The question caught Kevin Kuwik a bit off guard. After a few moments’ pause, the UD assistant coach simply shrugged: “It’s in a trunk somewhere at home.”
“In a trunk? Why don’t you have it on display somewhere?”
This time Kuwik didn’t wait. He just shook his head: “For me to dwell on what’s already happened, well, I think that’s for people who have retired ... or died. I’m a forward-looking guy and there’s still a lot of stuff I want to accomplish.”
So while today may be Veterans Day — and Kuwik served in Iraq — Saturday is the Flyers’ season opener, and like he said, “This time of year, hope springs eternal for every college team.”
Hope certainly is intoxicating, but past experience — both good and bad — and how he has dealt with it, is what defines Kuwik ... whether he frames it and hangs it up, or not.
“They say life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react,” he said. “And I’ve found the best way for me to deal with something negative is to try to turn it into a positive. No matter how bleak or dire some things may seem in life, I believe you can get through them if you just keep pushing.”
After graduating from Notre Dame summa cum laude in engineering in 1996, Kuwik began cobbling together a college coaching career while dealing with some other monumental situations in his life.
After joining the ROTC program at Notre Dame to help pay for his schooling, he began his military commitment that extended 10 years, much of it while he was coaching.
And it was seven years ago, while working as an Ohio University assistant, that he was sent to Iraq with the 113th Engineer Battalion of the Indiana National Guard.
Once back home and out of the service, he began to settle in as a coach and fell in love with a girl who also had quite an athletic career. Then it all was ripped away when she was killed in a plane crash one snowy night near the Buffalo airport as he waited for her at the terminal.
There would be no Bronze Star this time, but his negative-to-positive efforts did produce something else of merit — Public Law 111-216, the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Act — signed by President Obama in August of 2010.
“He’s highly, highly intelligent,” Flyers coach Archie Miller said. “When you consider he served our country while coaching basketball, then all that passion and fight he showed with his personal cause with Congress, and now all that he offers us on the basketball court ... he’s pretty remarkable.
“He’s kind of our Renaissance man.”
War and hoops
“I’m not gonna lie to you. I hate war stories,” Kuwik said. “You’re never going to hear me telling them. A lot of guys had it a lot tougher than I did over there. For me to run around and bang the drum and say I did this and I did that, well that’s just not who I am.”
During his first coaching job — at Christian Brothers University in Memphis — he served in the Arkansas National Guard. He then spent a season at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont before beginning an eight-year stint at OU.
At the same time, he was on the Army’s inactive reserve list and by 2004 he was getting ready to resign his commission. But before his paperwork was processed, the Army had cut him new orders and he was headed to Mosul, Iraq.
While there, his unit did everything from sweeping infantry routes for roadside explosive devices to beefing up security around Iraqi army posts, police stations and especially schools, which served as polling places when the country held its first free elections.
While deployed, he continued to follow Bobcats basketball. He listened to games over the Internet, wrote a blog for the athletics department and even called the team during pregame meals and talked to everyone as players passed the phone to each another.
When tournament time arrived, guys in his unit pooled their days off for him and he came home on a brief leave to sit on the Bobcats bench as they stunned everyone by winning the Mid-American Conference tournament and advancing to a first-round NCAA tournament game against Florida.
“I consider myself a basketball coach first and foremost, but that said, I’m proud of what I went through over there and the guys I went over there with,” he said. “There is no bond quite like that.”
He said all 518 men he went over with came home alive.
“Now that things are winding down over there, I am proud of what we did,” he said. “I think they sleep better at night because of what we did.
“They don’t necessarily have more food on their plates or money in their pockets — and that’s probably what they need most — but from a security standpoint, they are better off than they were.
“Now it’s up to them to take ownership and carry it the last 10 yards. Saddam held them down so long because he killed their will to self-improve and now that’s something they have to work through.”
Safer airlines
Kuwik met Lorin Maurer at the 2008 Final Four in San Antonio. She had been a three-time Academic All-American swimmer at Rowan University and, after stints working for the NCAA and the Mountain West Conference, she was an athletics fund-raiser at Princeton.
On the way to attend the wedding of Kevin’s brother, Lorin flew from Newark to Buffalo on a Continental flight that was run by a small regional airline. The plane crashed in a Buffalo suburb, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground.
The National Transportation Safety Board attributed the crash to pilot error.
Again trying to find some kind of positive in that crushing tragedy, Kuwik took the lead in lobbying Congress to change aviation laws and institute tougher regulations on commuter pilot training and fatigue guidelines.
“Yes, the plane crashed because the pilot messed up, but a lot of the fault lies with the little regional airline that was run like a mom-and-pop organization,” Kuwik said. “Pilots weren’t necessarily trained as they should be; they weren’t well paid. It’s kind of like if I asked a walk-on player to guard Michael Jordan and then Jordan scores. Is it the walk-on’s fault? Or mine for putting him in that position?”
Kuwik was a Butler assistant when the plane crashed and by the next year — as an assistant on Thad Matta’s staff at Ohio State — he was flying regularly from Columbus to Washington to get politicians on board to make the necessary aviation changes.
When Matta learned of Kuwik’s work he had the team wear patches with 3407 on them — the number of the Continental flight Lorin had been on.
Kuwik grew silent for a few seconds as he thought about his girlfriend and the efforts he and her dad spearheaded afterward.
“We wanted to do something,” he finally said. “It was too late to get her back, but we didn’t want someone else to lose their Lorin.”
UD is ‘special’
When Archie Miller took over the UD program last April, he talked to Matta — for whom he had coached a few years earlier — and asked about guys he could add to his staff.
“Thad knows in a big way who I am as a coach and a person and he highly recommended Kevin,” Miller said. “Kevin has a wealth of experience in Ohio. He’s worked with some really good coaches, and at the end of the day his last stint at Ohio State was a really good piece for me to add because of the way I felt about my two years there and how it’s influenced what I do now.
“The bottom line: Kevin was a rock-solid guy.”
At the same time, Kuwik was becoming especially interested in the Flyers.
“Every place has something that makes it stand out, but UD really does have something that makes it special,” he said. “You have a fairly large-sized metropolitan area and there really are no major pro sports, so it’s a unique situation.
“Athens is a college town and the Bobcats are the only thing there, but there are only 30,000 people in town. This is that on such a larger scale.
“When I got here, someone described a game at UD Arena as something like an NBA atmosphere. You’ve got businessmen entertaining clients and a lot of long-time fans whose seats have been in the family forever. It’s like with the Green Bay Packers, where someone has to die to get tickets passed along.
“And from a recruiting standpoint it’s a pretty neat thing to be able to tell athletes about the community support. You tell them, ‘You come here for four years, you’re gonna walk down the street and everyone is gonna know who you are.’
“When you have that going for you, you have a chance to bring some kids in and make a splash, not just in the A-10, but nationally. There’s a lot of potential here. This is quite an opportunity.”
So on this Veterans Day — with his Bronze Star stashed in some trunk and his Army buddies all back home safe — it’s understandable that Kuwik would rather talk basketball than war stories.
Yes, he’s a former soldier, and according to Miller, a current Renaissance Man. But as he said so succinctly, he considers himself “a basketball coach, first and foremost.”
And the season starts Saturday.
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