‘We lost Coach tonight’: Remembering Paul Kreke

September 21, 1996. Twenty-five years. It simultaneously feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago.

I was lounging around the house on a Saturday night, having relinquished my job as sports editor of The Quincy Herald-Whig three weeks earlier to assume a new role as the newspaper’s news editor. It was a promotion that meant having nights and weekends off for the first time in nearly 20 years, counting my time as a sportswriter for the Columbia Missourian at Mizzou.

So I was hanging out with my kids instead of sitting in a stadium press box somewhere preparing to write about other people’s kids when the telephone rang. My wife answered in another room.

“It’s for you,” she said. “Doug Elledge.”

I took the phone.

“Donnie, this is Doug. We lost Coach tonight.”

Those words were a punch to the gut.

“Coach” was Paul Kreke. He was only 43 years old. He had been diagnosed with brain cancer the year before. In an emotional conversation soon afterward, he told me how he cried all the way home after doctors in St. Louis gave him the news. But he was going to beat it, he said, and he looked good and sounded upbeat the last time we saw each other.

And now he was gone. My friend was gone. Damn cancer. The unfairness of it all.

One of the many great things about being a sportswriter is the people you meet and the memories they create. During the 1980-81 high school basketball season, I was a 24-year-old sportswriter with a wife and young daughter trying to prove myself. Paul was a 27-year-old coach with a wife and young son trying to prove himself.

And our lives converged.

My beat was Class A Quincy Notre Dame and other small schools. The more senior members of the sports staff were covering the Class AA Quincy High School Blue Devils, arguably one of the greatest high school teams in Illinois history. It was a team that featured several future Division I college basketball players, went 33-0 to win the school’s first state championship since 1934 and was voted the country’s best high school team by USA Today.

Paul coached at tiny Liberty High School, about 15 miles east of Quincy, and Doug Elledge was his assistant. Liberty had only a couple hundred students and played in a bandbox of a gym that wasn’t regulation length. It wasn’t “Hoosiers,” but it was close.

The team as a collection of talented “farm boys” who played with the guile and intensity of their coach, an imposing figure on the sideline at 6-foot-8, a towel often draped over a shoulder as he rose to bark out instructions to his team, or to voice displeasure with a referee’s call.

Paul had been a basketball and baseball standout at Quincy College (now Quincy University). He twice was selected in the Major League Baseball amateur draft as a pitcher, once out of Breese (Ill.) Mater Dei High School and once in college, and was QC’s basketball MVP as a senior in 1975.

Liberty entered the Class A regional tournament as the No. 2 seed behind host Quincy Notre Dame, which finished the regular season with only two losses and was ranked ninth in the state small schools poll. But Liberty had stayed within six points of QND on the Raiders’ home court a month earlier and then pulled off the upset in the regional championship game.

So Liberty was now my story. And what a story it was.

The Eagles followed that with two close victories in the sectional round and a comfortable win over Pittsfield in the super-sectional to advance to the state quarterfinals at the Assembly Hall in Champaign for the first time in school history. Handmade signs along Ill. 104 running through Liberty instructed the last residents leaving town on game nights to “turn out the lights.”

Liberty defeated Pana in the quarterfinals and led Dunlap late in the fourth quarter of the semifinals. A spot in the championship game that night seemed all-but-certain. But the Eagles were late coming out of a timeout, an over-eager official chose to put the ball on the floor on the baseline and start the five-second count, a rushed inbounds pass led to a turnover and Liberty lost by a point.

A few hours later, emotionally spent, the Eagles lost the third-place game to Cairo. (No team was going to beat Madison, the eventual champion, that season.)

But Liberty was still the fourth-best team in Class A that season, a phenomenal achievement that rallied a small community around its team. And I had spent three weeks traveling and writing about its improbable march to the state tournament, forging relationships with coaches, players and community members that in many cases endure today, four decades later.

Paul and I clicked, perhaps because we were so close in age and were early in our respective careers. We both met our wives in college and eventually had three kids. We both liked to shoot the bull.

This was before the internet, email, cellphones and text messages. If I wanted to talk to a coach, I had to call on the landline during their free period at school, or show up at practice.

Paul was free the final hour each school day. During ensuing years we would talk frequently about his team, other teams, future matchups, his kids, my kids. And, of course, there were a lot of post-game interviews, because Liberty became a perennial power that deserved coverage.

It was during the Class A state tournament in 1983, while we were both staying in the same hotel, that Paul brought up the idea of creating an annual high school all-star basketball game for seniors in our area. There were a lot of good players who deserved the recognition, Paul reasoned.

The result was the McDonald’s/Herald-Whig Classic, which, through a partnership initially spearheaded by Dick Shierling of the local McDonald’s restaurants, Frank Longo of Quincy University and The Herald-Whig, was played every June for 37 years before a pandemic and a newspaper ownership change led to its discontinuation.

Every high school boy and girl from West-Central Illinois and Northeast Missouri who participated in those games, and there were 40 every year, should take a moment to thank Paul Kreke for the opportunity.

Liberty won another regional championship in 1984, but couldn’t duplicate its state tournament run. Paul left in 1986 to take over the basketball program at Hannibal High School, a large Missouri school across the Mississippi River.

But basketball in Hannibal at the time was largely viewed as a way for athletes to stay in shape between football and track seasons, a dynamic Paul worked feverishly to change. After a few seasons he moved back to Illinois to Salem High School, where the team enjoyed its first winning record in 10 years his first season there.

And then cancer struck. A life cut short. No more state tournaments. No more trophies. A generation of players who never benefitted from his coaching. A wife left without her husband and three kids forced to grow up without their father.

Paul was posthumously inducted in the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1998. His daughter, Kim, who played at Salem High School (graduating in 2005) and then at the U.S. Air Force Academy, was inducted in 2020. Paul would have been proud.

And then there’s this retired newspaper guy. He would love to sit down with Coach and reminisce about that magical March 40 years ago when we were both young and “Cinderella Liberty” was the toast of the ball.

We could sit around and boast about our kids and grandkids, break down the Cardinals’ chances of reaching the baseball playoffs, moan about the state of our golf games, and wonder how in the hell we got this old.

Only Paul Kreke never got the chance to be old.

Twenty-five years. I miss my friend.