PRAIRIE GROVE — Dana Froud still jokes that her husband ran up the score.
About a decade ago, Dana and Kevin Froud were newlyweds coaching at small schools north of Russellville. Dana’s junior-high basketball team defeated Kevin’s one night, and the next night his senior high team rolled over hers by about 30 points.
“Don’t even get me started,” Dana says. “He left his starters on the court when they were up 25.”
“I only had 11 players,” Kevin protests.
“There’s only five starters, so that’s plenty” for subs, she responds.
This isn’t the only ending from that night that remains in dispute.
“I slept on the couch that night,” he says with a laugh.
“But you sleep there all the time, by choice!”
If there was a couple that should rightly end up on competing sides of the court, it was Kevin Froud and Dana Johnson. The two met in the fall of 1997 at the Greenland High School gym, where she was student-coaching.
Kevin, a former Piratebasketball player who had grown up in Greenland, had stopped by the gym to help the coaches.
“I went to Greenland for 18 years and never had a girlfriend, and then I stopped by there one day and met my future wife,” he says.
After they got to know each other, he asked her out, and promptly got shot down.
Before she had a chance to explain why, Kevin was gone. So later that day, Danacracked open the phone book and started calling every Froud in the directory.
It turns out she had been very interested in going out with Kevin; she just had already made plans for that particular night.
“We had a lot in common,” she says. “I used to tell people I don’t want someone smaller than me; I don’t want to carry them over the threshold when we get married.” (Dana is 5 feet 10 inches tall. Kevin is 6 feet 5 inches.)
The two had been dating for a little over a year when Kevin graduated from Arkansas Tech and took a job as an assistant coach at Hector. He was living in Russellville, and wanted the University of Arkansas graduate to move down there with him, but she said it wasn’t going to happen unless they were married.
They went shopping for an engagement ring together, something they’ve done countless times since then for gifts.
“I don’t buy her anything,” Kevin says. “If I do, she comes with me, so she gets what she wants. That’s what she does with any present.
“We get it, then bring it home and I wrap it. She does that with my mom, her mom, everyone.”
“I just want to make it easy on them,” Dana explains.
After Kevin proposed in March, they were married in Dana’s hometown of Mansfield on Aug. 7, 1999, at First Baptist Church.
After their marriage, Kevin was at Hector and Dana was at Dover, tiny schools where both coached multiple sports. They faced each other in girls basketball and once in softball, with Dana’s softball team winning their only matchup.
“My pitcher had 18 strikeouts and we lost,” Kevin says. “They had three hits.”
The Frouds returned to Northwest Arkansas and his family’s 400-acre family farm in Greenland after Kevin’s father became ill and passed away. Today, they have three boys, and Kevin is the girls basketball coach at Prairie Grove High School, which won a state championship last year. Dana works part time at a local preschool, but hasn’t lost any of her passion for basketball.
As a former coach, and with a keen eye for detail, Dana is not shy about offering her suggestions.
“He asks me, from the female perspective, when a girl does something off the court and he doesn’t understand it,” she says. “He might not take [the advice]; he has a female assistant.”
“I like to use my resources, and she’s my resource,” he says.
Northwest Profile, Pages 44 on 10/24/2010