FAYETTEVILLE -- Frank Broyles peeked at his watch as the runner approached and called time. His newspaper had arrived, delivered by his favorite athlete -- his daughter Betsy, who had just raced up the driveway.

Betsy Broyles Arnold, now 56, was timed by her father for many tasks. She tied with her twin sister, Linda, as the youngest of the Broyles' six children, and the two were in constant competition for his attention upon his return from Razorbacks away games.

Arnold jogged with him every morning, and would pass time waiting for him to take a dinner break by hanging out at football practices. It was worth it for the few minutes the drive home gave her with her dad, before he returned to the stadium for a few more hours of work.

Growing up with the famous coach provided lessons in how to spend time with him while he was focused on sports. She also learned early how to hold her tongue when her father was being talked about unfavorably.

She definitely got his athlete genes, playing basketball, baseball and football with the neighborhood boys and helping form the Fayetteville Woodland Junior High School girls basketball team in the ninth grade.

In high school, Arnold ran track and played basketball, where she averaged 29 points per game her senior year. Her obvious proclivity for sports led to other opportunities, including a tryout for the Junior Olympics volleyball team -- even though she wasn't on a volleyball team -- and a tryout for the Pan American basketball team.

She became a member of the first female recruiting class to receive athletic scholarships as a women's basketball player at the University of Arkansas, though she initially refused it.

"I put a lot of pressure on myself, even though I had offers [from other college teams]," she says. "People probably thought I got my scholarship because of Dad, so I worried about it.

"But all I'd ever known was the Razorbacks. I loved the Razorbacks ... so I could never see myself going away to school [elsewhere]."

Arnold was determined to make the Razorbacks -- and Broyles -- proud.

But her time on the court came to a quicker close than she imagined. Arnold injured her foot at the end of her freshman year and decided to hang up her uniform.

After a brief stint of keeping team statistics, Arnold forfeited her scholarship for another athlete and focused on school.

CROOKED PATH TO DESTINY

"I would have loved to coach, I always wanted to," she says. "[But] my dad ... said, 'You'll be away from home too much.' He wanted me to be a mother."

Having experienced that absence firsthand, she followed his advice and kept sports as a hobby.

She chose to study business with an emphasis on finance and real estate, in hopes of landing a job with Jim Lindsey and Associates, which controlled much of the land and rental housing in the Northwest Arkansas region.

Arnold had worked for Dillard's since she was 16, and after college graduation stuck with it. She moved to Little Rock and eased into the professional world, learning the lesson of hard knocks like everybody else by eating the last pantry items -- cheese and crackers topped with hot sauce -- when money ran short.

She spent a few years as a salesperson at the Allied Telephone Co., which became Alltel -- now Verizon -- where she became more accustomed to professional duties. It wasn't until she got into the hotel business that she really found her place. She coordinated hotel event logistics, catering and room setup, and tore down the sets afterward. Entertaining clients and an evolving list of tasks were part of the job, and she enjoyed it.

As her reputation in the hospitality industry grew she landed more opportunities, like opening a Holiday Inn in Little Rock on Interstate 30.

When David Arnold arrived in Little Rock for a corporate meeting, everyone was talking about the hotel's new catering director. As a frequent business client, he was invited for a drink at the hotel bar. He planned to leave early, but Betsy impressed him.

"The first time that I was introduced to her, I [thought] 'Oh my goodness, this is just the most beautiful woman I've ever seen,'" he says. "Most people don't realize ... how smart she is. She's the best divergent thinker and has this huge heart."

"She has the most complete package a person could have -- beautiful, knowledgeable and very smart, she wants to help and she can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys."

They connected via a mutual love for basketball and he talked her into volunteering for the King Cotton Basketball Tournament in Pine Bluff.

Over the course of a year their affection grew, and in 1986 they were married. David Arnold brought three children from a previous marriage, and the couple had two of their own 17 months apart, Molly and Jake.

NATURALLY NURTURING

The couple moved to Georgia, where Betsy was able to spend years caring for the children and volunteering. She did mission work through her church, mainly visiting disadvantaged families in the area. She enjoyed making sure that those who were down on their luck got the legal assistance, clothing and food they needed.

"I think people are born a certain way," Arnold says. "At heart, I've always been a caregiver. It's just where my interests have always [been], helping people in some way or another. I just think the Lord gives you gifts."

Over the years, her husband's work in the construction and materials manufacturing business took their family to Broken Arrow, Okla., and Conway. It was Tomball, Texas, though, that felt like home.

