In the decade following the Korean War, it would be difficult to pick a less likely candidate to successfully coach a group of talented but often undisciplined kids, many of them from the poorest part of town.
Kenny Huffman was a gentle, soft-spoken and polite man from the tiny farming community of Fabius, some 25 miles south of Syracuse. He'd never been even a good athlete, much less a great one. He spoke with an economy of words and never felt at all comfortable in the spotlight. The fact that Huffman became a coach at all was not so much because he was supremely qualified. It was because he'd once been a player-coach for a U.S. Army recreation team in Germany and, at least for the guy doing the hiring that day, that was good enough for him. Plus, he was still young enough and naive enough to work long hours for little money – that, of course, and the fact no one else wanted the job.
Like so many veterans of his era, Huffman had gotten out of the army, taken advantage of his GI benefits and gone to college – in his case to nearby Cortland State. He eventually became certified to teach and in 1959 scored his very first job at an elementary school in a section of Syracuse called Eastwood. At the same time he was also named the junior varsity basketball coach at an entirely different public school in town – Vocational High on the opposite side of the city, a school that had so declined as an institution that it had become painfully evident to everyone it was now more tied to the city’s glorious past than it would ever be to whatever Syracuse's future might hold.
Vocational and Occupational High – or VO, as the locals called it – was (as the name suggests) not so really a traditional high school. It was, for the most part, a trade school. In addition to basic reading, writing and math, students were taught functional blue-collar skills to help them, God willing, carve out careers for themselves as laborers and factory workers. VO offered a number of different vocational “tracks” to students, including printing, carpentry, home economics, electronics and auto mechanics.
But perhaps the school's most unique aspect was the fact that, for the first half of the century anyway, it housed an actual working foundry. Given the large number of factories in Syracuse at the time, years prior the city school board had deemed it essential to provide local young men (and, in a few cases, women) a chance to learn skills they'd need to land a job in one of the city's many industrial plants, including the ability to design and cast molds from which countless steel and iron products would be mass-produced.
One of the by-products of VO's foundry was the fact there was always a huge pile of sand just outside the back door that students would use to shape molds for the various steel products they'd learn to produce. Once a year, a large city truck that in the winter doubled as a snowplow would pull up behind the building, back up to the remains of the previous year’s pile, and dump a fresh load of fine black sand on top of it. Any student taking foundry would then go to the pile before school, scoop himself out a bucketful, and head off to class.
By the time Huffman arrived, however, things had started to change as contemporary philosophies of education -- if not the economy itself -- were rapidly evolving. As America's "Baby Boom" generation began working its way toward high school, it did so with its sights set, not on a blue collar job like dad’s, but on a white collar one with all the promise of upward mobility. To get that kind of job, though, meant going to college. As a result, there developed a growing emphasis on college preparedness, while trade schools began to seem, not so much quaint, but anachronistic. And in light of the earning potential of a bachelor's degree, the manual skills such schools taught suddenly seemed sadly passé.
For those reasons and other, in his first year Ken Huffman found himself working in a school that had become a shell of its former self. Enrollment was a fraction of what it had been at its peak in the 1920’s, the building was now aging faster and faster, and the quality of student body reflected not so much America's bright future, but its lower-working class past.
In addition, soon after Huffman arrived at VO, the school's varsity basketball coach abruptly left. He was, in turn, followed out the door by the school's football coach and, shortly thereafter, its track coach. Before he knew it, Ken Huffman, the full-time elementary teacher and part-time JV basketball coach, found himself not only a varsity basketball coach, but a head football and head track coach as well. And in all three jobs, he ended up drowning in responsibility, a situation complicated by a few harsh realities: he was hard-pressed to come up with even one qualified assistant for any of his teams, he often lacked enough equipment to conduct a full-scale practice, and, at least in the case of football and track, he had trouble finding enough boys to even field a squad.
