FAYETTEVILLE -- Ruth Cohoon may have dreamed of a weekend like this but couldn't have imagined it.
For even as University of Arkansas sports fans exude over their nationally No. 1 SEC champion Razorbacks baseball men advancing to today's semifinal of the SEC Tournament in Hoover, Ala., they well in advance sold out Bogle Park on campus for Coach Courtney Deifel's nationally sixth-seeded/SEC co-champion Razorbacks women's softball team at the nationally televised best 2 of 3 Super Regional.
The Arkansas vs. Arizona Super Regional started Friday night and continues today and Sunday if necessary.
Throughout the athletic year while the Razorbacks' men revived football with three SEC victories and basketball team achieved a national Elite Eight and the cross country and indoor and outdoor track teams won the SEC triple crown, the Razorbacks women flourished, too.
Arkansas soccer won the SEC.
Coach Mike Neighbors' basketball women upset recent national champions Baylor and UConn.
Six-time national champion Lance Harter's cross country-indoor-outdoor juggernaut continues with a SEC triple crown and Indoor national championship.
Arkansas women's golf and gymnastics teams annually excel.
"It's just kind of unimaginable that it would have blossomed into the successful program that it has," Cohoon said.
Cohoon would know. As the UA's first women's department athletic director in 1972, she started the program initially begrudgingly accepted by some as a Title IX necessary burden on men's athletics.
"In those days men's athletics didn't want to have anything to do with women," Cohoon recalled. "It's amazing what's happened to women's sports in the last 34 years. The kids today don't know all the struggles that took place and what we had to fight for to exist."
As this weekend of Razorbacks fans mutually excited about baseball and softball exemplifies, it's not only room for all but beneficial for all when the men's and women's programs mutually excel.
It's proven well worth the cost which would first gradually then eventually dramatically exceed what Cohoon began with fielding teams first called "extramural" before advancing into intercollegiate Southwest Conference teams.
"The budget, I'm sure it's big figures now but we struggled to get $5,000 for scholarship use," Cohoon said. "They did wonders with what they had to operate with."
Success, like John Sutherland's basketball Lady'Backs winning the WNIT, "a really big deal," and in the SWC beating Texas' invincible Lady Longhorns Cohoon said, boosted the budget and fan base.
Bev Lewis, a pretty fair track coach for Cohoon and upon Cohoon's 1989 athletic director retirement succeeding her through 2007 as AD, made key hires with Harter and Final Four basketball coach Gary Blair.
It's taken four basketball coaches since Blair but with Neighbors, "we've got the right person in the job," Cohoon asserted.
Cohoon marvels at the facilities and coaching esprit de corps throughout UA men's and women's athletics.
"It's nice to see people that come here and want to build something and not use this as a steppingstone to go somewhere else," Cohoon said. "It's great to see the success."