Did you ever feel noticed? A fourteen-year-old tenth grader, I moved with my family to  North Nodaway high school. That first year went okay. There were some teachers I liked and I began a part time job after school and weekends at Barnett’s Hy-Klas grocery. Basketball was just there. I was young and not grown up yet. My sisters were in the middle school and they talked often about their coach Marvin Murphy.

Coach Murphy came to the high school when I was a junior. Early in the year he asked if I would be interested in being ‘student trainer’ for the football team. When I liked his job description, I began to keep the team’s statistics and filed its scorebooks with the State after each game. During practices I did errands for the coaches.

Coach Murphy’s own chiropractic training had stopped when he was drafted during WWII. After the war, he began professional life in coaching, teaching and educational administration. He shared his knowledge of muscle and bone structure, teaching me to give football players muscle rubdowns – on their shoulders, necks, backs, and calves. That was something I did it every day as part of regular training during football season.

Basketball, though, was my main sport. In my senior high school year Coach made me a starting forward on the Varsity team. I was doing okay but one night I scored 30 points. After the game, in a room surrounded by teammates I was quietly getting dressed by my locker. My feelings were mixed, proud, disbelieving, practically overwhelmed. Coach Murphy usually went around the locker room after games. On this night as he came by I said I couldn’t believe it. He put his arm around me saying, “I knew you could do it, and you’ll do it again!” Over and over I did.

One night we played Forrest City. They had a star player, Dennis Klassmeyer, who routinely scored 30-40 points a game. Forrest City’s season team record was better than North Nodaway. Before the game, Coach told the rest of our team he wanted me to abandon our traditional zone defense. He wanted me to go one on one with Denny Klassmeyer.

“Be in his face all the time,” Coach Murphy said to me, “and don’t let up. When he doesn’t have the ball, be between him and the ball, uptight in front of him!” After the game, Coach came by player lockers as he always did. When he was by me I said to him, “Klassmeyer is all-star material!” “Yes he is,” responded Coach, “but you held him to 7 points.”

During those three final years of high school, in addition to being student manager for the football team, playing track and basketball I took driver’s education from Coach Murphy and a mandatory heath class, but I have several further memories of him.

First, one Saturday morning after my senior basketball season, Coach Murphy met me in the gym where he had played for his college Alma Mater. He had arranged an  introduction to Dick Buckridge the college basketball coach. When fall came I did try out for the college team, but Coach Buckridge told Coach Murphy that three new freshmen had made the team. I was the fourth, but the cafeteria of college life had already become exciting. Basketball was important, but there seemed so much to sample, learn and do.

Years later I was a new teacher in an old boys school in New York City. Two years prior to my coming they had admitted girls for the first time, and they wanted a basket ball team. Their coaching staff was committed but my previous experience got around and I was asked to be coach. Of course I was willing, but you might guess who my model was as we won a few games with some wonderful girls.

Coach Murphy came to my 40-ieth high school class reunion in 2005. By then he was solely devoted to his own adult sport of softball. He had been a summertime softball pitcher when I had known him during my school years. Girls’ softball had become his special interest, and he had become Missouri’s foremost girls’ softball pitching coach. I hope the picture of he and I, with his perennial coaches baseball cap, will always be part of my historical archives.

In 2008 Mom sent me Coach Murphy’s obituary from a local Maryville paper, the Daily Forum. A funny man, Coach had always called it the Daily Fool – em. Though his corporeal presence has died from this earth, I still think of him many times a day. I realize how important he was to my ‘physical’ education and sense of self in this world. He sought me out, offering steady encouragement. When I was proud he applauded, but I often realized he had seen it there before it ever happened.

Coach Murphy always said, “Girls don’t know how to punch!” That didn’t stop him from teaching them in every girls gym class each year. As I help lead punching exercises in my assisted living now I laugh, as those older women punch straight ahead, straight up, round houses, and finally finish off with upper cuts. I tell them, “If only Coach Murphy could see us now!”

Pursuing my goal to be a walking guy after thirteen years of going the opposite direction, Coach Murphy’s voice is for sure inside my head. As I walk now, I think of how I learned to stand and move in balance as an athlete under his guidance. Somewhere I learned the term ‘kinesthetic awareness’, and I don’t know if that term came from Coach or not. Certainly it was what he always talked about, being aware of where you were, how you were doing it, and what might come next. As I walk with the formerly broken right leg from a fall, that doesn’t fit quite like I remember from when I used to walk, I think every step I take of how Coach might say to do it right.