The sixth in a series on the 2025 inductees into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.
FAYETTEVILLE — Bev Lewis was pleasantly surprised by a phone call.
On the other end of it was an Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame board member, informing her that she would be an inductee in this year’s class.
Perhaps that news didn’t compare to the astonishment during a packed dinner in August 2001 at the house of the then-chancellor of the University of Arkansas. That announcement forever cemented and affirmed Lewis’ unparalleled contribution to Arkansas’ women’s sports programs.
Lewis, the women’s athletic director from 1989 to 2007, was rallying support around a new gymnastics team for the Razorbacks at the time. Arkansas was able to lure Coach Mark Cook away from Stanford after the 2001 season, who that year had led the Cardinal to another Pac-10 championship and a top-10 national finish.
The problem? Arkansas didn’t have a dedicated gymnastics practice facility.
Lewis and her husband, Harley, had dinner with Bob and Marilyn Bogle one night, and Lewis asked if they would consider helping donate funds for the new building. The Bogles didn’t hesitate, which is what Lewis assumed the dinner at Chancellor John White’s house was for: an acknowledgment of their gift. Lewis invited all of her head coaches and much of the staff. That night, the surprise was unraveled.
“I stood up to speak, to recognize them, and the chancellor interrupted me and said, ‘Wait, I have a special announcement I want to make,’ ” Lewis said this week in a phone interview. “He said, ‘Bob and Marilyn Bogle approached us and approached the Board of Trustees and said what they wanted to name the facility, and the Board of Trustees approved it. So the name of the new facility is the Bev Lewis Center for Women’s Athletics.’ So I was kind of speechless and shocked. … Oh yeah, (Marilyn) was laughing.”
Lewis grew up in Calumet, Mich., on the peninsula above Wisconsin. She got her graduate degree from Purdue, while working as an assistant coach for the track and field team. She made the trek to Arkansas in 1981 to coach both the women’s cross country and track and field teams, while also teaching classes. Assistant coaches and support staff positions also didn’t exist.
“It was good for me,” Lewis said. “Women’s sports were pretty young and they didn’t have the funding. It kind of inspired me to say, ‘I think we need to fight for a little more funding for the women.’ … It was helpful to me, then when I became women’s athletic director.”
The chancellor at the time, Daniel Ferritor, in need of someone new for the women’s AD position, called Lewis into his office and probed her interest. It was a career goal for the Lewis and they agreed on an interim trial run. But Lewis was still coaching women’s sports, which made for a bustling calendar.
Lewis eventually couldn’t do both. When Ferritor left it up to Lewis to decide her path, she knew she could make a bigger impact in the administration, having coached its teams for almost a decade.
Lewis added volleyball, women’s golf, softball and gymnastics programs — and not with an easy click of a button. She labored in getting all approved by the Board of Trustees, repeatedly had to ascertain that none of the men’s funding would have to be cut in order to sustain the women’s (a nationwide sentiment at the time), had to fill coaching staffs from scratch, as well as get funding for the new facilities. The Bogles made another financial pledge to help build the softball stadium.
In more behind-the-scenes work, Lewis and Joan Cronan of the University of Tennessee — the two schools had independent men’s and women’s departments at the time — were the few women who sat in on the athletic director meetings that could always chime in with attention to women’s sports in conversations mostly centered around football and men’s basketball. Lewis also helped with the eventual plan of merging the men’s and women’s departments into one at Arkansas.
Lewis said women’s sports have only continued to grow after the decision.
“When I came to Arkansas, we didn’t have very many (women’s) sports, and it was really out of whack with the number of participants in men’s sports versus the opportunities for women,” she said. “When I would talk about softball, they would say, ‘Well, who are you going to recruit? There’s nobody. There’s no softball in the high schools.’ I said, ‘Well, it starts with us, though. If we add softball, the high schools will add softball.’
“Fortunately, over time, that’s what happened, is as we added sports, the high schools did, too.”
Lewis also made long-lasting and successful hires, including Cook, her replacement Lance Harter and women’s golf coach Shauna Taylor. Harter recently retired after coaching at Arkansas for 33 years, winning multiple national and coach of the year titles. The Razorbacks’ golf program has made 15 consecutive trips to the postseason and were ranked as high as the top team in the country this season under Taylor, who was brought on in 2007.
“The other thing I was most proud of is to be able to not just add the programs, but to see them all become nationally competitive,” Lewis said.
Last weekend, the Arkansas softball team snatched its highest-ranked series win in program history, winning 2 of 3 at No. 3 Florida.
Lewis went on to become associate vice chancellor and executive associate athletic director and retired in 2014.
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