The September start to a new season of Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame inductions drew an overflow crowd – the largest in years – to The Gardens in Park Hills Wednesday as six new members were welcomed.
• Chuck Hablutzel gets much of the credit for the “rowdy crowd,” as he called them, with his friends and family here for the athlete and coach who talked of how growing up on Donaldson Road just “two doors down from Mary Queen of Heaven Church” and its baseball field and basketball court set the tone for his life from young on.
“A special place to grow up,” where you could play with your buddies “every day,” day, said Chuck who would go on to play both sports at Boone County High and then continue his career at Anderson College in South Carolina and Belmont University. But that was hardly the end of it for Chuck, who thanked Ellen, his wife of 57 years, and three children and seven of his eight grandkids who were present.
His dad got him started, Chuck said, and then he got to coach his grandkids who “all got their athletic ability from my wife,” he kidded, while also coaching multiple sports at Conner for more than two decades including head girls’ soccer coach while impacting generations of young people in Boone County.
Chuck also thanked especially his coaching mentors, Don Shields and Bill Warfield, with a classic story about Warfield, the colorful first Conner basketball coach who would have his players working out in heavy winter gloves and boots so that when they took them off, the game would come much easier for them, he said.
• Newport High’s Karyn Stubbs Starks let her amazing swim career – from the fifth grade on for eight high school letters and two state championships in the 100 back-stroke as a four-time all-state and two-time high school All-American swimmer and then on to a record-breaking college career at Wright State that earned her an invitation to the 1988 Olympic Trials.
And as is the case for so many swimmers, Karyn, a 1987 Newport High grad, thanked her parents “for all the support it takes to get a person to the Olympic Trials” with all those early morning practices for a young athlete at swimming pools often not located nearby.
• NKSHOF vice-president Kenney Shields describes Highlands’ alum Kevin Siple as having done “so well in so many sports,” although the former Bluebird football/baseball star said you can subtract basketball from the list. But man was he a fan from little on, Siple says, having grown up “one street over from Highlands’ Death Valley” where he watched football and baseball from his early days on. And that was all it took.
“Those coaches took an active part in my life,” Kevin says as he described his high school days as “taking gym two times a day and as a gym aid three times.” And how “I don’t know how I graduated. I wanted to be just like Coach Shields” — and like the Hall of Famers in the room. “These people were legends to me, I wanted to be just like them. They don’t know me, but I knew them. They taught you how to be a real man . . . I’m thrilled to be associated with a group like this.”
A quarterback, defensive back and place-kicker, Kevin helped Highlands to state championships in 1975 and 1977 and as a middle infielder, helped lead two Highlands’ teams to the regional finals in baseball. And with the timing of a professional comic, he thanked and recognized his wife, Diane, with a joke about asking God to build a bridge to Hawai’i for her that could not have been delivered better.
• Steve Hensley is one of those both-sides-of-the-river guys who has pretty much done it all. From injured backup guard on the then No. 1 high school football team in the nation at Cincinnati’s Princeton High to broadcaster on NKU basketball games to head football coach at Ludlow High School to AD at Campbell County High, Steve has pretty much done it all.
He’s been named Coach of the Year multiple times in football, helped 43 teams at Campbell County to regional titles with two state championships, served as NKAC president for four years and broadcast more than 400 NKU games over 15 years. “The only radio guy who roomed with the head coach,” Steve says of his time at NKU with Coach Shields. “A true and good friend,” Shields described him. “He never lost his loyalty. He never changed. I can’t say enough good things about Steve.”
Now at Egelston-Maynard Sporting Goods, Steve says “It’s a great place for me after 36 years in high school and college sports.” And while “a lot has changed (in sports), what hasn’t are the hearts of the people working with young people.”
• And finally, in a break from protocol, Dr. James Claypool, who orchestrated the creation of athletics at NKU (then Northern Kentucky State College) called up the first two team captains (for baseball) in NKU history together – Mark Saner and John Siemer.
Saner, a three-sport guy from Newport Central Catholic, would play baseball and golf in those early NKSC years. Siemer, who played two sports at Covington Catholic, was an iron-man catcher of doubleheaders for the Norse. Although in those days when NKSC’s first – and one-of-a-kind — coach Bill Aker was recruiting players the morning of games to have nine, everybody was an iron-man, as the pair recalled with the stories that always come up when those early days are remembered.
“Bill would always send us over to the lounge on the morning of games,” Siemer said, of those teams where everybody also had to pitch. “We had some great times, we had some great stories, we just didn’t have enough players,” Siemer said, thinking of the year when their team photo “had just eight players in it – and that included Bill.”
One day that search for a ninth player resulted in success and the newcomer was told to meet the team at the bus with John, who would go on to a career as a softball player and youth coach, happy that he might get backup catching help the second game of a doubleheader when the new player said, “Sure,” and then asked, “Do you have a left-handed catcher’s mitt?” And John knew he’d be catching both games that day.
Mark, who would go on to manage the Sports Arena sporting goods store while building batting cages, recalled the day NKSC was holding off an opponent, 14-13, in the last inning when they brought in Ludlow’s Steve Modlin from the outfield and he shut them out for the win. You just never knew.
Or how in a weather-pounded spring when they’d already turned in their uniforms and then were asked to help the University of Cincinnati in a pair of games that would get the Bearcats enough games to qualify for the NCAA tournament. As Mark recalled what almost seems typical of those crazy years, “we beat UC a doubleheader – our first-ever Division I wins – and cost them an NCAA bid.”
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.