Terri Conder-Johnson
Athletic and business-minded, Terri Conder-Johnson runs the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame with savvy and a love of the game.
Before she was executive director of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Before she spent nearly three successful decades in the business world. Before she was a three-time All-American basketball player at the University of Central Arkansas, this is where we find Terri Conder-Johnson.
She was a girl, then just Terri Conder, shooting hoops in her front yard in tiny Romance, a White County dot on the map that she jokes is “a suburb of Rose Bud.” Basketball was her favorite sport, and her father, Delbert, had nailed a piece of plyboard and a goal to a cedar tree pole so she could practice.
When she wasn’t busy with chores around the cattle farm where she grew up in the late 1960s and ’70s, she was aiming basketballs at that well-worn piece of plyboard. She shot so much that pretty soon the grass was gone from around the goal, rubbed out into just dirt. Growing up rural, neighbors — and thereby close friends — were a half mile or farther away. She shot by herself sometimes, playing imaginary games that were real enough to her.
There she is. The star basketball player. Her team down by 1 point in some fictional championship game. Seconds remain on the clock. Her team, her coaches, her school all know she is the one to either win or, gulp, lose this game.
The ball is in-bounded to her. She shucks to the right, then gives a quick juke and darts up the court. She dribbles confidently, in control of it all, even as two players converge upon her. She stutter-steps, reverses, moves beyond the opposing players and is open for a shot.
There the ball goes. Arcing silently through the air. The gym is hushed. All is in slow-motion. The ball enters the basket with a satisfying swish. The buzzer sounds. The game is over. Her team has won. The crowd goes wild.
Then, she did it all again, shooting hoops into the Arkansas gloaming.
Now, at the 58-year-old hall of fame, nestled comfortably on the lower level of Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, Conder-Johnson works among real memories, real championships and real heroes, including herself.
The museum’s purpose is simply to honor and preserve Arkansas’ sports history and the people involved in it, says Conder-Johnson, who turns 54 today.
“If you don’t maintain and have some place to keep your sports history, how are people going to know about it?” she says. “People just lose track. People just forget things. That’s what I love about this organization.
“There are some wonderful inductees in here who not only have contributed to this state from an athletics perspective but also by just being wonderful people and good citizens.”
To walk into the hall is to walk among these people. The walls leading inside are lined with Vic Harville cartoons of Arkansas sports greats such as Michael Cage, a basketball rebounder who earned the nickname “Windexman,” and Cliff Lee, who has won 143 games as an MLB pitcher.
Inside, the museum is a monument to Arkansas sports past and present with memorabilia and exhibits portraying sports memories from Bill Valentine’s umpire case to Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame member Hazel Walker and her high-scoring career with the All-American Red Heads Team, one of the nation’s first women’s professional basketball teams.
There are 389 members, including players from championship teams such as the 1964 Razorbacks football team.
A new class will be introduced Friday during the hall’s annual induction banquet at the Statehouse Convention Center in downtown Little Rock. The Night of the Stars VIP reception will be Thursday night at the hall of fame. Both events are open to the public.
Nearly 400 inductees means a lot of faces and games and moving bits and pieces, with the museum staff — Conder-Johnson is joined by assistant executive director Tom Mitchell — constantly arranging exhibits to fit it all in.
“The museum is a living, breathing thing; it needs to be continually updated and refreshed,” Conder-Johnson says.
An introductory video, narrated by former Razorback football player and longtime TV sportscaster Pat Summerall (himself a 1971 inductee) and screened in the museum’s 88-seat, high-definition theater, underscores an important message: Arkansas is a rural state; its sports heroes are largely from these rural towns.
“It’s amazing these small towns that produce these great athletes,” Conder-Johnson says.
She speaks from experience.
MORE THAN SPORTS
At Rose Bud High School, Conder-Johnson was a fivesport athlete, moving from one to the other as the seasons progressed, from fastpitch softball and basketball in the fall to volleyball, track and field and slow-pitch softball later in the year.
Basketball was her first love, though, having grown up watching local basketball games with her father and mother, Pat. She started playing organized basketball in the fourth grade. “That’s just what you did in a small town,” she says. “If you had athletic ability, you were going to play sports.”
In seventh grade, Conder-Johnson was 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 88 pounds. Then, a growth spurt. By ninth grade, she was 5-foot-8 and then 5-foot-10 when she graduated.
Her height had caught up to her athletic ability. She made the most of it, scoring points in bunches and helping her basketball teams win games. Conder-Johnson says the teams for which she played in junior high and high school lost “maybe eight to 10 games” in those six years.
College scouts took notice, including those from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, but she chose the University of Central Arkansas when her mother, upon learning her daughter’s initial decision was to play at UA, exclaimed, “Now, we’ll never get to see you play.” She was a three-time National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics All-American at UCA from 1983 to 1985 and was known for her scoring in an age before the 3-point line.
All those years of playing sports taught her “discipline and teamwork,” she says.
