Sydney Carter always knew she wanted to be a basketball coach. She never sought out to be a trailblazer or go viral, she just wanted to share her love of basketball with others. Recently, her outfit videos and clips of her coaching have gone viral, and she’s amassed over 1.7 million followers on her Instagram, @coachsydcarter.
Originally from DeSoto, Texas, Carter had a lifelong dream of playing basketball for the University of Texas Longhorns, but ultimately played her college ball for Texas A&M University.
As an Aggie, she would go on to play a pivotal role in the team’s national championship run in 2011 under head coach Gary Blair. She returned to College Station as an assistant coach in 2020, before she got the call to join Vic Schaefer’s staff at Texas, which she said, was a no-brainer.
When writing down goals for herself, she recalls that she wrote down wanting to be “the flyest coach of all time.”
Being on both sides of one of the fiercest rivalries in college sports, she has won games on both sides, and just wants one thing: to win where she is.
“What I’m doing now in my life does not diminish what I’ve given to both programs thus far,” Carter said. “It doesn’t matter if I leave Texas, it doesn’t matter where I go. I’m going to give everything I’ve got. I’m at two different times in my life, I was a player and I’m coaching now, and the mission remains the same, as I want to win.”
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Transitioning from A&M to UT was simple for Carter, as she always wanted to be a Texas Longhorn. Watching Jody Conradt’s teams play inspired her to be a role player on her own teams, which ultimately led to her being recruited by Schaefer.
“I grew up and I watched Texas when Jody Conradt had one of my favorite players of all time in Texas women’s basketball history,” Carter said. “Her name was Nina Norman, and she played defense so hard. I wanted to be her, I just kept saying, I’m going to be Nina Norman when I get older. I just didn’t have the luxury of being recruited by Texas after Jody Conradt left. Coach Schaefer was at A&M at the time, and Coach Blair was the head coach. They came out to see me play, and they were on me, and they wanted me to come there. It was just a matter of going where people wanted me.”
After helping the Aggies to their only national title in the sport, she played four years in the WNBA before taking her career overseas. Carter played in Europe for seven seasons before returning to coach at her alma mater.
Once she was done living her dreams of playing, she turned to her next one, coaching. Carter joined the Texas Longhorns coaching staff as the Director of Player Development in April 2022 and became an assistant coach ahead of the 2024-2025 season.
In 2025, Texas won the regular season SEC title and played in its first Final Four in 22 years. In 2026, Texas won the SEC Tournament and will be a No. 1 Seed in the NCAA tournament, and Carter is looking to help her team go all the way to a national title this year.
Seeing the success of her athletes is why she loves coaching, even if she has bittersweet moments when her athletes leave.
“It’s the exact reason I got into coaching and coaching college basketball at that, because that’s what you want,” Carter said. “You want to see the people (succeed) that you’ve had a direct hand in influencing their lives in some of the most crucial years of their lives, because college is a very influential time in their lives, and it molds them so much. To know that you’ve had a direct hand and then being able to live out their dreams, there’s no feeling like it.”
While she’s been able to help with success on and off the court, she’s had her own success on social media. In 2024, she first went viral for posting pictures of her on the sidelines coaching.
In the Name, Image, and Likeness era of college sports, Carter has turned her coaching from just basketball, to helping her athletes succeed off the court with tools like social media. Justice Carlton, a sophomore, has launched her own cookie business.
Carter’s personal brand is her fashion and she takes inspiration from fashion shows, trends, social media, and her fashion icon, Princess Diana.
“Even as a little girl, I can remember being fascinated with (Princess Diana), and I just always felt like she was ahead of her time when it came to how she dressed,” Carter said. “A lot of time I will look at how she’s worn something, … and think, how can I make this mine? You can look at trends, or you can just kind of wing it. And sometimes I do both.”
While Carter had her challenges getting into coaches, receiving feedback that she wouldn’t be taken seriously because she is “curvy,” she used her network and her passion to achieve her dreams. Now, she hopes to inspire others to not listen to those stereotypes, while also knowing her worth as a coach.
She’s seen firsthand how women’s basketball has grown, and she believes that she was just a small part to driving that growth.
“Social media is at the forefront of so many things, and it’s so influential,” Carter said. “Once you go to a game and you realize how much fun you actually have, because maybe the halftime show is more interactive, and the marketing departments are just doing a much better job of selling the product that is out there and putting that on display for people to say, ‘Okay, I do want to attend a game.’ Once they do, they have so much fun, they want to come back.”
Lindsey Plotkin is a multimedia reporter for the Victoria Advocate. Contact her at lindsey.plotkin@vicad.com.