TRIBUNE COLUMN
High school basketball leader builds career on softball field

One of Prairie Home High School’s all-time great basketball players will be honored at 2 p.m. Sunday.

His name is Kelly Odneal. His 1,253-point total at Prairie Home is still among the all-time leaders at the southern Cooper County school.

Oh, before I forget - Kelly will be honored at Westran High School in Huntsville, not in Prairie Home, and for baseball and girls’ softball, not basketball.

Confusing? Not really.

Kelly Odneal retired last May from Westran High, where he had been athletic director, physical education teacher and girls’ softball coach, among other duties, for 24 seasons.

As the girls’ softball coach, his teams won the Lewis and Clark Conference title 21 years, won the district title 19 years and made 15 trips to the state high school Final Four. Westran won state titles in 1987, 1996 and 1999, finished second a record eight times, third three times and fourth once.

There’s a whole lot more to Kelly Odneal’s record as a coach and player, but you get the idea why Westran is celebrating what Kelly Odneal has meant to the school and to the community of Huntsville.

Actually, the celebration is the project of an army of softball parents who have followed their green-and-white-clad daughters to 15 state tournaments. That makes the celebration even more precious to the "Ol’ Coach."

Kelly Odneal Jr. was born in May 1952 in Oceanside, Calif. Kelly’s mom, Wanda, and Kelly Sr. had been married only 14 months when Kelly Sr. was killed in Korea in January 1953.

Wanda came home to Prairie Home and eventually met and married Junior Lachner, and Kelly shared his youth with a half brother, Jim Lachner, now Cooper County assessor.

Kelly was, and is, built like a linebacker. At 6-foot-1, 200 pounds, with broad shoulders and powerful legs, he was tough to handle on the hardwoods. He should have been a linebacker, but the only football in Prairie Home was on TV.

Kelly started for three years in basketball, finishing with a 22-point average as a senior. "It may have been my Adidas shoes," Kelly says.

Harold Dunning, a basketball player at Pittsburg State, was playing fast-pitch softball in Boonville and had been given a pair of shoes to help promote Adidas’ entry in the U.S. shoe market.

"They didn’t fit Dunning, so he sold them to me for $10. Thus I was one of the first players in the U.S. to make Adidas shoes famous."

Prairie Home didn’t play high school baseball, but the Cooper County Athletic Association had a fall softball program for boys, and Kelly was the pitcher. He learned the fine points of the game by watching the Boonville Cavaliers and Columbians Don Poore and Ron Hudson.

Along the way, he played baseball from Little League through Senior Babe Ruth ball and for five years with Tipton in the old Central Missouri Ban Johnson League, setting the career record for strikeouts. Second on the list was Darold Knowles, who went on to a 20-year career in the major leagues.

Kelly had a one-inning career at the University of Missouri, earned his bachelor’s degree in education and coached three years at Jamestown, where his girls’ team won the CCAA all three years, compiling a 30-3 mark.

In 1978, he moved to Sturgeon and struck baseball gold. The Bulldogs won the state Class A high school title in 1980, again in 1982, and his 1983 team was unbeaten until losing to Englewood Christian in the state final.

Kelly moved to Westran in September 1983 and coached basketball for three years. In the fall of 1985, he became girls’ softball coach, finishing with a career mark at Westran of 485-89. His baseball teams at Westran were 233-74. Add his Sturgeon record, and his career baseball mark was 338-123. Add Jamestown to the softball record to make it 515-92.

Through the years, his girls’ softball program at Westran produced more than 30 players who earned college scholarships. The best?

"Probably Lindsey Jacoby. She led us to the state title as a pitching/catcher in 1997, then was a middle infielder at MU, setting the all-time assist record at shortstop as a junior and won the Gatorade Player of the Year award as a senior second baseman."

Kelly and Kay have been married for almost three decades and have three successful children, including Travis, a civil engineer in Hanford, Calif., who was an all-state tackle for Westran.

Kay has taught second grade for 20 years and is still hard at work while Kelly takes care of the softball field he and the community built in 1995.

Kelly is not yet finished on the playing field. Would you believe that he is now a softball umpire, working his first games this fall? All those years he umpired from the bench and the coaching box don’t count.

Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks?

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Bill Clark’s columns appear Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 474-4510.

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