A year of trial and loss hasn’t broken John Pelphrey. ‘You have to move forward.’
This is all you need to know about how rugged John Pelphrey’s 2020-21 was:
The Tennessee Tech men’s basketball coach’s team went 5-22. Yet that five-win season wasn’t close — not even remotely so — to being the toughest thing Pelphrey dealt with last winter.
Early last Nov. 19, Pelphrey joined his team and staff in taking a coronavirus test.
It came back negative.
Yet, by that night, the health of Pelphrey, Kentucky’s 1987 Mr. Basketball and a former Kentucky Wildcats standout (1987-1992), had begun a descent toward a scary place.
Of the symptoms most commonly associated with the coronavirus, Pelphrey realized he was starting to display most.
“I didn’t really struggle breathing and I didn’t have a severe sore throat,” Pelphrey says. “Everything else, I had at a 10. The nausea, the loss of taste and smell. The muscle aches and pains, they were just devastating.”
As his body’s battle against COVID-19 persisted, Pelphrey, 53, came to dread the nights.
“When nobody’s around and everybody is kind of asleep, you get really, really isolated,” Pelphrey says. “I can see how folks start going to a dark place. You start thinking, ‘Am I going to be one of those guys (who doesn’t make it)?’”
After eight days of suffering, Pelphrey says he told his wife, Tracy, that he needed to go to an emergency room.
“At that time, if you had COVID, you couldn’t go see (a doctor) in person,” Pelphrey says. “The only place you could go if it got bad was the ER. Well, nobody wants to go to an ER. But that’s how bad I felt — I didn’t care.”
In the emergency room, Pelphrey’s temperature spiked.
“They ended up giving me an IV, a strong antibiotic,” Pelphrey says. “They got me on some real medication, steroids and those things. I was so sick, they almost kept me in the hospital. But they let me go home.”
Once the medication he’d received started to take effect, Pelphrey says his symptoms began slowly to abate within “three to four hours.
“It was probably another week before I felt like going back to work,” he says. “My experience with COVID, it was not good at all.”
Even before sidelining the team’s coach, the coronavirus had already disrupted Tennessee Tech’s preseason preparation for the basketball season.
“We were in COVID (protocols), we got out just in time to start (playing) games with enough people,” Pelphrey says.
By the time Pelphrey felt strong enough to make it back to the Tennessee Tech bench, the Golden Eagles had started the season 0-4.
“Not only in our sport, but in all sports, the teams that did the best (during the pandemic) had experience and were able to stay healthy,” Pelphrey says. “Well, we struggled with all of that. We were an inexperienced team. We never had our whole team together all year long.”
The Tennessee Tech record stood at 1-11 on Jan. 9. The Golden Eagles were in Pelphrey’s home state to face Eastern Kentucky. On that day, the coach’s father, Jack, died from congestive heart failure.
Jack Pelphrey, a former high school teacher and coach, and a longtime advocate for youth baseball in Johnson County, was 87.
In taking the Tennessee Tech head coaching job two years ago, John Pelphrey moved his family to within, roughly, four and a half hours of his parents in Paintsville.
“My dad was at my press conference when I was hired (at TTU) — that was great,” John Pelphrey says. “Only at the very end did he really, really struggle (physically). So we were able to make the most of seeing him and being with him. That was such a blessing.”
In retrospect, Pelphrey wonders if he took enough time to grieve his father’s passing. But he says Jack would have wanted him to do exactly what he did last January — immediately reimmerse himself into his team’s basketball season.
“The way our players and staff embraced me and my family, it was a unique experience,” Pelphrey says. “I am not glad I had to go through it, obviously, but it will be something I always remember.”
Tennessee Tech lost 15 of its first 18 Ohio Valley Conference games — five of them by five points or fewer, nine by 10 points or fewer.
Yet Pelphrey’s team did not quit. Standing at 3-22 for the season, Tech closed out the year with back-to-back OVC wins over Austin Peay and Murray State.
“I was proud of the guys. When it actually got the hardest for us there at the end, we actually got better,” Pelphrey says. “Winning those last two games gave us a lot of momentum going into the offseason.”
Looking ahead to 2021-22, Tennessee Tech expects nine players to return — including former Madisonville star Kenny White and CJ Gettelfinger, the son of ex-Kentucky Wildcat Chris Gettelfinger.
Pelphrey and his staff have also added five recruits.
“We feel like we have enough talent to compete,” Pelphrey says.
History says Tennessee Tech is a difficult coaching job under the best of circumstances. The Golden Eagles have not played in an NCAA Tournament since 1963.
Ever a glass mostly-full type, Pelphrey says that makes coaching hoops at Tennessee Tech “an amazing opportunity to do something that hasn’t been done here in your lifetime or mine.”
Whatever happens going forward, it’s hard to imagine Pelphrey will ever face a coaching year more challenging than the one he just survived.
“It’s been hard. But, hey, everybody has got a story,” John Pelphrey says. “At the end of something like this, you just have to move forward.”
This story was originally published August 21, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