But Huffman, at twenty-five, was young and determined. More than anything, though, he cared. What he would soon learn is that, of those three, the one variable that paid the biggest dividends when mentoring oft-neglected and sometimes desperately poor kids was the last – the caring part – and not just by a little, but by the proverbial country mile.
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In those early days, at least when it came to coaching, Huffman found himself in uncharted waters. Never having been a starter on his high school teams, much less a star, never having had to take the big shot with the game on the line, or knowing what it felt like to have your team’s fortunes riding on your shoulders, he brought to his very first high school coaching job a different, if not very human, frame of reference. Instead of leaning on things he'd learned from former coaches or picked up from actually playing the game, he relied on two things that had been a part of his makeup pretty much forever. First, he knew people and had been taught by his humble and hard-working parents to respect everyone regardless of his or her station in life. And he knew, too, he could teach, having had success over the course of his brief career at Indiana State and SUNY Cortland.
So while other coaches coached, Ken Huffman did what he did best. He taught. When a player made a mistake, he didn’t yell or chide the boy. He’d pull him aside and patiently explain how things should be done. And what he lacked in experience, he more than made up for in intellectual curiosity. Huffman read dozens, if not hundreds of books on coaching and through them developed a philosophy that incorporated the ideas of the most innovative and successful minds in the game. As a result, even though his personal frame of reference might have been limited, Ken Huffman’s body of knowledge was as broad and deep as any coach in the city.
As a teacher, he was also able to build a connection with his players that went beyond a traditional player/coach relationship. The things he taught his kids might have often started out as basketball lessons (or track or football lessons), but nearly as often as not, they'd end up becoming life lessons. Many of his players found they could talk to him about questions they had, or things troubling them, and he'd listen without becoming judgmental. He’d offer encouragement in a way that made his kids start to believe in themselves, and in a way they'd never done before. And as frustrated or upset as he may have gotten, Huffman never yelled. Slowly but surely, many of the young men under him came to realize that Coach Huffman was the one person who'd give them the one thing they craved most in life, the one thing few other adults seemed to ever care enough to give them: respect.
It didn’t matter what color the young man’s skin was, if Kenny Huffman was his coach, he was his coach. That was all that mattered. The kids knew this, and knew that Coach Huffman would treat them not just fairly, but as individuals.
What's more, despite his gentle and soft-spoken manner, Huffman proved time and again to be a man willing to roll up his sleeves and fight for his players. His first day of spring track tryouts one year, he looked around and realized he was only going to have seven kids on his team. When he went to dig out the equipment from the VO storage room, all he found was a handful of beat up old items like a bent javelin and a chipped and rusted shot put, along with a rusting high-jump bar, some broken whistles and a handful of sprinter’s starting blocks that, apparently, some previous year’s team had fashioned in wood shop.
He tried to make a go of it for a while, and gave it his best because he always told himself that’s what his father would have done. But over the course of that first year, as he saw how humiliated his kids constantly felt by getting blown by well-equipped teams with twenty or thirty members, Kenny Huffman felt the frustration welling up. That frustration came to a head one afternoon when he watched his only high jumper, a dedicated young African American, vault the bar in practice only to catch a jagged, rusting piece of metal and cut his leg wide open. He'd seen enough. Huffman patched his player up, then marched into his athletic director’s office and, in a measured tone, demanded new equipment.
Perhaps it was his persuasive argument or the fact that the AD loved his young coach's passion for the job. Or maybe it was the gentle reminder that Ken Huffman offered his AD, suggesting that if he were to walk out the door the school would find itself having to hire not one, but three new head coaches. Whatever the reason, that following Monday when the members of the Vocational track team showed up for practice – still undermanned and still winless – they found themselves armed with a full array of all-new equipment.
Despite the fact that throughout that 1959-60 season all three of Huffman’s varsity teams lost more than they won, word starting spreading throughout the city, particularly in the mostly black 15th Ward, about how he well treated those who played for him. Young men, many of them African American who'd never gone out for a sports team in their lives, or who'd dropped out of school altogether, were suddenly back in class and talking about trying out for the team. Some, from schools like Central High and Onondaga Valley Academy, even said they were going to transfer to VO for a chance to play for Coach Huffman.
One day, just after that very first basketball season ended, Huffman – who by then was constantly on the lookout for young talent to recruit – went to the Boys Club on East Genesee Street to scout a kid he'd heard could play some. It was almost nightfall when he arrived, and as he walked in the building he soon realized his was, literally, the only white face in the place. When he got to the gym, which was bustling with activity, Huffman stood in the doorway for a moment. The second he set foot in the gym, however, the basketball game in progress came to a screeching halt and everything immediately got quiet, while virtually every face in the place turned in his direction.
For a split second, Huffman felt a twinge of discomfort, not because he was the only white face in a sea of black ones, but because everyone was looking at him and he was, by nature, a man who hated the spotlight. For that reason, he almost felt himself asking no one in particular, what the hell am I doing here? But before the thought even crystallized, Donnie Fielder, the director of the East Side Boys Club – not to mention a legend in the 15th Ward – had bounded out of his tiny office and was striding in his direction, a hand out and a warm smile on his face. “Coach Huffman,” Fielder said, shaking the Corcoran coach’s hand. “What an honor. Welcome to the Boys Club!”
Fielder then ordered one of his kids to grab a folding chair and set it up at mid-court. Huffman sheepishly took the seat of honor and smiled his thanks to both Fielder and the kid who got the chair. The game started up again, and as he settled in, Ken Huffman found himself not so much awed by the reception, as humbled by it.
This scene, or ones like it, played out time and time again, especially during Huffman's first few years, as he began to attract talent from the blackest and poorest section of the city, its 15th Ward. Soon, wherever Huffman went, respect (and wins) just seemed to follow. In his very first game on the VO bench, his lightly regarded squad was able to nip a rugged Eastwood team behind Frank Harlow's 20 points and a key blocked shot in the final seconds. And even though his team finished at just .500 that first year and failed to make the playoffs, VO improved so dramatically that by the end of the year the City League coaches had voted to bestow on the 26 year-old Huffman their first-ever Coach of the Year award.
Within two years, the players that Huffman started drawing from the inner city, combined with the ones already under his wing, had come together to kickstart a run of success at VO that would prove to outlive even the school itself.
In the spring of 1961 – just a season and a half into his coaching career – Kenny Huffman’s Vocational and Occupational Vikings, a one-time laughing stock, had risen from the ashes to become a powerhouse. Led by two ox-strong forwards, Jesse Dowdell and Dave Buono, VO won the City League title and Syracuse’s first ever All-City Championship, a post-season title game dreamed up that summer by an enterprising school official who thought it might make some great local theater to pit the best team from the Syracuse City and Parochial Leagues in a winner-take-all matchup for citywide bragging rights. Played at the Onondaga County War Memorial, home of the NBA’s Nationals, in the All-City game Huffman's Vikings staged one of the great comebacks in Syracuse schoolboy history as they rallied from eight down with a minute and a half to play (in an era without a shot clock, mind you) to force an overtime period during which they utterly dominated a still-stunned St. Anthony's squad.
In 1962, Huffman and Vocational ran the table again, winning the City League title, breezing through the playoffs, and dismantling St. John the Baptist in the All-City game, despite the fact Baptist featured three kids who’d make names for themselves playing major college ball for St. Bonaventure: Franny Satalin, Jimmy Satalin and John Riley.
Huffman’s teams achieved this run of success playing under spartan conditions, in the creakiest of home gyms and while wearing ratty and threadbare uniforms – not to mention with little travel money, first aid supplies or equipment. All that changed in the fall of 1965, however. In that year, the City of Syracuse opened two all-new, state-of-the-art high schools, both of them named in honor of ex-mayors of Syracuse. Anthony A. Henninger High was built on a majestic hill on the northeast side of the city, just above Sunnycrest Park. And Thomas J. Corcoran High was erected on a crest of land overlooking the city’s southwest side, a stretch of urban ground so densely wooded and relatively undisturbed that when construction started, even though it was located in the city, it supported a stream of native trout, a small waterfalls that a few locals liked to call "Little Niagara," and healthy populations of deer, pheasants, raccoons, owls, foxes, chipmunks, snakes, rabbits, woodpeckers and a number of other forest denizens – even the occasional bobcat.