David had settled in his career, the kids felt at ease and Betsy's best friend was nearby. Once she got over the anti-Razorbacks stigma of raising her children as Texans, she tried her hand as a basketball coach for the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), a nonprofit sports organization. Four years of coaching gave her a taste for the dedication, quick thinking and strategizing that her father had known all along.

"My mom always coached my basketball teams," says Molly Gay, Arnold's daughter. "We were the only team that ran plays, [had] double screens, codes for pass left or pass right -- we were very sophisticated third-graders."

When she wasn't on the sidelines, Arnold was working for Habitat for Humanity, where her specialty was making the family's tastes and preferences come alive through paint colors and decorating details. Her approach showed the new homeowners respect and helped them realize that home ownership was not just about stability but a chance to express their identity.

Many of the conversations revealed how very little each family had, so she took on the task of filling each Habitat House with everything a family would need -- appliances, furniture and even silverware.

Her efforts earned her the title Woman of the Year in 2000 by Habitat for Humanity.

Arnold's plans to continue helping other families were halted when her mother, Barbara, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2000. Since her family was accustomed to moving frequently and she was close to her parents, the choice was obvious. She would move back home to care for her mother.

Arnold and her husband bought a house without touring it and vowed to help Frank make every day Barbara's best. As caregivers, they used a system of trial and error and stuck with things that worked -- doing things that made Barbara feel safe and taking the focus off of negative things like the slow loss of independence.

"There's such a tremendous amount of guilt" even on the caregiver, Arnold says. "I was missing [my children's] sporting events, and then my husband became disabled in 2002 and so I was having to choose between my husband, mother and kids, and my mother always won because she's my mother."

When Barbara died, Arnold and her family wondered at the lack of resources for caregivers, a demographic of roughly 15.5 million people in the United States, and set about creating something others in their situation could rely on. Each member of the family wrote extensively about his or her caregiving experience, and they turned the stories into a how-to book.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences provided initial writing help; Beverly Enterprises, now known as Golden Living, provided focus groups to provide feedback on the book's ease of reading and coherency; the Alzheimer's Association offered expertise; and Wal-Mart provided a grant to print the books and stocked them in company pharmacies.

THE PLAYBOOK

The finished product was Coach Broyles' Playbook for Alzheimer's Caregivers, a binder-style book divided into offenses and defenses, and comes with a pocket guide that offers caregiving advice for the three stages of Alzheimer's.

Beginning in 2006, Arnold helped her father earn support to print 800,000 copies and distribute them for free -- a task several times greater than their initial goal.

Arnold saw the need was greater still and went to work for the Barbara Broyles Foundation, founded in honor of her mother. Caregivers who called wanted more than a book. They shared experiences and were hungry for advice from someone more experienced. Her daughter, Molly, was not surprised.

"She is very easygoing and nurturing," she says. "I think that's why people connect with her so easily. ... Somehow, magically, everyone feels like they can confide in her, which leads her into hours of counseling caregivers on the phone."

Arnold became the listening ear, taking phone calls at all hours of the day and night, and coached new caregivers through the frightening responsibility until they were more at ease in their new role.

Charlotte Schluraff was one of those callers, and says that Arnold's empathy for others can't be contained.

"Betsy has lived what she is teaching, she has learned by trial and error, by living in her mother's world of dementia," Schluraff says.

Many caregivers sought her advice about cooking and navigating life without a spouse, and they remain friends.

In 2008 Arnold knew her family's work wasn't done. She began to accept speaking invitations free of charge. Her father joined her and Molly for the first two years to offer audiences three generations of insight into Alzheimer's care.

One of those events was Schluraff's Alzheimer's conference in the Orlando, Fla., area.

"By being transparent in her feelings with the ups and down of her journey, she was able to capture her audience," Schluraff says. "[The] caregivers knew she understood what they were going through and wanted to hear every tidbit that might make their life just a little easier."

Leigh Green, a board member of the Broyles Foundation, was working for a Memory Care community in Michigan when she invited Betsy to speak.

"She is a very real woman that loves what she does," Green says. "She was born to help others, it comes from her heart."

That natural caregiver expertise landed her spots on the Dr. Phil show, the Mike Huckabee Show, Discovery Channel and a number of radio programs. Most recently, Arnold has helped develop Alzheimer's and dementia curriculum that was incorporated into the Arkansas Department of Human Services Office of Long Term Care, which require nursing assistants to have 8-15 hours of dementia training before becoming certified.

Her proudest accomplishment to date was speaking to the National Alzheimer's Project Act advisory council before it advised Congress on how to spend federal dollars earmarked for Alzheimer's programs.

"The truth of the matter is we've been very blessed because we've had the opportunity to help people," Arnold says. "It's what my mother would have wanted us to do."

High Profile on 07/13/2014