Longtime former Fort Smith (Arkansas) athletic director Jim Rowland passes away

Rowland hired championship-winning coaches at both Fort Smith Northside, Southside

Former Fort Smith Public Schools Athletics Director Jim Rowland, who passed away on July 24, 2024, served in that capacity from 1991-2016. /

Jim Rowland, a former athletics director in Fort Smith (Ark.) who hired several state championship-winning coaches at both city's main high schools, passed away Wednesday.

He was 83.

Rowland was the athletics director for Fort Smith Public Schools - serving both Fort Smith Northside and Southside high schools - from 1991 until he stepped down from that role following the 2015-16 school year. Prior to that, he had served as Southside's head football coach, spanning the 1970s to the early 1980s before transitioning into administration, and also coached football and track at Northside in the late 1960s.

During his lengthy run as AD in Fort Smith, Rowland had a knack for hiring successful coaches for both schools.

Among the coaches that Rowland hired included Rickey Smith, Northside's current girls basketball coach who has won eight state titles since his hiring in the mid-1990s, with the latest coming in 2021; Eric Burnett, who won two state titles as Northside's boys basketball coach and also served as Southside's head coach; Jeff Williams, who won the 2006 Class 7A state title as Southside's football coach; and Mauricio Maciel, who coached soccer at both Southside and Northside, and won multiple championships for the Grizzly boys soccer program. Rowland was also AD during the successful run of former Southside football coach Barry Lunney Sr., who won multiple state titles before leaving the school in the early 2000s to take over at nearby Bentonville.

"He's handled everything first class," Smith once said of Rowland in a 2016 newspaper interview.

"We're all coaches who he has told us 'no' before, and we probably didn't like (it) because we had our feelings hurt. (But) that's part of his job to make tough decisions, and we still love him."

Rowland was originally from Little Rock, and played football at legendary program Little Rock Central. He was at Central when the school famously integrated in the late 1950s, and attended college in nearby Conway at the University of Central Arkansas.

He worked for Fort Smith's school district for 53 years before he resigned, effective at the end of the 2015-16 school year. A main reason for that resignation was the fallout from a change in mascots at Southside, when the school went from being called the Rebels to the now-current moniker of Mavericks.

But Rowland still maintained a constant presence at Fort Smith Public Schools athletic events following his resignation. The football stadium at Southside also bears his name, and the city of Fort Smith holds an annual half-marathon in the fall that is named in his honor.

"The world lost a great man (Wednesday night)," posted Williams on his X page.

Burnett, who himself is now in administation as an assistant athletic director for the Springdale School District in Northwest Arkansas, remarked in a 2016 newspaper interview that he owed his coaching career to Rowland.

"He gave me the head coaching job at Southside the age of 27," said Burnett. "At that time, I was the youngest coach at the highest level in the state of Arkansas. I'll be honest, I didn't believe in myself, but he believed in me.

"Any time I had questions about stuff, he was there to help me through my transition of becoming a head coach."

- Buck Ringgold | buck@scorebooklive.com | @SBLiveAR