North Texas has a lot of trailblazers; the first person to do something or go somewhere and blazes a trail for others to follow.
That's what a woman in the Garland ISD has done throughout her five-decade career and her peers honored her for it.
"One of my coworkers told me the other day, 'How wonderful to celebrate your life's work.' And, I stopped to think about it and I thought, 'You know, I never thought about this being my life's work.' It's just what I've done every day since I was 19 years old. I started teaching when I was 19. And, now I'm 74 and I'm still here every day doing what I love," said Judy Campbell, the assistant athletic director for Garland ISD and the first-ever recipient of the Texas High School Coaches Association Jody Conradt Award.
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Conradt is a retired Hall of Fame Fame college basketball coach and the award in her name honors a female high school coach committed to advancing girls and women in athletics.
Campbell coached for three decades. She started her career in Royse City where she was the junior high basketball coach then coached the middle and high school track teams. Volleyball was added to her duties.
"I had not ever run track or played volleyball," she said. "In fact, the first volleyball game I ever saw I coached but, you just do what you have to do. You learn. You get advice. You go to coaching clinics. You read books. You get with the guys' coaches and figure out what they're doing."
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Garland ISD recruited her at the start of the 1975-76 school year. She took the opportunity and joined the district in 1976.
"I came to Garland to start the women's programs. And, I started at South Garland High School and I was volleyball, basketball and track coach and we just hit the ground running," she said. "I never thought of it as work. I never thought of it as being deprived in any way. I just did what had to be done. And to this day that's what I'm still doing."
Campbell left South Garland for Naaman Forest in 1988 and stayed there until 2002 when she decided it was time to retire.
"And I just felt like I was, I was there. I had done what I could do. So, I retired with no intention of ever going back to work and I stayed retired three months and Homer called me and said, 'Hey, come to work part-time.' Well, part-time turned into full-time. Full-time, turned into all the time," she said.
Homer B. Johnson, the district's head athletic director who initially hired her in Garland, brought her back to be the district's assistant athletic director.
"And, now I work with mostly, coaches instead of kids. And it gave me a whole new career to pursue," Campbell said.
She's now been in the role for more than two decades and still going strong.
"Homer Johnson asked me one time when we were coming home from a meeting. He said, 'Judy, if you couldn't have done this, what would you have done?' And my answer to him was that I never stopped to think about it because to me, what I've done is so natural. It comes so natural," she said. "I can't imagine that I would have ever done anything else."
For her more than 50 years of being a positive role model for athletes and coaches, a credit to the coaching profession, and her contributions to women's high school athletics in Texas, Campbell was selected as the inaugural winner of the THSCA's new Jody Conradt Award for her unwavering commitment to the advancement of girls and women in athletics much Conradt.
Her new honor is from an organization which only admitted men until 1988 when women were finally allowed to become members.
"To have an organization tell you that they cannot, you cannot join their organization, then for that organization to establish an award for someone who has pursued and persisted is probably one of the greatest honors I've ever been given," Campbell smiled.
Campbell was given a ring not a plaque or trophy in celebration of her award.
"Every time I look at this ring, it helps me remember what my purpose is. It helps me remember that I still need to keep going forward, not worrying about obstacles, not worrying about, what I don't have or what we don't have but trying to continue to, make things better for all coaches, not just women but men, too," she said.
