‘It’s been a wild ride.’ How Breathitt County’s football coach led hoops team to Sweet 16.
The first Kentucky Boys’ Sweet 16 was played in 1918. Over all the decades since, one can’t help but wonder if any coach has ever taken a more unlikely path to the state tournament than Breathitt County’s Kyle Moore has this year.
When the 2022-23 school year began, Moore, 41, had no thought of coaching basketball. He is the Breathitt County head football coach and athletics director. Yet, after Bobcats boys’ hoops coach BB King died during the season, the school eventually turned to Moore to lead the hoops team through a trying time.
“We were in a tough situation,” Moore says. “It was the middle of the year. We were just trying to find somebody to fill the void on a temporary basis.”
Improbably, the football coach has led the Breathitt County boys’ basketball team to its first state tournament appearance since 1996. The 14th Region champions (18-9) will face 7th Region champ Male (25-10) at 11 a.m. Thursday at Rupp Arena.
“It’s been a wild ride,” Moore says of his 2022-23 school year.
That, actually, seems an understatement.
Late last summer, Moore was trying to get his football program through a crisis. The devastating flooding that afflicted Eastern Kentucky in late July essentially left the Breathitt County football program under water.
“We weren’t sure we were even going to be able to play,” Moore says. “Our field house had, probably, 6 feet of water in it. Our field was totally submerged with 6 feet of water and mud. Debris was everywhere.”
At a time when most high school football players were focused on preparation for the coming season, Breathitt County High School’s athletes were trying to help their community through a time of distress.
Breathitt County basketball power forward and football linebacker/tight end Bryce Hoskins said he realized soon after the flooding that Bobcats athletes were possessed of an attribute that was of unique value to their neighbors.
“A big thing everybody needed was just muscle — big, strong boys just packing stuff out” of damaged homes, Hoskins says. “A lot of people had washers, dryers, refrigerators, deep freezers, workout kits, you name it, we had to pack it out.”
Austin Sperry, sophomore star for both the Breathitt County football and basketball teams, helped clean out a family member’s house after the flooding. “It was just awful,” Sperry says. “You couldn’t even step anywhere without stepping in mud. The whole house, a two-story house, was just covered in mud.”
Within the wider Kentucky football community, helping Breathitt County have a season became a cause.
“We had to start over in a lot of areas,” Moore says. “But we had a lot of help. We had several schools from around the state, (they) actually came down here and put boots on the ground and went to work. Other people came by and brought items, or just sent us money.”
Against great odds, Breathitt County opened its football season on time on Aug. 19. Overcoming adversity, the Bobcats went 9-3 and made the third round of the Class 2A playoffs.
“It was sort of a miracle,” Moore says.
Yet Moore’s coaching year had a whole other challenge still ahead.
From pigskin to hoops
In BB King’s time as Knott County Central’s boys’ basketball coach, he led the Patriots to five 14th Region championships. So it was considered a coup for Breathitt County when King accepted the Bobcats’ coaching job last May, just a week after stepping down at KCC.
“Coach King, his résumé spoke for itself,” Hoskins says.
Yet King, 61, made it only four games into the 2022-23 season before his health forced him away from his new team. “He had had cancer previously,” Moore says of King. “He had some complications arise there in December. He wasn’t able to overcome those.”
On Dec. 20, King died at Louisville’s Norton Brownsboro Hospital.
After considering some other options, Breathitt County ultimately turned to its head football coach to lead its basketball team. Coming off the most challenging football season of his career, Moore was suddenly coaching a whole other sport.
“I would say ‘Football Coach Moore’ is just a little bit more intense,” than the basketball version, Hoskins says. “He came in and has done a good job of keeping us calm and collected on the basketball court.”
A three-sport star — baseball, basketball and football — in his playing days at Breathitt County in the late 1990s, Moore has hoops in his DNA. His late mother, Peggy Gay Moore, coached Breathitt County to four girls’ basketball regional championships. His aunt, Irene Moore, was Kentucky Miss Basketball in 1978.
In his younger days, Kyle Moore had worked as a girls’ hoops assistant to his mom and had coached some AAU basketball. So switching over from football to basketball wasn’t completely foreign. “Coaching is coaching,” he says.
Moore basically left in place the systems King had installed in the preseason. Still, having a football coach running a basketball team can lead to a change in emphasis.
“He really focused on having a tougher team, a lot of defense and rebounding,” Sperry says of Moore. “It worked. Me and Bryce (Hoskins) were already pretty mean. But the other guys, it’s kind of lit a spark in them.”
In the 14th Region Tournament, Breathitt County beat Knott County Central (66-46), Hazard (53-51) and Perry County Central (62-46) to earn its first state tourney trip since Bill Clinton was serving his first term as U.S. President.
For a community that has had its mettle tested in the past year, the local high school hoops team earning the chance to play in Rupp Arena has returned smiles to faces.
“It’s been crazy,” Hoskins says. “It’s just like the tone (in the county) has been completely revamped. I feel like we are bringing a community back together, especially one that has been through such a devastating time.”
Says Moore: “We needed something really positive in our community. We’ve just been through so much. Right now, it’s great. It’s sort of a storybook-type atmosphere.”
As for the football coach who has led Breathitt County basketball back to the state tournament, Moore says the plan for next year is to go back exclusively to his main sport.
Nevertheless, he says his most challenging coaching year has been uniquely rewarding.
“With everything we’ve been through this year in this county, people living in tents, people who lost everything, we’ve had a pretty successful year athletically,” Kyle Moore says. “We’ve got some tough, resilient people here in Breathitt County.”
This story was originally published March 13, 2023 at 1:18 PM.
