It’s been a rough couple of weeks around the Kamler household as we lost my father, Ed Kamler, to cancer on July 2. He battled valiantly for nearly three years, but finally went home last Thursday.
The family, as you might imagine, is saddened and we’ve spent a lot of this time remembering “the good times.” There were millions of good times.
But this may be the best forum to recap what Ed left for the Northland community during his life. I’m going to give it a try.
If you grew up anywhere near Clay or Platte counties over the last 40 years, chances are pretty good that you swung a bat, threw a ball, or laced up a pair of cleats on a field that Ed Kamler had a hand in. And if you didn’t, well, one of your kids probably did.
Dad was a baseball man first and foremost. He coached more Little League teams than any of us can count — somewhere north of 75 is our best guess, though he’d have told you the number didn’t matter, only the kids did.
He helped run the NKCA Baseball League for 30 years – most of that time as an unpaid volunteer. He would drag fields, empty trash cans, set schedules painstakingly by hand – all so kids could play. Famously, I tried to help modernize Ed’s hand-scheduling process and, predictably, the computer couldn’t keep up.
He believed, with the stubborn faith of a man who’d seen too many rainouts, that a summer evening was best spent under the lights with the crack of a bat and the smell of somebody’s mom bringing juice boxes and orange slices after the game.
My dad didn’t just think, but knew that he could control the weather. Often I’d call him as his chief umpire around 2:00 in the afternoon. “Dad, getting pretty dark out to the West. What’s the plan today?”
“Aw, it’s gunna miss us.” And then on his rainout hotline which had to have been listened to tens of thousands of times throughout his tenure with the league, he’d open the recording with “It’s a beautiful day for baseball.” Most of the time he was right. It usually did miss us.
But it didn’t stop there for Ed Kamler. He would lobby parks departments around the Northland for more park land for team sports. Platte Purchase Park and WaterWell Park being among the parks that he fought to build or revitalize. He would lobby against the larger parks like Tiffany Springs Complex only hosting big expensive tournaments and fight for them to have “league” games during the week so kids who have been priced out of tournament ball could still play.
Dad managed more than 20 teams of “list” kids – kids who couldn’t otherwise find a team. Kids who couldn’t make a team or got cut from tryouts. This is where my dad excelled. Every year, he’d put together a rag-tag team full of sandlotters, castoffs, and ne’er-do-wells. He’d cuss the entire time through practices, “these kids couldn’t catch a cup of coffee if it’s sitting under a Mister Coffee maker.” But every single year, those kids would improve. They’d often challenge for the league title by the end of the year.
Dad’s Facebook has been filled with those kids saying “Ed was my best coach of any sport.” Or “they broke the mold with Coach Ed.”
“Keeps ’em out of trouble,” he’d say, and he said it so often it became something of a punchline. But he meant it. He believed it right down to his bones. He’d watched enough kids drift toward the wrong crowds to know that a well-timed practice on a Tuesday night could be the difference between a good path and a bad one. To Ed, a scoreboard was almost beside the point (though not entirely). The real victory was a kid who showed up, who belonged somewhere, who had a coach that remembered his name. Coach Ed.
(Get more from Chris Kamler at chriskamler.com)
