ZACK KLEMME: Kidwell made unique imprint on area sports | Sports

Harold Tackett felt like he’d won the Merle Kidwell Sweepstakes.

As it turned out, he was only the first beneficiary.

When Kidwell was dismissed as Russell High School’s boys basketball coach in 2015, he figured he wasn’t finished with the game.

Kidwell didn’t know then that would be his last head-coaching job, and probably hadn’t guessed in what way that road would manifest itself.

But he stayed in the middle of northeastern Kentucky high school hoops, and for that matter area sports, for eight years after that – until his death Tuesday at 56 from cancer – in whatever manner he could.

It began with an entreaty from Kidwell’s opposite number at one of the Red Devils’ fiercest rivals nearly as soon as he went on the market.

“The next day I called him,” said Tackett, then Greenup County’s coach, “and I said, ‘I’d love for you to be a part of my staff here at Greenup,’ and it shocked me – he didn’t hesitate. He said, ‘OK, I’ll be there.’

“And I just thought, ‘Man, I just hired one of the best coaches in the 16th Region to help me.’”

If such a tag applied, Kidwell wasn’t too prideful to join the Musketeers, scoot a seat down on the bench and dig into the not-especially-glamorous part of the profession.

“He would come in and have five or six typed pages on scouts,” Tackett said Tuesday. “Just so organized and ready to battle.”

That, and the opportunity to continue teaching kids basketball and life lessons, was enough for Kidwell to get what he frequently jokingly called his “fix.”

Three years later, though, Tackett hung it up in Lloyd, and Kidwell was again looking for a connection.

This time, he found it in the media. Kidwell began announcing games for WLGC and later for MyTownTV. During that time, he also began freelancing as a sportswriter for The Daily Independent.

Former coaches becoming color analysts isn’t especially rare. Working as play-by-play guys is less common, though, and becoming a sportswriter even less so.

Not that what we do in sports media is rocket science – it isn’t – but it can be somewhat involved, especially on tight deadlines. Beyond that, though it could generally be said the high school coaches and newspaper reporters of northeastern Kentucky get along reasonably well, it requires a mindset shift going from being the person discerning how best to present your program in the media, to being tasked with gathering as much information as possible, be it good, bad or ugly.

But Kidwell bridged that gap. And, as an English teacher by trade whose father, Gary, has written a sports column for the Lewis County Herald since 1975, he had the chops to make it work.

The first game Kidwell covered for The Daily Independent was Fairview’s 38-28 football victory over Lewis County on Nov. 1, 2019. Over the next three years and change – until he physically couldn’t do it anymore – he became one of the Ashland paper’s most dependable and frequent stringers.

Elden May, formerly a sportswriter in Ashland and Maysville who, like Kidwell, has Lewis County roots, followed his writing closely.

“For him to take it serious and improve that much, not only was he a good coach, but he was disciplined and coachable himself,” May said.

Kidwell’s background provided an interesting dynamic for interview subjects such as Ron Keeton, who had coached against Kidwell from 2005-09 when Kidwell led Russell’s girls and Keeton was an assistant at Raceland.

“No disrespect to anybody else, but the questions are a little more insightful, just because of his years of coaching, along with having an intimate knowledge of all the coaches,” Keeton said Tuesday. “In many cases, he would know your plays that you’re running, and would ask questions about that: ‘I know ‘Deuce’ is one of your favorite sets, and you guys ran that multiple times successfully tonight.’

“While there were times that you could tell he wasn’t necessarily a journalist, or a sportswriter, he did have that unique ability to dig in and get the answers he needed to get.”

Kidwell never forgot what it was like to sit in the big chair, though – or for that matter to lose that opportunity.

When the same thing happened to Keeton at Raceland in 2022, as word trickled out he’d been fired and messages began pinging his phone, one of the first was from Kidwell.

“Sorry to hear. You’re a class act. Proud to call you my friend,” Keeton read Kidwell’s text, which he’d saved, to a reporter. “Don’t let it define you. I did for a little while.”

Not for long, though. The longer-lasting legacy of Kidwell is his passion for sports locally and beyond – and his development of the skill to enhance their discussion on a professional level.

Even as the end drew near, as recently as three days before he died, Kidwell was still sending story tips to local reporters.

“He took a lot of time to promote kids and promote high school athletics in our area,” Keeton said. “Not really being about himself, but more about the kids and the programs and the coaches around here.”

ZACK KLEMME is a former sports editor of The Daily Independent. Reach him at zklemme@hdmediallc.com. Follow @zklemmeHD on Twitter.