Fasten Your Sun Belts, Guys, And Meet The Girls Of The Southwest Conference

Almost a decade ago, when Playboy was hopping about the country in search of college ladies who best ignited our national school spirit, we decided to peek in on a popular cluster of nine campuses--eight of them in Texas, all of them part of the Bible Belt--dubbed the N.C.A.A.'s Southwest Conference. To our delight, what began as a photographic shot in the dark turned out to be a winner: Bejeaned and bounteous, the Girls of the Southwest Conference (Playboy, September 1980) brought city boys to their knees and set men everywhere dreaming of one-way tickets to the Sun Belt. Well, we figgered eight years was enough time for y'all to cool down--so we decided to go back. We asked Playboy Contributing Photographers David Chan and David Mecey (whose last pictorial collaboration was Women of (text concluded on page 133) the Ivy League Revisited--October 1986) to high-tail it to the heart of Texas--with a little side step into Arkansas--and they came back with a hot-blooded cowboy fantasy. "The thing that separates the women of the Southwest from some of our other college-women features," says Playboy Managing Photo Editor Jeff Cohen, "is that out there, everybody's a hard body. That and the fact that there are more allover tans. The body consciousness is unbelievable." Well, start believin', pardners, as you say howdy to the women of the Southwest Conference.