SAN ANTONIO – UTSA Athletics mourns the loss of one of its earliest and longest supporters, Betty Sutherland, who passed away at her home on June 23 at the age of 93. Sutherland was memorialized on Thursday morning at the First Baptist Church of San Antonio.
Sutherland and her husband Dr. Berry Sutherland, one of the first professors hired at UTSA in 1976, helped start the basketball program at UTSA. Following Berry’s death, Betty created the Berry Sutherland Endowed Scholarship in Athletics. Sutherland was a long-time season-ticket holder for UTSA Athletics.
“When we came here, we didn’t have any athletics or anything,” Sutherland said in a 2022 interview. “Then we decided we really wanted to work on basketball and got them going, and we went to all of the games. We wanted basketball because I had played basketball all my high school time in Oklahoma. UTSA has just always been very special.”
Sutherland, born Oct. 15, 1930, in Maysville, Okla., first moved to San Antonio in 1955 where she worked as an executive assistant to Colonel Hewlett, who was Chief of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at Brook Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. Hewlett and Dr. Denton Cooley performed the first open heart surgery in San Antonio.
Sutherland had a long and distinguished political career working for multiple mayors of San Antonio. Working with Mayor Phil Hardberger in 2010, she helped complete Phil Hardberger Park, which she named as one of her proudest achievements, and continued to work for the Phil Harberger Park Conservancy to support the creation of a green space with an innovative land bridge and gardening programs for San Antonio’s youth. There is a building named for Sutherland at the park called “Betty’s House.”
Sutherland was preceded in death by her husband Berry, her parents and four siblings. She is survived by her daughters Cathy Davies and Dianne Sutherland. The family requests that any donations made in her honor go to the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy.