By JOHN MARCASE
It was during my junior year at Pineville High School in 1987. The boys basketball team was returning home from a rather lackluster performance in the Lake Charles-Boston tournament.
By the time the old gray and maroon Ford van reached Kinder, assistant coach Ronnie Kaiser had enough. Apparently, the team wasn’t as upset about its loss as Kaiser.
As the van stopped at a red light, Kaiser turned around in the driver’s seat and barked, “The next person who says a word is gonna get slapped.”
Complete silence.
Then, Coach turned and looked at me in the shotgun seat.
“And, I’m gonna start with you, Marcase!”
I might’ve turned whiter than I normally am.
Then he unfurled that mischievous grin of his. The light turned green, and onward north we traveled.
That was Ronnie Kaiser, the longtime Pineville coaching icon who passed away Saturday.
Visitation is scheduled for Friday from 5-8 p.m. at Hixson Brothers in Pineville. A Rosary will be recited at 6 p.m. Services are scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturday at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Pineville.
Coach was tough, a proud graduate of Louisiana College coaching legend Billy Allgood’s School of Hard Knocks. Tough and gruff on the exterior, but also one who truly cared about his players during and after their playing careers.
“He was known to break baseball bats, throw baseballs and basketballs, slam his hands on metal chairs,” said Steve Rachal, a player on Kaiser’s 1980 Pineville baseball team that won the school’s first championship in the sport. “But, at the end of the day, he would always make sure to come around and let us know that he truly cared and loved us all.”
Kaiser was a Hall of Fame basketball player at LC before he went into coaching at Pineville, with a brief stop at Peabody, along the way.
He was a throwback to the days when coaches coached multiple sports. In addition to coaching baseball, he also coached basketball alongside Bobby Rucker, football under Louisiana Sports Hall of Famer Don Shows and later Mike Desadier, and softball with Jackie Laborde-Monkhouse, who credited Kaiser for helping win the 1983 state softball championship.
Kaiser and Rucker spent two decades coaching together and were like an old married couple, playfully nitpicking at each other while trying to get players to choose sides. It often depended on the sport. Kaiser held sway in baseball; Rucker in basketball.
When Rucker stepped down to go into administration prior to the 1988-89 school year, Kaiser replaced him as basketball coach, and Rachal took over as head baseball coach.
“The nervous part was replacing the man,” said Rachal. “I had older brothers who had played for him, so I knew what to expect. I was more nervous taking over the program, but it was great having him as an assistant to learn and bounce things off him.”
In Kaiser’s second season as head basketball coach, he led the Rebels to the school’s lone state championship in boys basketball, upsetting heavily favored Morgan City in the semifinals before defeating longtime rival Peabody in the championship game, making him one of the few coaches in the upper levels of the LHSAA to win titles in both sports.
An indelible scene of that championship in basketball was Kaiser hugging Rucker after the game. In a 2015 Town Talk article on the 25th anniversary of that title, Kaiser said that championship should’ve been Rucker’s.
His former players would go on to serve as head baseball (Rachal and Keith Hood), basketball (Chad Sears), football (Robbie Martin), softball (David Moreau and Mark Mertens) and track (Dwayne Taylor) coach at Pineville. The baseball field at Pineville is named in Kaiser’s honor.
His three daughters – Kasee and twins Kari and Krystal – were all standout athletes at Pineville, each of whom would win state championships in softball.
Kaiser and wife Brenda were married for 55 years. They may not have had sons of their own, but they did have sons. Hundreds of them. And what do sons want most in life? To earn the respect of their dads and make them proud.
During college, I began working at The Town Talk in the sports department, and thus had to interact with Coach as a reporter. It was intimidating at first, but the compliment I treasure most from my 30-plus-year career in journalism came one night after a Pineville basketball game.
I walked into Kaiser’s office. He was sitting at his desk. Assistant coach Billy Jones was sitting on the couch. Whereas Kaiser and Rucker were like an old married couple, Kaiser and Jones, who were teammates at LC, were like a comedy duo, constantly teaming up to pick on anyone and everyone and everything.
On this night, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Before I could say anything, Kaiser looked at me and said, “You were right. I should’ve listened to you.”
To be honest, I have forgotten the subject at hand, but I will never forget that moment.
Nor will I forget a Friday night at Tioga during a heated game with Buck Williams’ Indians that went to overtime. At some point in the fourth quarter, Kaiser suffered a heart attack. He didn’t leave his boys for the hospital until they had pulled out the victory.
That was Ronnie Kaiser. He would be with you through thick and thin.
Medwin Wallace was a member of that 1990 basketball championship team. He discovered, like Rachal and I, that sometimes you didn’t experience the other side of Kaiser until after you left high school.
“When I would go to Camp Beauregard, I’d go by and see him,” said Wallace, who is a Detective-Sergeant with the Houston Police Department and served as a Command Sergeant Major with the Louisiana National Guard until retiring from that post a few years ago. “He always told me he was proud of me, what I had accomplished. I saw a guy who wasn’t always on edge. He was enjoying life.”
Rachal saw that side of Kaiser once they became colleagues in 1988.
“I got to see a softer side of Coach,” he said. “I cherished the eight years we shared a gym (as teachers), sharing life together. He had a great impact on my life.”
When Wallace lost his dad Mack, a longtime local educator and basketball official in 1999, Kaiser was one of the men he turned to along with his godfather, Columbus Goodman, and Ernest Bowman, the former Peabody basketball coach, who was one of his dad’s closest friends.
“We rekindled relations after that,” said Wallace. “I always knew I had Ronnie Kaiser and Columbus Goodman as well as Ernest Bowman. I knew if I needed any fatherly advice, I could call him. No hesitation.
“He didn’t have a son, but he treated me like one.”