JESSIEVILLE, Ark. — In the 1980s, Bob Sivils and Garry Crowder worked at Jessieville High School about 30 minutes north of Hot Springs serving as Band Director and Girls Basketball Coach respectively.
But the two men had another job -- on Friday nights, they would call newspapers such as the Arkansas Democrat and Arkansas Gazette and report the scores of that nights' Jessieville High School football game.
“Jessieville was a football program that was just a couple of years into its existence,” Crowder said. “At that time, there was a newspaper war. There were two papers, and there's a lot of coverage, and so we were responsible for making those calls.”
But according to Sivils, the majority of newspaper writers with whom they corresponded didn’t know too much.
“They'd say, ‘Okay, you're Jacksonville,” Sivils said. “We'd say, ‘No, we're Jessieville.’ ‘Okay, and you're the Eagles.’ ‘No, we played the Eagles. We're the Lions.”
“I made the comment, ‘I bet you could just call a score in and they'd probably just put it in the paper. They probably don't even have any idea where we're from, who we are, or anything,” Crowder said.
With that, an idea started to form and the two started to plan what their fake team would look like.
Location, name, mascot, even star players -- Crowder and Sivils thought of it all.
“I lived in Hot Springs Village at that time,” Crowder said. “Of course, being the head girls basketball coach at Jessieville, just right down the road, we thought, 'There's no school in the village. So maybe we could just have a school right there and we could just call our school Village Academy.'”
They decided the prank would work as long as the school only played out-of-state teams and didn’t win too much.
It was Sivils who made the first phone call.
Somewhat ironically, he told that first lie from the office of a church -- Jessieville Baptist.
Sivils said he went there because he wanted privacy.
“I went over there and made our phone call for Jessieville,” Sivils said. “Then I hung up. This was before caller ID. And so then as soon as I hung up, I dialed again, and I said, ‘We have the Village Academy football score.”
According to Crowder, the first person to take their call was a little smarter than many they’d dealt with, and started asking questions.
“He says, ‘Well, what's your mascot?” Crowder said. “Well, Bob had never even thought about that. Bob and I didn't even discuss that. So Bob just comes up with- ‘Uh, beavers.'”
And the next day, when the Arkansas Gazette appeared on front porch steps across the state, there it was.
“Saturday morning gets here, we rush out to get our newspapers and there it is,” Crowder said. “Village Academy has played their first game.”
A somewhat modest start -- a 6-6 tie against Rayville, Louisiana.
There was one bright spot though; 94 yards and a touchdown for a player named Jess Norman.
“Our principal at Jessieville during those days was a guy named Norman Jesperson,” Crowder said. “So Bob and I just put our heads together and thought, ‘Hey, you know, why don't we just turn his name around and we'll invent this guy named Jess Norman.”
And Norman put up huge numbers in nearly every game.
Schools like Yale and Dartmouth took notice, sending recruiting letters that went to Crowder’s address.
As the prank grew and the school was featured in papers like the Democrat and the Gazette every week, more and more people wanted in on the action.
“We would get calls from coaches,” Crowder said, “Or Bob would get calls from band directors, and they'd say, ‘Hey, I want to see my name in the paper. Can I score a touchdown for the opponent?'”
And sometimes, they would do more than just ask politely.
“We never accepted these offers,” Sivils said, “But we actually had people offer us money to let them score a touchdown or kick a field goal.”
Shirts, bumper stickers, a fight song -- all of these became hallmarks of the growing beaver fan club in Jessieville and beyond.
But all good things must come to an end, and after a glorious four year stretch from 1985-1988, this prank ended too.
It came with an anonymous letter to an Arkansas Democrat reporter named Robert Yates.
“I was very young and very green,” Yates said. “That’s probably why the hoax worked.”
The letter wasn’t long and it read: “Dear Sports Department. You have a group of people across the state reporting fictitious high school football scores. They call their school Village Academy. There is no school by that name.”
The letter may have been anonymous to the young reporter … but not to Crowder and Sivils.
“We had an elementary principal that was a little concerned,” Crowder said.
“He didn't think it was right for us to be calling in fictitious scores,” Sivils said. “And by the way, he misspelled the word fictitious in his letter.”
But as you’d expect, Crowder and Sivils did manage to have a little fun before ending the prank entirely by hosting an end-of-the-season banquet for the team.
Nearly 100 people packed into Rod’s Pizza Cellar in Hot Springs for the occasion.
For Yates’ part, he thought the hoax was funny, although he noted that his editor did not.
It also saved Yates some work.
“It worked out really good for me,” Yates said, “Because at that time I was writing columns, and so I got a good column out of it.”
That column ended with a simple phrase… “You got us.”
They certainly did and nearly forty years later, the legend of the Beavers lives on.
In fact, you can still buy a Village Academy Beavers shirt if you ever feel like representing a fictional football team.
And as recently as September, somebody photoshopped Village Academy onto a fake Mountain Home football schedule and both Crowder and Sivils said they had nothing to do with it.
“It’s just one of those things that just... it's never going to die,” Crowder said.
Sivils agreed.
“It really brings me a little smile every time I see it.”