>>08.09.05
New Assistants Join Staff
For Soccer, Athletic Training

RICHARDSON, TX - A pair of Metroplex natives and a former volunteer assistant coach have joined the University of Texas at Dallas athletics staff as fulltime assistants.

Heather Martinelli, a former varsity women's soccer player at the University of Oklahoma who assisted at UTD as a volunteer last season, has been named assistant women's soccer/tennis coach.

Cody Worden, a graduate of Fort Worth Southwest High School and the University of Dallas, has been named the new assistant coach for men’s soccer and men’s tennis.

Brandi Shrier, a native of Lancaster, is the Comets’ new assistant athletic trainer.

Martinelli, a former all-state high school player on a three-time state championship team in Norman, Oklahoma, served as a volunteer assistant with the Comets last season while also working locally with the Sting Soccer Club.

• Martinelli played four years of Big XII women’s soccer at OU from 2000-2003, and was selected a team captain her final two seasons. She earned a BA degree in psychology in 2004. Martinelli was four-time all-district player at Norman (OK) High School while playing on a team that won the Oklahoma state women’s soccer championship in 1996, 1997 and 1998. She won all-state honors in 1998. Her father is former OU strength coach, Pete Martinelli.

• Worden was a 2002 USCAA All-American and team MVP during his senior season after a four-year career at the University of Dallas. Between 1999 and 2002, he set several school records for goalkeepers and was a two-time team captain. He played three years at Fort Worth Southwest High School, earning all-district honors.

Worden earned his BS degree in history from the University of Dallas in 2002 and spent the last two years working with amateur soccer organizations and camps in Knoxville, Tennessee.
He succeeds Jeremy Morse, who had been an assistant with the UTD program since 1998.

• Shrier joins head athletic trainer Larry Gardner’s staff after working the last two years in Illinois. Previously, she worked with several professional and amateur hockey teams, including a year with the Texas Tornado junior “A” team in Frisco.

A 1996 graduate of Lancaster High School, Shrier earned an undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, where she worked as a student assistant trainer, and a master’s degree from Baylor University in 2002.