Remembering a Legendary Denver Basketball Coach: Kathryn Kindle
An unforgettable woman, a thought-provoking new novel, and some Lit Fest classes for your consideration.
On April 28, we lost a legend: longtime Denver Thomas Jefferson High School women’s basketball coach Kathryn Kindle, who died at age 82. She’d been coaching at TJ since 1985, and just retired in February. When I was at TJ, she was my varsity basketball and track coach, and she was absolutely unforgettable: tough, generous, and quick to smile wide enough to reveal a gold tooth with her initial “K” engraved in it. If she thought a girl needed extra physical support, she would present her with a sports bra at the end-of-season banquet in front of everyone. If she thought a girl needed extra emotional support, she would most likely provide it herself.
I expected the passing of this remarkable woman would be covered in the Denver media, but there isn’t much Denver media left. The best information I found about Coach Kindle’s life was in the Thomas Jefferson Journal, the newspaper that I served as the Sports Editor of during high school. Perhaps it’s fitting that high school journalists are the ones who took the time to write about her, as she spent her whole life in service to young people. I’m grateful for the reporting of Kira Kennedy and Halen Alemseged whose articles provided many of the facts below.
Kathryn Kindle was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1940. Despite the barriers that growing up in segregation imposed, she played college basketball at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, honing her skills as a guard, and earning her B.A. in sociology. She later earned a master’s in Education Leadership from the University of Northern Colorado, and took classes from a variety of colleges throughout her life.
In 1960, she met her first husband, with whom she had seven children: two daughters and five sons. According to Kira Kennedy’s 2023 interview, Kindle was pregnant with her first child while she was completing her undergraduate degree, and her doctor ordered her not to climb stairs. “So I made sure all my classes were on the first floor,” she explained. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.” After a brief stint as a social worker in Chicago, Kindle moved back home to Arkansas to earn her teaching certification and begin teaching at Altheimer High School.
Kindle faced several devastating losses as a young woman. Her third son died when he was five years old, due to a tumor in his heart. Then in 1979 her youngest son, Tyrone, fell ill with sickle cell anemia. She scoured the country for a hospital that could offer him treatment, and found one in Denver that guaranteed her son a spot in the program. Tyrone graduated from Montbello High School in Denver and lived until age 25 before succumbing to his illness.
While she made sure Tyrone had the medical care he needed, Kindle taught at Merrill Middle School and coached basketball there, then began coaching track at South High School. Next she moved to Montbello, and finally in 1985, she transferred to TJ, where she spent the rest of her life, coaching basketball, softball, and track, and teaching a variety of history and sociology classes. Coaching basketball helped Kindle stay focused in the face of her grief over the loss of two children, according to Halen Alemseged’s 2012 interview with her. “I had to keep my head up and move on.”
Kindle’s teams won many district titles, including one in 1994 when I was on the team. But perhaps she contributed more just by being a vital presence in the school, an essential mentor and source of support, especially for my Black teammates. So many studies show how the presence of a Black educator in a school makes Black students more likely to achieve, less likely to have disciplinary issues, and more likely to go to college. I remember there were always kids just hanging out in her classroom when I’d stop in after school for a team meeting, and several times I heard of her taking kids into her home when they needed a place to stay.
Kindle loved basketball the most, but one of my favorite memories of her is when she was coaching my track team. During track practice, sometimes when we wanted to loaf, we'd claim we were heading off on a "distance run." We'd trot down the street and once we got far enough away from school that we thought our coach wouldn't notice, we'd start to walk. But then, soon enough, you'd realize this huge, boat-like sedan was slowly following you. The window would roll down, and the unmistakable bullhorn of Kathryn Kindle would emerge and blast you. "Get moving!"
At the time, we would groan, but as I look back on it, I realize how few people would care enough to check up on whether I was fulfilling my promises, and remind me of the task at hand. For the rest of your life, you have to be your own bullhorn.
If you were lucky enough to have someone like Coach Kindle who cared enough to push you, who never allowed you to slack, you stood a good chance of developing the self-discipline you needed to coach yourself through life. As I look at photos of my teammates, I realize how many of us have taken up our own metaphorical bullhorns, using our skills to urge others to dig deep and succeed. I see women who became parents, teachers, coaches, a doctor, a pastor, a radio executive, and leaders in other fields. Kathryn Kindle showed us how it was done. You just might find me running (slow) wind springs in her honor. Thank you, Coach.
The Book Recommendation Portion of The Tumbleweed
I wrote about Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and I’ll be thinking about this novel for a long time. It’s set in the near future, when the most popular American reality TV program features prisoners fighting to the death for the chance to be free. I wrote:
Chain-Gang All-Stars is at once original, its own fresh creation, and clearly part of a lineage of American literature that links the opening "Battle Royal" chapter in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to Native Son by Richard Wright, Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Soledad Brother by George Jackson. These classic books delve into the inhumanity of mass incarceration, the conversion of violence into entertainment and how the burden of these practices are disproportionately borne by Black Americans. Adjei-Brenyah's distinguished novel updates this tradition to encompass our dizzying, barbaric, performative, and capitalistic digital age.
This novel is already a Read With Jenna Book Club pick, and I expect it to end up on many best of 2023 lists, so check it out and you can say you were ahead of the rush!
The Happenings & Links Portion of The Tumbleweed
Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop’s Lit Fest registration is open now! It’s the first year the festivities will be held in their brand new building at 3844 York Street in Denver. (If you live outside of Colorado, Lighthouse offers many online classes too.) I’m teaching five classes, and I’d be delighted to see some Tumbleweed readers there. Below, I’ve marked my classes with their remaining availability, as of when this Tumbleweed rolled into your inbox.
[5+ SPOTS LEFT] Getting Published: Stories, Essays, Articles, and Books, Saturday, June 10, 1:30pm - 3:30pm
[5 SPOTS LEFT] When News Breaks in Your Backyard: How to Craft and Pitch a Timely Essay, Wednesday, June 14, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
[2 SPOTS LEFT] Seeing the Big Picture: Techniques for Revising Books, Thursday, June 15, 1:30pm - 3:30pm
[SOLD OUT] Building Your Own Emotional Thesaurus, Saturday, June 10, 9:00am - 11:00am
[SOLD OUT] And Then I Woke Up: Writing Endings for Short Fiction and Nonfiction, Sunday, June 11, 1:30pm - 3:30pm
As always, The Tumbleweed welcomes your questions and comments about writing, reading, taco eating, rabbit wrangling, Deion Sanders, basketball, and baby seals.
Thank you for such a awesome and beautiful article on Coach K . I have known Coach K since I was in middle school , and it has been a BLESSING to have spent these last 11 years with her. She was the backbone of my program and I will forever be grateful ❤️🩹.
Thank you for such a thoughtful, moving tribute to an astonishing woman who deserves to be remembered. My mother wrote for a local newspaper that still exists but mostly consists now of AP stories smattered with some articles slamming state government officials. I remember how my mom wrote articles about local people who opened a local Italian store or created a ballet school having emigrated from Russia and how that's gone now in favor of Tie Tok and Kardashian worship. Thank you so much for reminding us all that women like Ms. Kindle are what we should be reading about, not just in her passing, but in what she did with her life. Thank you for sharing her story with us all.