Queen of ?The Hill? Focuses on Big Picture

Katie Hill is a Renaissance woman.

The most powerful female on the University of Arkansas campus has been an abstract expressionist painter, a science teacher, a personnel director, a factory worker and a world traveler. But these days, she’s all business.

Hill’s time is now consumed with overseeing all aspects of business and financial operations for the UA athletic department, including its $26 million annual budget. The No. 2 person in charge behind athletic director Frank Broyles, Hill has helped guide the department through more than $30 million of capital activity over the last four years.

The athletic budget has increased 160 percent during her tenure, and she expects it will reach $35 million in the next five years.

This January, Hill is playing a vital role in the department’s “stadium debate” by analyzing numbers and providing advice about long-term economic issues related to moving games from War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock to the expanded Reynolds Stadium in Fayetteville. In her fifth year as assistant athletic director, Hill says the only way to view this issue is with binoculars.

“We’re at a watershed moment here and we have to look long term,” Hill says. “I’m deadly serious about what’s going to be the best thing for the program over the long haul. It appears to be a short-term risk, and a lot of people don’t understand that if we’re going to bring this program to the next level, then you have to think about the overall picture.”

Hill’s ability to tackle challenges by seeing the big picture continues to impress university administrators. Chancellor John White says he admires Hill’s ability to understand and explain complicated financial data as it relates to long-term projects.

“She is very adept at looking beyond the numbers to their impact,” White says. “Few people with her responsibilities are able to differentiate between strategic and tactical issues. She does that quite well.”

Raised in a military family, Hill learned how to make tactical decisions at a young age. But she says it was the challenge of doing something new that led her to the Razorbacks financial office.

An undergraduate of the University of Central Arkansas, Hill finished her MBA in 1985 at the UA with an emphasis in finance. In 1988, she was working as the Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences’ budget officer when Hill says an opportunity came along to help reorganize the Razorback Scholarship Fund — now known as The Razorback Foundation Inc.

She was the non-profit organization’s first treasurer and operations administrator.

“It was a chance to take on some broader responsibilities,” Hill says. “The organization was being moved off campus, and they needed someone to help start it. It was really a ground-up restart. Terry Don Phillips was in charge of fund raising, but the rest of it was my baby.”

Before getting her graduate degree, Hill served as personnel director for Baldwin Piano & Organ Co. in Conway. She says an experience there prepared her for complicated issues like the stadium debate.

“The toughest thing I ever did at Baldwin was when we had to close a factory in Conway,” Hill says. “It moved to east Arkansas, and I had to be the one to lay everyone off in the factory. You just have to realize decisions and the way they affect people are sometimes hard to take.

“The easiest thing to do is to give into the short term. They’re frequently painful, like what’s going on right now with the stadium, but you have to weigh the long-term issues at every turn.”

Eight years ago Hill joined the UA athletic department, and, despite being the highest ranking female, she says gender never plays a roll in her work. She’s confident both in herself and her immediate staff of five workers.

“I don’t think of myself in a gender when I come to work,” Hill says. “One time we were discussing how some women were treated, and I said to [Associate Athletic Director] Bill Gray, ‘Well, Coach Broyles has never treated me like that.’ Bill said, ‘I don’t think coach knows you’re a woman.’

“In some ways that was a huge compliment, and in other areas it wasn’t as much of one. But the comment just shows that it’s not an issue here.”