He was working at the Ice House in Covington, his college summer job after graduating from Xavier University in 1976, when the call came.
A biology major, would he be interested in stepping in to a last-minute teaching vacancy at Covington Catholic? Oh, and would he also be interested in coaching baseball after a standout career as a left-handed pitcher at Cincinnati power Elder and then at XU, where his 22 career wins are third-most in school history.
Would he? Bill Krumpelbeck would be — and still is – more than a little interested. Forty-eight years later, 46 of those teaching biology, he still has that fire. “Ten, maybe 20 years,” he says with a smile when asked how much longer he’ll coach baseball.
And the numbers just keep adding up. Although don’t ask Krumpelbeck about them as he closes in on a place as the second-winningest baseball coach in Kentucky high school history not to mention a Top 10 spot nationally.
“No idea,” he says after losing a chance to add one more win to his record Tuesday in the third rainout of the last week when the Holy Cross game was called off in a downpour after four innings with a 3-2 CovCath lead.
“Who cares?” he says of the number – 1,143 — that his assistant coach Rob Harmon, who pitched five post-season tournament wins for that 2002 CovCath state championship team, the first in 39 years from Northern Kentucky, looked up as he was talking. That leaves him one behind the 1,144 posted by No. 2 man – retired Pleasure Ridge Park coach Bill Miller, something he could get Thursday at Beechwood.
But enough of this numbers talk, Krumpelbeck says. “When you’re a Catholic school teacher your whole life, you’re not thinking about numbers, you’re trying to get them better – from the beginning of the season to the end.”
Krumpelbeck makes it clear he cares about winning, just not the counting part. “We want to win,” he says, of course. “The guys who come back for the reunions are the guys from teams that won championships,” as are all his assistant coaches.
But his goal is always the same – to take a team of individuals and get them better together from here to there, from the winter indoor workouts through the early spring chill and rain to the late spring heat of early summer.
Which may be harder to do in baseball than it is in football or basketball where a coach has more control of what his players do. Unlike in baseball where you do the best you can but then you have to send them out there and turn them loose to play as individuals mostly, but in a team sport.
“To get them to play fundamental baseball,” is the goal says the guy who played American Legion for the legendary Joe Hawk and multiple national champion Bentley Post on Cincinnati’s West Side. But despite the technological improvements with mostly artificial turf fields and metal bats, teaching the game doesn’t get any easier.
“Fundamentally, the players aren’t as prepared as they used to be,” Krumpelbeck says after a game when getting a squeeze bunt down or getting in front of a ground ball seems a real challenge and the final two runs were scored on a balk and a wild pitch.
There’s also this: Kenton County Knothole Baseball no longer exists. “It’s all travel teams,” Krumpelbeck says. And the emphasis there is, as the description says, traveling to games. Lots of games. Not as much time to practice. You spend more time trying to get them up to speed rather than moving ahead when they get to high school.
“And the numbers are down,” for baseball, he says. “The days of the multi-sports guys are gone,” unlike that state championship team of 2002 when every member played another sport for those 40-3 Colonels who won the most games that year of any high school team in the nation.
As to his still being at the Park Hills school nearly a half-century after he got that phone call: “I didn’t even think about it then, you just go year to year,” he says, or year to year to year to year . . . And then they start talking about your numbers.
“It’s a total distraction,” Krumpelbeck says of the recent attention to his win total. “We had high hopes for this year” for a season the Colonels had circled on the calendar as something that could be special. And then the Player of the Year in Northern Kentucky, shortstop Jackson Reardon, turned up with a stress fracture in his back that has kept the 6-foot-3, 190-pound five-tool prospect out the entire season with no expectation the University of Cincinnati signee will be able to return.
What kind of distraction is that for his now 15-10 Colonels, he’s asked. “Well, he worked out for seven major league teams on that field this fall,” Krumpelbeck notes as he looks through the picture window in his office toward Jerry Collins Field at what might have been for what could have been another CovCath alum to sign a pro contract.
But now it’s about getting better as a team, which is why Krumpelbeck stopped his players for a talk behind third base after the third inning after leaving six on base the first three innings and not executing the way they needed to.
So what’d he say in that animated conversation? “You couldn’t print it,” the man his players call “Krumps” says with a smile as his Colonels rallied for a pair of go-ahead runs before the rains came.
FOOTNOTED: The winningest coach in Kentucky high school baseball is a near-Northern Kentucky guy Krumpelbeck has been going against since the two were in college. Harrison County’s Mac Whitaker played for Morehead State against Xavier before going on to Cynthiana where he’s won 1,267 games in his 47 seasons and is going strong with a 23-2 mark this season. Interestingly, three of the four winningest active high school coaches in Kentucky are from Northern Kentucky with the fourth, Dixie Heights’ Chris Maxwell, who has won 789 games in his 41 seasons.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.