By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
Sometimes it happens like this. When the past meets the present. As it did Saturday in front of a season-high crowd of 4,935 at NKU’s Truist Arena.
The two banners unfurled fromthe ceiling of Truist Arena for Kenny Shields and Nancy Winstel. (Photo by Dale Dawn/NKyTribune)
Where the must-have Horizon League game between the third-place Norse and the first-place Green Bay Phoenix may have been won, at least in part, by a pair of Hall of Fame NKU coaches whose 38 combined seasons at Highland Heights ended more than two decades ago.
Kenney Shields and Nancy Winstel made their return to be honored with the school unfurling permanent banners in their names from the Truist ceiling, recognizing the legendary coaches at halftime of each game.
And the fans turned out.
“Let me say how great it was to see such a good crowd come out and honor two NKU legends,” Northern Coach Darrin Horn said. “You’re talking about two people that literally put us on the map and are the reason that we’re here today, that we have a Division I program and this arena. And I think even more than that, if you know anything about both of them, the impact they’ve had on people in general, people all over this area in Northern Kentucky. I’m so happy to see them honored in the way that they deserve.”
Nancy Winstel and Kenney Shields (Photo by Dale Dawn)
“The atmosphere here tonight was really live,” said NKU’s LJ Wells, playing against his home-state team. “We fed off that. Shout out to the fans.”
Shout out as well to the NKU defense that limited a Green Bay team that scored 88 points in a win Thursday at Wright State to just 29 points the first 28 minutes on the way to a surprising 74-52 romp to pull within a game of now first-place Oakland (7-2 in the Horizon League) and a half game behind Green Bay (7-3) to NKU’s 6-3.
Actually this game and this night were worth a whole bunch of shout-outs. Start with an NKU team, after losing leader Sam Vinson for the season to ACL surgery, that’s beginning to realize that the way for this team to win is to do it with defense. They held a Green Bay team, shooting 46.5 percent from the field for the season, to 35.2 percent (19 of 54). They stole the ball eight times. They tripled Green Bay – 9-3 — in points off turnovers.
“Our identity is guarding,” said the 6-foot-8 Wells, a sophomore who scored 15 points while earning big-time respect from his coaches now that he’s a starter.
NKU’s Keeyan Itejere makes it look easy on one of his high-flying dunks against Green Bay. (Photo by Dale Dawn)
Center Keeyan Itejere, who played his basketball in Wisconsin as well last year, at Marquette, is starting to do some of the heavy lifting for the Norse now that he’s getting a chance. He scored 13 points with six rebounds and three blocked shots. “He’s literally as athletic as anybody in college basketball,” Horn said now that the explosive 6-foot-9 shot-blocker and dunker is getting playing time.
“He trusts that I can guard the one through five positions,” Itejere said of the wrinkle NKU added to their matchup zone. “All of our ‘bigs’ can guard out on the floor,” Horn says. As they did, limiting Green Bay’s leading scorer Noah Reynolds, who averages 19.7 ppg, to nine on four-of-15 shooting.
But it was “the whole approach,” Horn said that this team is taking that pleases him most. Like getting to the free throw line 25 times to 11 with their aggressive drives. Like turning the ball over just five times – to Green Bay’s 10. Like hitting on 53.1 percent (26 of 49) of their field goal attempts.
And maybe even getting the win for Green Bay transfer Cade Meyer, the backup center, who accepted the victory. “This is big,” the Monroe, Wisc., native said, “but this is kind of my home now.” So not a win for him but for NKU. “A great win in my eyes.”
NKU’s leading scorer missed the postgame presser – “He was still signing autographs,” we were told. But with his game-high 21 points, Marques Warrick, the senior from Lexington, reached 1,972 career points – No. 4 on the NKU all-time career list but just 94 behind No. 1 all-time Drew McDonald’s 2,066. And with 11 regular season games to go, certainly easily within range.
NKU’s Marques Warrick drives against Green Bay’s Noah Reynolds. (Photo by Dale Dawn)
BANNERED FOR ALL TIME – WINSTEL AND SHIELDS
They honored Northern Kentucky sports history – not just NKU’s – with the coaches’ banners, looking back to a time when this program was a natural outgrowth of a Northern Kentucky region that, unlike every other area in Kentucky, had gone so long without a public university.
Beechwood and Centre College alum Dr. James Claypool was the moving force behind NKU athletics. But no one took the Norse farther than this pair from the no-longer-in-existence St. Thomas High School.
Winstel played here on the first women’s team, a lefthanded, down-on-the-blocks post player who simply could not be dislodged on those early NKU teams that benefited from Dean of Students Claypool’s decision to scholarship women’s athletes when no one else in Kentucky would. She eventually earned herself a $1,000 scholarship, Winstel recalled.
Out of Newport’s Corpus Christi Grade School, and then St. Thomas High, neither of which had a basketball program for girls, Winstel was working in intramurals, doing volleyball, her second year at NKU when the girls on the first basketball team asked her to try out. “But I’ve never played basketball before,” she told them. No matter, they said, “We only have eight players.”
“I made nine,” Winstel said of how she became a college basketball player. And that was it. “I wasn’t used to all that running but I loved basketball.” And her first coach, Boone County’s Marilyn Scroggins, would influence her like no other. “I still have a notebook where I’d write down things like ‘How to set a pick’,” Nancy says.
And yes, she probably could have gone big-time, as Shields told the NCAA’s Division II Coach of the Decade she could after her NKU teams’ national championships in 2000 and 2008. “I was just a lifelong Northern Kentucky girl,” she says. “I was just happy to be here.”
