Sean Cartell is in his second year as Senior Associate Athletics Director for Strategic Communications at UTSA after being hired on October 16, 2023.
Cartell has oversight of the communications, creative, marketing, fan engagement, brand engagement and broadcast teams. He also serves as the Chief Communications Officer for UTSA Athletics, handling all department-wide communications efforts and responses, and serving as the communications contact and advisor for Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Lisa Campos.
Cartell, who is a member of UTSA Athletics’ Senior Staff, represents the department on a number of campus committees, including the Campus Communications Leads, Website Steering Committee and the Enrollment and Content Marketing Collective. As part of UTSA’s integration with UT Health San Antonio, Cartell serves on the Merger Communications Task Force. He chairs the UTSA Athletics Awards Committee, which works cross-departmentally to select and nominate student-athletes for awards related to academics, performance and community service, and he created the Rowdy Recognition Awards, a program for Athletics staff peer recognition.
Cartell leads the department’s strategic plan efforts – the Roadrunner Game Plan – and also serves as a leader of the Student Engagement initiative as part of RRGP.
Cartell is a primary storyteller for UTSA Athletics, working within the department to tell nearly 100 written and video features on the Roadrunners’ student-athletes during the 2024-25 academic year. He also is the departmental contact with Sport and Story to help produce the thrice-weekly newsletter the Brew-1-0 that goes to a subscriber list of more than 40,000 UTSA supporters and stakeholders.
On a national level, Cartell serves as Vice Chair of the College Sports Communicators Advocacy Committee.
Cartell joined UTSA after a three-year stint at the Sun Belt Conference, where he served as Associate Commissioner for Communications & Branding.
During his time with the Sun Belt, he served as the secondary communications contact for football and the primary communications contact for volleyball, men’s basketball, beach volleyball and men's and women's golf. His leadership role in communications, marketing and branding helped increase the conference’s social media engagements by 232 percent over a two-year span across Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram.
Cartell was a key contributor to the Sun Belt’s billboard presence in New York’s Times Square in September 2022, which — along with an appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay — was part of the Sun Belt’s generation of more than 155,000 social media engagements. He also launched the Sun Belt’s first podcast “Around the Sun,” which appears on all major podcast platforms, and the Sun Belt’s weekly e-newsletter “Around the Sun,” which went to an audience of more than 2,000 members working within the Sun Belt Conference.
Prior to his time at the Sun Belt, Cartell spent more than five years at Texas as associate media relations director, working with the Longhorns' nationally prominent women's basketball, women's golf and rowing programs. He also oversaw the media relations student assistant program for Texas Athletics. He completed UT’s Collegiate Athletics Talent and Professional Leadership Training (CATAPLT) program, and he was a member of UT Athletics’ Diversity and Inclusion Council, and the Gender Equity Subcommittee.
Cartell previously held athletics communications roles at Santa Fe College (2003-04), Kentucky (2004-08), UCF (2008) and Florida (2008-11). He received the 2008 Collegiate Volleyball Update RESPecting Volleyball Award and he was the 2007 (Kentucky) and 2008 (Florida) South Region SID of the American Volleyball Coaches Association’s Grant Burger media award.
Working at the Southeastern Conference from 2011-15, Cartell served as the conference's first sport administrator and championship director for equestrian and worked with SECU, the conference's academic initiative.
Cartell, who has staffed more than 30 NCAA and conference postseason championship events, was the 2015 College Sports Communicators (CSC, formerly CoSIDA) Rising Star Award Recipient and graduated from the CSC’s 2022-23 Diversity & Inclusion Fellowship Class.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in integrated strategic communications from Kentucky in 2007 and his master’s degree in sport studies from Tulane in 2022 with a 4.0 GPA and graduate certificates in sport administration and sport coaching. He earned his accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America in January 2022.