Looking back, every step of Terri Conder Johnson’s life has led her to her dream job.
Conway’s Johnson, 53, recently completed her first year as executive director of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. It’s been a whirlwind, but she said she couldn’t be happier.
“Every day, it’s something different,” said Johnson, who continues to use her University of Central Arkansas undergraduate accounting degree and her master’s degree in business management in her new position. “Accounting is so structured, and this is so much fun. I’m running a business, too.”
Johnson, a three-time All-American (including the prestigious Kodak All America Team) for the UCA Sugar Bears; a four-sport standout at Rose Bud High School who won the inaugural Arkansas High School Pentathlon in 1981; and Arkansas Female Runner of the Year in 2000, was inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2005. She quickly joined the board, then the executive committee.
“When Ray Tucker stepped down [as executive director], I thought, ‘I want that job,’” she remembered. “I was super excited. I knew a ton about the organization before I took the job, which was very helpful.”
According to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame’s website, the primary purpose of the organization, incorporated Aug. 16, 1958, is to “establish a sports hall of fame to honor and preserve the history of individuals who, through outstanding achievement, accomplishments, and contributions in both amateur and professional sports, have brought honor, prestige, and fame to the state of Arkansas.”
Johnson has already been impressive in her duties, which include overseeing all operations of the organization — fundraising, marketing and working alongside the board of directors and its various committees.
“She has the perfect blend of an athletic background mixed with administrative and leadership skills that are needed for her position,” said David Grimes, Hall of Fame board member and former president. “She’s already done a great job, and a lot of exciting things are going to happen under her watch.”
Johnson grew up in Romance, “the suburbs of Rose Bud,” in White County. In the late 1970s at Rose Bud, she said, girls had more sports than boys.
“We played fast-pitch softball in the fall before anybody played it, then basketball and then volleyball,” she said. “White County had a volleyball league, and then we’d jump into track, and in the summer, slow-pitch softball.”
She called herself “an OK softball player,” but she excelled at basketball and track. Through her sophomore year, Arkansas high schools played the old half-court style of basketball before making the transition to the full-court game. At 5-10, she played forward. She earned all-state honors three times and was named Most Valuable Player once.
Johnson said her college choice eventually came down to UCA and the University of Arkansas.
“My mom and dad never said anything because they didn’t want to sway my decision,” she said. “[UCA] coach [Ron] Marvel called me, and I told him I was going to the U of A, and when I got off the phone, my mom was upset because she thought she’d never get to see me play. So I called Coach Marvel back. I had a lot of ties to UCA. My sister [Debbie] went there.
“I’m glad I didn’t go to Arkansas because I would’ve been a little fish in a big pond,” Johnson said.
She said she and Wynne’s Bettye Fiscus, who went on to excel at Arkansas en route to a 2006 Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame induction, were the top high school players in Arkansas in 1981.
During Johnson’s four seasons, the Sugar Bears went 96-20, advancing to the postseason every year. In 1984, they lost to North Carolina-Asheville in the NAIA National Tournament.
Lacking three hours toward her Bachelor of Business Administration degree, she moved home in the summer of 1985 and commuted to UCA for her final class.
“It wasn’t funny then, but that summer was like a country song — my parents got divorced, and my house burned down,” Johnson said. “All my trophies, all my awards, were lost.”
A 2001 inductee into the UCA Sports Hall of Fame, Johnson said there were opportunities after graduation to play professionally overseas, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she got a good job offer and went to work for Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Co. accounting firm in Little Rock.
She married Randy Johnson, “not ‘The Big Unit,’” but an all-Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference baseball player for UCA, in 1986. They have two sons — Ryan, 28, a video-game design artist for Sony Entertainment in Oregon; and Garrett, 22, who is finishing his degree at UCA.
Terri Conder Johnson said she had run a bit here and there since her basketball career ended, but in the late 1990s, she was looking for something to do to keep her motivated, so she decided to run a marathon. She joined the Conway Running Club and got serious, running the Boston Marathon three times, as well as multiple marathons across the country. Her honors include the state’s female and master’s female Runner of the Year awards.
“But I just burned out,” she said. “I used to get up every day at 5 to run. I don’t do it like that anymore. Now I just run so I can eat and drink.”
Along the way, Johnson took accounting jobs at Kimberly-
Clark and Alltel before becoming executive director of UCA’s Purple Circle.
“I was so thrilled to have that job at UCA,” she said. “It was so much fun, such a great job, but it was when we had the whole Lu Hardin scandal, so when all that was going on, Steve Strange offered me a job as accounting manager at American Management Corp.”
A few years later, the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame position opened.
“Terry and I worked together at AMC for 10 years,” Grimes said. “We hated to lose her, but I knew she was the perfect fit for the ASHOF job.”
Johnson took the position just over a year ago, shortly after the 2016 class was announced.
“I jumped in and started pulling videos together and planning for the banquet and taking care of all the inductees,” she said.
Other duties included cleaning up the organization’s accounting following a theft. A couple of years earlier, Jennifer Smith, former assistant executive director, pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $120,000 from the organization.
The 2017 Hall of Fame induction banquet is scheduled for March 3 in the Wally Allen Ballroom of the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock. Following that, Johnson said, the organization will have a membership drive in March.
“Then the next thing is our Pat Summerall Celebrity Golf Tournament on June 5,” Johnson said. “We’ve got [Arkansas] coach [Bret] Bielema
and his staff for this one. That’s a lot of fun. We have past inductees and different local personalities, and then we start the process for next year’s inductees.”
That process includes soliciting nominations from members. Those nominations then go to the Hall of Fame’s regular and senior committees.
“[The committees] decide who is going to be on the voting ballot,” Johnson said. “That goes to the general membership, and they vote. The top two vote-getters on the regular list and the top one in the senior and posthumous categories are automatically in, and the rest of the class is filled out by our 40 board members.”
Once the next group of inductees is decided, Johnson and her new assistant, Tom Mitchell, begin planning the late-winter/early-spring banquet. For the past two years, there has also been a fall event. The 1970 Arkansas state football team and Arkansas Tech’s back-to-back national championship teams from the 1990s have been honored thus far.
“What we really stress is we’re not just a Razorback organization; we are statewide,” Johnson said. “We try to get all the schools. In this year’s inductees, we have two with U of A-Monticello ties and one from [Arkansas State University]. We really are a statewide organization.”
Among the accomplishments Johnson counts from her first year as executive director are doubling the memberships from 500 to 1,000 and reorganizing the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame Museum, a 12,000-square-foot facility on the west side of Verizon Arena in North Little Rock at No. 3 Verizon Arena Way.
“I’ve totally redone the museum,” Johnson said. “You really want a museum to be continually evolving. It had gotten kind of stagnant. I’m trying to make sure all my inductees give me something to put in the museum for them. I’ve gone through all the memorabilia and have been cataloging it. Hobby Lobby is my new friend; we’re trying to match all the framing. I’ve found a lot of really neat things that had not been put out.
“I’m trying to do a little at a time as we totally revamp the museum. We’re updating and refreshing and getting the word out to show how nice it is. Everybody who sees it is so impressed, but we haven’t done a very good job promoting it.
“We’re also starting to push it as an event venue. We can have birthday parties, wedding receptions, weddings, team building for different businesses. We have an 88-seat theater that’s high-definition, all digital.
Verizon caters. We’ve never really promoted it that way, but we’re really trying to. It’s a really good place to have a party.”