Legendary coach fights for kidney
Bianchi: Kershner keeps active helping youth despite health concerns.
Few coaches have won more games and helped more kids than Ed Kershner.
Few coaches have a more giving, loving heart.
If only he had a good, functioning kidney.
If only he didn’t have to spend 10 hours a day locked to a dialysis machine to decontaminate from the deadly toxins in his blood.
“There are no days off,” Kershner says of his marathon dialysis sessions. “You have to do it every day. Every single day.” Every single day.
Hour after hour. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. No days off.
Sounds sort of like being a high school coach, which Kershner was for 48 years (45 as a head coach), two state championships and 901 victories — the most of any boys basketball coach in Florida high school history. For nearly half a century, Kershner was not only a high school coach; he was a mentor, a guidance counselor, a taxi service, an equipment man, a team trainer and a surrogate father to hundreds of teenage boys.
Through the decades, he became one of those men who was never, ever identified by his first name. You see, he is not “Ed” Kershner anymore; he is simply “Coach” Kershner to so many who love, admire and respect him. And, if you ask me, “coach” is a more noble title than any king or queen.
I’ve always admired high school coaches who dedicate their lives to molding and mentoring other people’s kids. Especially in Florida, where high school coaches get a stipend that pays them far less than minimum wage for the time they put in. It’s why many of the top high school football coaches leave Florida for lucrative jobs in Alabama, Texas or Georgia.
I’ve written before about one of my own high school coaches, Dave Branch, whose then-wife showed up at a baseball practice one day and argued with her husband shortly before they divorced. The argument ended with her saying, “Why don’t you spend more time with your kid and less time with these kids?” Ouch.
I once told the late, great Corky Rogers, the winningest high school football coach in state history, the story about coach Branch, and Corky nodded his head knowingly.
“That story makes me cringe because we’ve all been guilty of it,” Corky said. “It’s a hazard of the coaching profession.”
Being a high school coach isn’t a profession; it’s a passion and a commitment and a devotion that consumed Kershner at a young age. He grew up in Indiana, where his mother was a high school girls