At the same time, the school board chose to close or re-purpose four aging high schools, funneling their students into their two new facilities. North High on Prospect Hill closed its doors altogether, while Eastwood High was turned into Eastwood Junior High, while the students from those two schools were funneled into Henninger.
Meanwhile, Onondaga Valley Academy on the South Side became Powlesland Elementary, while VO, a block off Geddes Street, was rechristened Blodgett Junior High, with the respective students sent up to the shining new beacon to secondary education at the top of the hill, the modern, sprawling and conspicuously well-appointed Corcoran.
To the surprise of no one, between the Valley and VO basketball coaches, it was Ken Huffman who was asked to become the head coach of the all-new Corcoran program, a fact that only strengthened his standing in the local fraternity. As a result, even though Huffman's Cougars were beaten twice in the regular season and suffered a stinging upset in the 1966 All-City Game, the combination of having two full student bodies from which to select five starters, combined with all-new equipment, and a modern, well-lit and spacious gym, the Corcoran head basketball coach found himself with a decided advantage over many of his counterparts.
That was why, going into the 1966-67 season, of the seven All-City games played, Kenny Huffman had found himself on the bench for almost half of them. That was why, entering that season, Huffman faced higher expectations than just about any coach in the Salt City. And that was why the quiet, unassuming farm boy from Fabius continued to command, even in the heart of the city, the undying respect of not just teachers and coaches, but hundreds of talented and now deeply focused basketball-loving teenagers of color.
The extent to which Huffman’s standing in Syracuse’s black community had risen was perhaps best exemplified by a moment that occurred, ironically, not in a basketball setting at all, but a football one. It was 1968, and the city’s long-simmering racial tensions had finally spilt over into a series of confrontations, if not all-out riots. And such confrontations, alas, had almost become commonplace at many high school sporting events. But one day in the Fall of that year, Huffman and his wife were walking to their car following a Friday night football game against Nottingham, a mixed race school on the city's East Side, and one in a heavily Jewish and virtually all-white part of town. As dusk faded to evening, and as the Huffmans walked arm-in-arm, seemingly out of nowhere a massive street fight broke out just a few yards ahead of them. The confrontation appeared to Huffman to be between a few dozen black and white youngsters, and it was framed less around school colors than skin color.
Then, just like that, the confrontation escalated into something more than just a garden-variety/my-school's-better-than-yours showdown. In fact, right before Ken and Lillian Huffman’s eyes, it devolved into something clearly dangerous and, possibly, even life-threatening.
As he stood there for a brief moment transfixed, Huffman noticed that the kids on both sides of the melee were now brandishing weapons, a knife here, a chain there, and in at least one case, a broken liquor bottle. The young coach whispered in a steady but concerned voice to his wife to run to one of the houses across the street and call the police. He then said he’d do what he could, while heading off in the direction of the fracas.
As he approached, and as the confrontation exploded, while a sense of chaos enveloped the throng of teenagers, one of those teens, a baby-faced black kid of maybe fifteen or sixteen who Huffman didn’t know from Adam's house cat, emerged from the fringes and ran up to him, his shirt torn and some fresh blood tricking down the right side of his face. The youngster, who looked as though he’d just given and received a few substantial blows, in the blink of Huffman's eyes seemed to transform from a savage street thug to a respectful student. The youngster opened his eyes wide and held out his hand to the Corcoran coach. In it was a black tire iron. “Here, Coach,” the boy panted, his eyes intent and his voice simultaneously comforting and cautionary. “I'm thinking you might need this.”
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