A REPORTERgets her start

Without these two men, I never would have spent 45 years as a sportswriter for newspapers in Lexington, Ky. and Dayton, Columbus and Akron, Ohio.

And while it was my late dad Les who kindled my love of sports and pushed me forward with an ultimatum of “You either understand what a first down is or we’re not coming next week” at a Seneca High School football game when I was a seventh-grader, it was Kidd who gave me the courage and reassurance that I was choosing the right path.

I had written only one sports story in my life when Eastern Progress editor T. G. Moore signed off on a one-semester trial for me as sports editor. Part of the cachet was that I would be the first woman to hold that position at a Kentucky university. It was a piece on intramural racquetball, hardly a qualifier for covering an Ohio Valley Conference football power like EKU.

I had been on the Progress staff for a year, writing about increasing enrollment and the like. I had no idea I was about to step into the domain of a coaching legend.

But Kidd never came off that way to me. To this day, I’ve seen no hint of ego. In recent years, he has greeted me as warmly as he did during our once-a-week sessions in his office in between games.

At the team’s banquet after an 8-2-1 season in 1975, he uttered the second most important sentence of my career, surpassed only by my dad’s first-down demand. Kidd stood up in front of the Colonels and their families and said I had proved to him that a woman could know more about football than he’d ever expected.

I was seated off to the side, not in his line of sight, which made it all the more surprising.

I needed that validation.

When I came to Eastern, I thought I was going to be a physical therapist, but the difficulty of getting into out-of-state postgraduate programs scared me off. I took an aptitude test at the counseling center designed to match my strengths with potential careers. Journalism was one. Since I’d written a “My Career in Journalism” report in fifth grade (complete with letters on the cover cut from the newspaper) and had been on the yearbook staff in high school, I dove in.

But without Kidd’s acceptance and honest cooperation, my plan could have been rerouted again.