Baylor

Since moving from her birth home in Colon, Panama to Little Rock, Ark., when she was 2 years old, Deedee Brown-Campbell has known only two other homes - Fayetteville, Ark., and Waco, Texas.

In the world of college athletics, where the norm is moving around every few years, Deedee is in her eighth year at Baylor after an eight-year run at her alma mater, the University of Arkansas.

"Family is 100 percent the most important thing to me, and being the best wife, mother, and guiding our family with God first," said the 39-year-old Brown-Campbell, Baylor's Assistant AD for Academic Services. "I think it's just making the decision to prioritize. For me, that balance leaned more on what was best for my family."

Although she grew up in Little Rock, Deedee was involved in sports and other extracurricular activities "that took me to different parts of town, different parts of Arkansas and ultimately different parts of the country."

Track turned out to be her meal ticket, with a scholarship to Arkansas, but she also played volleyball, basketball, softball, "literally every sport you could think of," at Little Rock Hall High School, "smooth up until the decision on what you want to focus on for the next level."

"I feel like basketball should have been my sport . . . if I would have poured more time and energy into it, and maybe if my dad was a couple inches taller, I probably would have ended up on the basketball court," she said.

Deedee followed in her dad's path to the University of Arkansas despite the struggles that Darrell Brown had to endure as the first African-American football player in school history when he walked on in 1965.

Subjected to ridicule, mental and even physical punishment, Brown persevered to play the game he loved before suffering an injury in the spring of '66.

Brought back 45 years later to be recognized as a Razorback Trailblazer, the prominent Little Rock attorney said, "I didn't understand or grasp the significance of what was going on. That was just my dream. I wanted to be a Razorback and I wanted to play football."

"He didn't want to taint our view of the University of Arkansas just based on his initial experience," Deedee said of her father, who passed away in 2015. "We were aware of his struggles, and he would speak to us - I would say in code - about what happened there and how far it's come. Just what they experienced and why they were glad to be pioneers for us."

At Arkansas, she was a two-time All-American outdoors in the heptathlon (2000, 2002) and won three individual conference championships. She was inducted into the university's Sports Hall of Honor and also the state of Arkansas Track and Field Hall of Fame.

"I don't know that I deserve to be in either one of those, but I'll take it," Deedee said. "I've had different records, but they've all been shattered. That's in the past, they're made to be broken."

While she likes to "argue and talk a lot," Deedee said she was not interested in following her dad to law school.

"I'm grateful for him, for his sacrifices, but the life of a lawyer was not the life for me," she said. Her older brother, Darrell Brown Jr., is a practicing attorney in Little Rock, while the younger brother, Derek, is finishing his doctorate at Arkansas while working in student support services at the University of Central Florida.

Graduating in 2002 with a degree in education, Deedee "was supposed to be an elementary ed teacher. I went through the student teaching, the whole nine, and then I realized I could not do that every day. I figured a happy balance would be teaching Sunday School."

Meeting with Bev Lewis, who was Arkansas' Director of Women's Athletics at that time, Deedee realized that she didn't quite want to be an athletic director, "but I still wanted to serve in some capacity in athletic administration, making an impact on student-athletes."

"She helped me define what I didn't want to do and gave me the opportunity to explore what I did want to do by offering me a graduate assistantship," Brown-Campbell said. "At first, I was just working with women's sports and administration on that side. And then after the men's and women's departments combined, I got an opportunity to work with the men's sports as well. And oddly enough, I loved working with the male student-athletes. It was just a nice contrast."

After earning a master's degree in sport management in 2004, Deedee was hired full-time and worked at Arkansas until coming to Baylor in the summer of 2010 as Director of Student-Athlete Services.

As much as anything, the move gave her a chance to work with football for the first time.

"The trend in athletics is to move around. And I'm not going to say I bought into that immediately, because I was at the University of Arkansas for a while," she said. "But being away, I do recognize the importance of spreading your wings and being exposed to different things and the value that brings to not just your everyday but your overall career path."

Working with football was a challenge just in the sheer numbers, Deedee said. "You can't get as personal as you can with basketball, but you need to try to. That's the challenge. But, you find a happy balance, you get in a groove and that's how it works."

She is now working with men's basketball again and also works with the men's tennis program in her advisory and counseling roles.

"Deedee's gift is the unconditional care and compassion she has for student-athletes," said Deputy Athletics Director Dawn Rogers, the sport administrator for men's basketball. "It is a joy to work with her and witness firsthand her diligence and empathy. We are so fortunate to have her as part of our team at Baylor."

Marcus Sedberry, Senior Associate AD for Student-Athlete Success, says Deedee "has been a cornerstone and the backbone of our department."

"She is very knowledgeable about our field and displays an unbelievable amount of passion for our student-athletes and Baylor."

For Deedee, the best part of her job is "trying to figure out what goals can this one student accomplish and how can they be celebrated."

"Everybody is so different and their goals are so different," she said. "Being able to get to know them, where they came from and what they want their future to look like. My job is to show them how to reach those goals. That's 100 percent why I love doing what I do."

Deedee met her husband, Marcus Campbell, when they were both student-athletes at Arkansas in the late 1990s, and they were married in 2005.

"Oddly, we were from the same hometown. We just didn't know each other," Deedee said. "Our parents put the dots together, eventually. They knew each other, but we did not. He was going to North Little Rock High School and I was going to Hall. And he's four years older than me, so we weren't even in school together."

The Campbells have a 10-year-old son, Chase, and a daughter, Camdyn, who will turn 3 in July.

"(Chase) is a big sports fan, so I get those cool mom points for all the things he gets to do and places he goes," Deedee said. "Sometimes, he doesn't even realize how cool it is."

Deedee says Camdyn "keeps me on my toes. My mom says she acts like me, but I'm pretty sure I was the perfect child (wink-wink)."

Marcus is a former strength and conditioning coach and juvenile probation officer who now serves as a behavior specialist at Carver Middle School in the Waco ISD.

"It's similar to a vice principal role, where he manages the behavior issues . . . and tries to fix their paths, because a lot of them are headed the wrong way," Deedee said. "We have similar jobs, just the ages and situations are a little different. We both have an end goal of helping others reach success."

Other than trying to keep up with her active children, Deedee said she loves to cook and watch documentaries - "I'm really intrigued by things that I haven't been exposed to, or that you just hear about: cults, mysteries, you name it!" - and recently got into "extreme couponing," graduating from a Ziploc baggie to a binder for all her coupons.

Deedee loves a challenge and a good deal.