said. “When you get that feeling, that rush of adrenaline and tears in your eyes and goosebumps because you know it’s an opportunity of a lifetime … I called my husband and said, ‘We have to talk!’”
A former professional golfer on the LPGA Tour, Ianello also won a national championship as a member of the Wildcats in 2000. She was named the Pac-12 women’s golf coach of the year in 2010 and 2019 and took the Wildcats to the NCAA championships nine times.
Ianello said Texas was a perfect place to continue her coaching career in part due to the program’s resources.
“Chris Del Conte has Arizona blood and to have the opportunity to work for such a tremendous leader was very enticing,” she said. “Texas has a lot more resources than a lot of other universities and top programs. If you’re a coach and middle-aged like I am, and you want to continue to coach and have successful programs and win national championships … with the climate of athletics there are changing times, I want to make sure I can do that.”
Taking the job at Texas also lets Ianello coach some of the golfers she recruited out of high school. She said she lost several recruits to the Longhorns, so she knows the players well and she’ll use that to help accelerate their development.
The Longhorns finished tied for 11th at the NCAA championships this past season and won the Big 12 Conference championship.
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