Hall of Fame
Bill Rowe retired from Missouri State on June 30, 2009, at which time his 47 years on staff made him MSU’s senior employee in point of service. The recipient of an MSU Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008, he spent 52 years at MSU from the time he entered as a freshman in 1957 until his retirement from a school founded in 1905.
His Lifetime Achievement Award was added to an MSU Outstanding Alumnus Award he received in 1988. He was the 2004 recipient of the MVC’s John Sanders Spirit of the Valley Award and is a member of five Halls of Fame, including the American Association of Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame, MSU Athletics Hall of Fame, Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, Springfield Area Sports Hall of Fame and National Association of College Directors of Athletics Hall of Fame.
In May 2016, Rowe was honored as the 34th person to become a Missouri Sports Legend by Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, while he was named to the Missouri State University Wall of Fame in 2015.
Rowe the first person to have his MSU baseball number retired (#22) and the indoor training facility at Springfield’s Hammons Field was named Bill Rowe Training Center.
He capped a career in which he served as head baseball coach and athletics business manager for 19 years before taking over as director of athletics in 1982 when MSU moved to NCAA Division I status.
As a coach, he took seven Bears’ teams to the NCAA Division II baseball tourney, including four which reached the Division II World Series, and he produced the baseball program’s first two major leaguers.
Notably, his AD tenure matched the longest in school history and his work was vital in making Missouri State a charter member of the Association of Mid-Continent Universities when that league was founded in 1982, and he spearheaded the effort for MSU’s invitation to join the MVC in 1990.
Rowe had four-year tenures on NCAA championship committees for baseball and I-AA football, and he was chairman of the NCAA Baseball Rules Committee;
MSU teams won nearly 100 conference regular season or tournament championships in his years as AD, with some 50 post-season team appearances and more than 80 qualifications by individuals to NCAA competition.
Rowe’s facility work included involvement and departmental leadership in the building of Hammons Student Center (basketball-volleyball-swimming, 1976), Forsythe Athletics Center (locker room complex, 1980), two-phase renovation of FAC (1998-00), four-phase renovation of Plaster Sports Complex (football-track, 1987-91), Hammons Field (baseball, 2004) and his final legacy with his work on the 11,000-seat JQH Arena (basketball, 2008); and he oversaw a departmental budget which grew to some $11 million annually, and his fund-raising and revenue-generating leadership efforts produced the biggest part of that money from non-university dollars.