FAYETTEVILLE — Julie Cromer Peoples might not have been a household name in Arkansas prior to her appointment as the Razorbacks' interim athletics director Wednesday, but the 46-year-old is well-known throughout college sports circles.
Cromer Peoples has spent the past three years at Arkansas and had assumed a large list of responsibilities in a short time. She managed the department's staff of senior-level employees and the sport administrators assigned to all 19 programs.
She was the department's designated Senior Women's Administrator, replacing the longtime women's AD Bev Lewis, and other than now-ousted AD Jeff Long, she was the only athletics staffer with a chancellor title.
Her ties to athletics go back more than 20 years. Those who have worked with her say her strong suit is in compliance to NCAA rules. Indiana athletics director Fred Glass called her "widely acknowledged to be one of the foremost experts on compliance issues in the country," and she was won multiple national awards from peers and organizations that recognize leaders in college athletics.
Among them: the 2012 Frank Kara Leadership Award from the National Association for Athletics Compliance and the 2015 Nell Jackson Administrator of the Year by Women Leaders in College Sports.
"To me, it's a matter of time before she is running her own show," said Eric Wood, a deputy athletics director at Central Florida who worked with Cromer Peoples for two years at Arkansas and prior to that for a time at the NCAA office. "She has the credibility in our field to wait for the right moment and the right job. Her reputation nationally is unquestioned.
"She exemplifies intelligence and professionalism. You can't be in a seminar or in a meeting with her and not walk away impressed with how intelligent she is and how forward-thinking she is."
Cromer Peoples, who was on the dance team at Missouri State where her father was a baseball player, spent most of her administrative career in the Midwest. She cut her teeth in administration at the Horizon League (then the Midwestern Collegiate Conference) in Indianapolis and was an assistant AD at Wright State in Ohio.
She returned to Indianapolis in 1999 to work for the NCAA office, where she spent 11 years working on matters pertaining largely to compliance.
In 2010, she was the unanimous choice of a search committee for a senior-level position at Indiana, where she graduated with a master's degree in policy analysis. During a 2011 speech in Bloomington, Ind., Cromer Peoples said her duties included learning the more than 500 pages worth of NCAA rules, including more than 100 new rules that were implemented each year; monitoring phone records, coaches' logs and practice schedules to make sure rules were being followed; and performing routine certification checks to ensure athletes were eligible.
With the Hoosiers, she was one of the nation's only female administrators for football and supervised the program's staff, as well as coordinated future schedules. In 2011, she assisted in the search to replace Indiana's football coach, which led to the Hoosiers hiring Kevin Wilson, a Broyles Award-winning assistant coach from Oklahoma.
"There is no way you can reduce her role to just being over women's sports," Wood said. "I felt like she was highly involved in making sure we had a productive culture regardless of sport. She was always challenging and pushing the department to grow."
Wood said Cromer Peoples oversaw the Arkansas' sports training, sports medicine and sports psychology staffers. She also has served as the sport administrator for the football and women's basketball programs.
"In my dealings with her she was always very pleasant, very organized," said Jimmy Dykes, who coached the women's basketball team from 2014-17.
"As a sport administrator, scheduling has to go through you...and any time there is a compliance or academic or discipline issue, that's handled between the head coach and sport administrator. They have to be the one who makes the decision to bring the athletics director into the equation if needed. That is your daily contact because the athletics director is so busy with so many things going on."
While Cromer Peoples is not likely to be tasked with any big-picture decisions in her time as interim, she still will be in charge of day-to-day operations for a department that employs around 200 people and has an annual budget in excess of $100 million. Wood said Cromer Peoples has "exactly what is needed for these next few weeks" of transition at Arkansas.
"And that's leadership," Wood said. "She's a natural communicator and one of the smartest people I know, period, not just in this industry.
"I don't see her as the type that is just going to keep the seat warm. I think she is the type of person that will - while she's in the leadership role - continue to move the needle. If I know her well, she's approaching this like she's the athletics director."
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story reported the incorrect sport Cromer Peoples' father played in college.