“That’s a cliche, but it’s really the truth. It teaches you how to get along with people; it teaches you how to work with people; it also teaches you how to take orders from people, which is important in life. You can’t always be the boss. Everybody says, ‘Teamwork,’ and that’s what it is. If you take it with the right attitude, it teaches you very valuable life lessons. It’s not all about you. It’s about everybody.”
But as sports have defined Conder-Johnson’s life — she became a championship long-distance runner later in life, finishing three Boston Marathons and winning Arkansas Female Runner of the Year in 2000 — she has not been defined by sports.
First of all, she’s a successful businesswoman.
She graduated in August 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and entered the workforce at accounting firm Peat Marwick. She later earned a master’s in operations management through the UA in December 1995. Later, she worked accounting jobs at Kimberly-Clark and Alltel and worked at American Management Corp. in Conway as the general ledger accounting manager.
“She is a very dedicated employee who always wants to make sure the job gets done right — no matter how big or how small,” says David Grimes, the chief financial officer of American Management Corp. and a Conway alderman. “She’s perfect for the new job with the hall of fame with her mix of accounting and business background and the background in sports.”
She also served as executive director of UCA’s Purple Circle, the official support organization for UCA athletics, during the time the school was moving from Division II to Division I athletics.
“Terri was a key cog in us being able to do that,” says Vance Strange, who served as UCA’s athletic director from 2003 to 2006. “She was so well-organized and did such a great job.”
And, finally, she’s a wife and mother.
She married Randy Johnson, an all-Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference baseball player for UCA, in February 1986. Randy graduated from UCA with an engineering technology degree. The couple lived in Greenbrier until about two years ago when they moved to Conway. They have two children.
Son Ryan, 28, is a video game designer who lives in Oregon and works for Sony Interactive Entertainment, having recently worked on Days Gone, a forthcoming open-world action-adventure video game set two years after a devastating global pandemic. The other son, Garrett, 22, is a junior at UCA majoring in criminology and minoring in business.
During her down time, Conder-Johnson bikes, runs (not competitively anymore), lifts weights and hikes to keep that athletic edge. She loves going to Greers Ferry Lake, enjoys anything outdoors and is a voracious reader, having finished The Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill by Dominique Enright recently. But Conder-Johnson’s life always circles back to sports.
TAKING OVER
The Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame hit a bad spot a few years back.
From 2007 to 2012, Jennifer Smith, a former assistant executive director of the hall, used the museum’s credit cards to make $118,296.98 in unauthorized personal purchases, including charges to an athletic club, restaurants, women’s and children’s clothing stores and for out-of-town trips.
Smith’s scheme was discovered in September 2012 following an audit that was triggered when the hall’s bank statement showed a payment to the Little Rock Athletic Club for personal dues in Smith’s name. She was fired in December and a year later pleaded guilty in federal court to a single count of access device fraud.
It took a while for the hall of fame to get back on good financial standing, but Conder-Johnson praises the staff that took over during those troubled years for keeping the hall running.
Conder-Johnson’s own personal connection to the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame started in 2005, when she was inducted, with her induction biography noting that “as a senior, she set an NAIA freethrow record, hitting 20 of 23 in a game against Arkansas Tech [University].”
She joined the board of directors in 2006, and when the
executive director’s job came open, she thought to herself, “You know what? I want that job.”
Conder-Johnson says she was drawn to the job because of the “sports aspect of it” but also because the hall of fame is a nonprofit. Each year the hall offers four Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame scholarships ($1,000 each to two girls and two boys attending an in-state institution) and needs-based National Football Foundation scholarships of $500 each to players in each classification of Arkansas high school football.
In November 2015, Conder-Johnson was selected from among 29 applicants.
“I was absolutely tickled that the board entrusted her with the job as executive director,” says Strange, who was the hall of fame’s board president from 2001 to 2003 and served on the hall of fame’s board for more than 20 years.
Conder-Johnson and Mitchell, who started working at the museum in August after 52 years as a pastor, spend their hours updating the museum, archiving material, organizing nominees and managing fundraisers for the museum, such as the annual Pat Summerall Memorial Celebrity Golf Classic. They
book corporate events in the hall space and offer tours by appointment.
Having worked with Conder-Johnson for about seven months, Mitchell says she’s “superior in her talents.”
“She’s very, very well-organized,” he says. “She’s diligent. She has a background in finance. She’s a great administrator. She’s done a great job in leading the hall of fame.”
In the future, Conder-Johnson wants to increase the hall’s membership, the voting arm of the hall with about 800 members, and continually update the hall, creating a dynamic spot for honoring Arkansas sports legends and lore.
One thing is certain: Conder-Johnson knows the hall is for all Arkansans. It’s a shrine to the big names, the forgotten souls, and, mostly, evidence that athletic ability is not just nurtured in cities and bigger towns.
The little girl shooting hoops on a rickety goal in her front yard is proof of that.
“One thing that always strikes me is that Arkansas is a very rural state, with lots of small towns,” she says. “It’s amazing that these athletes can go out and do what they do when we are mostly small towns … but it happens.”
“The museum is a living, breathing thing; it needs to be continually updated and refreshed.”