“It’s been a lot of fun, to live and coach in your hometown,” says Nancy, whose teams won 616 games (against 214 losses) in her 29 NKU seasons. “Although since it’s your home, you’d better win or they might run you out. Kenny and I are blessed to be able to coach here and then live here.”
Shields, out of Covington’s St. Patrick’s Grade School (think the Fourth Street entrance to I-75 next to Goebel Park) and Covington Catholic, came by way of the University of Dayton and Highlands High School after his St. Thomas coaching days.
NKU’s Michael Bradley splits a pair of Green Bay defenders on this drive, (Photo by Dale Dawn)
And if some of their schools no longer survive, the winning with class that each lived in their combined 45 years here until retirement certainly does. Shields, who with his wife Marie sat through the women’s game greeting fans and posing for selfies and sharing memories with attendees who flocked down to the floor to greet him.
Some, as he recalled, go back to his CYO days with St. Pat’s when this writer played against him for St. James. Or those years in Knothole Baseball or Sunday Morning softball – or almost any day of the week when Kenney was a mainstay on the Main Tavern team with the likes of his ex- NBA buddy Danny Tieman.
No wonder Kenney has been the man who introduces new members to the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame. He’s either played with, or against, coached with or against almost everybody, or maybe someone in their family. A Kenton County guy who settled in Campbell County, Kenney crosses all paths in Northern Kentucky sports. His biography, “Nothing More, Nothing Less, Nothing Else,” tells his story through many of the lessons he taught his players.
“It just felt like with how many people came, how much love they had,” Shields said of the standing ovation that came his way. “I came out of Goebel Park and look at the way people turned out.”
As it has been for Nancy, it’s almost impossible to think of Kenney anywhere else than right here. He came to NKU as the all-time winningest high school coach in Northern Kentucky history with 620 wins. And then he added 306 in his 16 seasons at NKU.
Shields was another of those old-school coaches you don’t see today, going straight from high school to college head coaching. And yeah, there was an adjustment to the physicality of the college game from the zone-playing, jump-shooting Ninth Region game Kenney had coached in all his life.
NKU’s Carter McCray on her way to a game-high 25 points against Wright State (Photo by Dale Dawn)
But adjust Kenney did. For seven 20-win seasons and a school-record 30-win season and back-to-back NCAA Division II national championship games and a National Coach of the Year award in NCAA Division II.
“I never had to drive more than 11 minutes to any of my four coaching jobs,” Shields said of staying home. And he didn’t have to Saturday.
Six years after Kenney retired, NKU had 9,000-seat Truist Arena and was Division I with a coach today making more than a half-million dollars a year, behind only the coaches at UK and Louisville.
As a Division I-Horizon League program, it’s no longer a Northern Kentucky thing anymore. Only one Northern Kentuckian started for NKU in either game Saturday.
And yet, for a night, there were thousands of Northern Kentuckians here to celebrate two of their own.
NKU WOMEN FALL IN 2ND HALF
After leading 38-36 over Wright State at halftime, the NKU women (3-14, 1-7) ran out of gas – and defenders – in a 90-83 Horizon League loss to Wright State (12-8, 6-3), giving up 54 second-half points. Carter McCray led NKU with 25 points. Kailee Davis added 22 and Khamari Mitchell-Steen 16.
NKU-GREEN BAY MEN’S SCORING SUMMARY
GREEN BAY 25 27—52
N. KENTUCKY 33 41—74
GREEN BAY (12-9, 7-3 Horizon): Jones 4-5 0-1 3-4 11, Cummings 1-5 0-3 0-0 2, Bhyre 0-3 0-0 0-0 0, Ruedinger 3-8 1-4 2-2 9, Reynolds 4-15 0-4 1-2 9, Wonders 2-6 2-5 0-0 6, Hall 2-6 1-3 2-2 7, Eames 3-5 1-3 1-1 8, Antchak 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Wade 0-1 0-1 0-0 0; TOTALS: 19-54 5-27 9-11 52.
N. KENTUCKY (11-9, 6-3 Horizon): Wells 5-7 0-0 5-7 15, Itejere 5-7 0-0 1-3 13, Robinson 2-8 0-2 1-2 5, Warrick 7-15 2-8 5-6 21, Bradley 3-6 0-2 4-5 10, Pettus 2-4 1-3 0-0 5, Meyer 1-1 0 0 0-0 2, Tchilombo 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Sherman 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Ipassou 0-0 0-0 0-0 0; TOTALS: 26-49 4-16 18-25 74.
NKU-WRIGHT STATE WOMEN’S SCORING SUMMARY
WRIGHT STATE 18 18 36 18—90
N. KENTUCKY 19 19 19 26—83
WRIGHT STATE (12-8, 6-3 Horizon): VanKempen 2-4 1-2 2-2 7, Loobie 10-11 0-0 4-5 24, Hutchison 9-19 2-6 4-7 24, Ferrell 2-6 0-1 0-0 4, Baumhower 4-9 2-4 0-0 10, Tate 1-1 0-0 0-3 2, Scott 5-8 1-2 1-3 12, Henson 3-3 0-0 1-3, Ion 0-0 0-0 0-0 0, Taylor 0-0 0-0 0-0 0; TOTALS: 36-61 6-15 12-23 90.
N. KENTUCKY (3-14, 1-7 Horizon): McCray 8-11 0-0 9-13 25, Davis 8-21 3-8 3-4 22, Mitchell-Steen 6-10 0-0 4-8 16, Blevins 4-10 0-1 0-1 8, Hubert 1-2 1-2 0-0 3, Razzano 1-1 0-0 2-2 4, Igo 2-3 0-1 1-1 5, Lacy 0-1 0-1 0-0 0, Basye 0-0 0-0 0-0 0; TOTALS 30-59 4-13 19-29 83.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.
