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Friday, June 22, 2018
It's been many years -- few tougher than the most recent one -- since Terry Kitchen sat in his home as a child, listening to older brother Paul — "Bub" as he called him — regale him with stories from the latest Cape Girardeau Central High School baseball practice or game.
As the words came out of Bub's mouth, they seeped inside the younger Kitchen and took root, and on those nights Terry saw his entire life unfold in front of him.
"I'd go watch him and he'd come back at night and he'd talk about it and I'd just listen to it all," Kitchen says.
"There were two things I wanted in life: to play professional baseball, and I wasn't good enough for that, or be head coach at Cape Central. That's all I wanted my whole life."
There are few people who have fully realized their dreams, but Kitchen tells this story from the Cape Girardeau Junior High School athletic facilities, where he is, on this summer day, cleaning things up and mowing the grass.
Half a century after going to bed with visions of Tigers dancing in his head, Kitchen is 40 years into a career as a teacher, coach and athletic director with the Cape Girardeau School District, and he has no plans on slowing down.
He has become the gold standard for what it means to commit a lifetime toward a cause and, as such, Kitchen will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fifth Annual Semoball Awards sponsored by SoutheastHEALTH on July 14 at the Bedell Performing Arts Center on Southeast Missouri State's River Campus.
Family, friends and supporters are encouraged to join "Coach" in celebrating his accomplishments by reserving event tickets at semoball.com/awards; use the promo code KITCHEN to receive $25 off a VIP ticket (the discount can be applied to multiple tickets).
Kitchen's career truly has been one of passion. As a child he wanted to pull on a Central uniform, and later did so in style, playing baseball, football and basketball and winning the Lou Muegge Award, given to the top senior athlete at the high school, before graduating in 1970.
He was hired by the school district in 1978, and he hasn't left since.
Even as a college student, he believed in the power of high school athletics, writing a paper about the correlation between participation in sports and improved grades. He still believes it's a valuable tool for young student-athletes.
"I know so many times when a college coach came in and was scouting [a player], he'd never come in and say, 'How good a player is he?' Never," Kitchen says. "The first thing he'd ask is, 'What kind of grades does he make and what kind of person is he?'"
For the past four decades, Kitchen has put his blood, sweat and tears into his belief in the connection between athletics and education, including coaching baseball and football at the high school and junior high school level for Cape Girardeau schools. As a coach he set the high school's record for winning percentage in baseball (.769), most district titles and most trips to the final four; as an athletic director he earned the MIAA SEMO District Athletic Director of the Year award in 1996; and his career accomplishments and contributions saw him inducted into the Central High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2002.
In August of 2017, the school year began with the announcement that the outdoor athletic facilities at the junior high school would bear his name.
It was an emotional moment for Kitchen at a time when he had plenty of reason to appreciate everything that has come his way.
Last summer, Kitchen began suffering stomach pains and had his gall bladder removed. The surgery revealed something far more earth-shaking: Kitchen had pancreatic cancer.
He spent July 3-27 of 2017 at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, undergoing surgery and, he says, losing a lot of weight. But Kitchen got back on his feet, and when the first day of school rolled around, there he was, reporting with the rest of the faculty.
The pride in Kitchen's voice is unmistakable when he says the only days of school he missed during the year were for scheduled doctor's appointments.
"I went through the toughest health time of my life last year, but I can honestly say, right now, the cancer doctor I'm seeing is saying, 'Coach, everything right now is looking fine,'" Kitchen says. "I plan on keep going. I don't want to let this stop me. I've got faith in my God that he's healing me and I'm gonna make it."
And he still loves Tiger athletics more than anything.
Kitchen mulls through his favorite memories, reveling in the years in which he saw good teams grow and become great. He thinks about some very good junior high football teams he coached, but it's his best baseball teams that stick out the most, with Central making trips to state in 1980, 1986, 1988 and 1991.
"We kind of established a tradition that when you put on the orange, black and white, you better be ready to play," Kitchen says. "It was kind of like you didn't have a choice to say, 'Hey, we hope we're good.' We didn't live off the word 'hope.' We lived off the word 'expectation.'"
He still has a few regrets -- a few decisions that didn't go the Tigers' way -- including in that 1991 season, when he rolled the dice in the semifinal and had his team pitch to one of the opponent's best hitters rather than pitch around him, and watched the ball sail into the outfield for the game-winning sacrifice fly.
He takes a journey through those memories, then comes back with another: his 1986 team that didn't make the list of final four teams, but which he believes was as good as any of them, winning its first 21 games before losing to rival Sikeston in the district tournament.
But mostly his memories are overwhelmingly positive, and often didn't even happen on a field. Like pep rallies.
"My gosh, did we have some times," Kitchen says. "You talk about getting a crowd fired up and getting happy. I have some times there I won't forget.
"I must admit, I love Cape Central. I got what I wanted in life -- to be a member of Cape Girardeau public schools. I'm gonna go and keep going 'til I can't go anymore. I'll keep going until they say, 'Fella, get out, we don't want you anymore.'"
As he busies himself during the summer as caretaker of the facilities that have lent so much joy to his life, he sees no reason to stop now. His is, after all, a lifetime commitment.
"I'm not planning on changing anything," Kitchen says. "I feel good. I'm mowing grass at the school right now. I feel good. I know there have been other teachers and coaches that went longer than me. I'm going to hang in and keep going, and if a time comes I don't think I can meet my expectations, then I'll stop. But right now I plan to keep going and do the best job I can representing Cape public schools."
