Rogers High coaching fixture Dick Kinzer dies at 91

Dick Kinzer loved kids. It wasn’t a one-way thing. They reciprocated; they loved him back.

“He was a kid magnet,” former fellow Rogers High School teacher and coach Barb Silvey said of Kinzer, who died Oct. 23 at Hospice House North in Spokane. He was 91.

“He always had time for everybody; kids, teachers, coaches, anybody who needed anything,” Silvey said. “Whatever he was doing, he would stop and give you his time. That was important to him.

“You could count on him for anything,” the former longtime former tennis coach added. “You saw how the kids took to him; how they reacted to him. As a coach, you just wanted to be like him.”

Kinzer, who served in the Army during the Korean War, earned a bachelor’s degree with honors and a master’s in physics from the University of Wyoming. He started his teaching and coaching journey at Morton High School in Kinnear in his native Wyoming in 1955. He taught science, and in the early days, coached pretty much anything that needed a coach.

But he found his most success with basketball and track. He won a state basketball championship on his second stop in Gillette, Wyoming, in 1966 and another in 1971 in Helena, following a second-place finish the year before.

With that ’71 title in hand, Kinzer left Helena for Spokane to apply for the men’s head coaching job at Spokane Community College. He didn’t get it.

He told S-R sportswriter Mike Vlahovich for an August 1994 story, “I didn’t realize the guy I was up against (Craig Johnson) was the (college) president’s son.” Vlahovich wrote that Kinzer made the comment “jokingly.”

That took Kinzer up the road a ways to Rogers, where he was hired as boys basketball coach for the 1971-72 season. He coached the Pirates through 1983. During that time, Rogers had four top-three league finishes and twice went to the State AAA tournament, finishing fifth in 1975 with a team that tied for the GSL title and eighth in 1978.

Those teams were led by brothers Ed and Tony Poydras and Bill Wood.

Kinzer stepped down from basketball in 1983 with a 120-161 overall record and took on coaching the Pirates’ girls track team.

Three years later, Rogers won the 1986 State AAA championship.

Spokesman-Review correspondent Bill Pierce recounted in a piece in March 2016, “Although the Rogers girls finished behind University … in the GSL, coach Dick Kinzer found himself with a talented team” of five sprinters.

Kellie Gamby, Keryn Shines, Tina Braman, Trish Matlock and Dee Dee Bell, “were young and talented,” Pierce wrote. “Braman was the only senior among them.”

Undaunted, they produced the Greater Spokane League’s first girls track and field state championship.

Kinzer retired from teaching in 1992, but he didn’t stay retired long.

In 1995, Rick Mergenthaler, who had been Kinzer’s student manager when he coached in Helena, was hired as the boys basketball coach at Rogers. He talked – probably didn’t take much talking – Kinzer into being his assistant.

“He’s an up-tempo, offensive coach; runs a fast break as well as anybody,” Mergenthaler said, alluding to the entertaining style Kinzer’s teams employed. “I’d done it over the years and was not very successful.”

“I’ve had a good time,” Kinzer was quoted as saying of his time on the bench with Mergenthaler. “And (as an assistant) you don’t have all the other pressures of the stuff that goes on.”

And working with kids, Kinzer is noted for saying, “is what made me a better person.”

And the kids better people.

The family obituary said a celebration of life will take place in the summer.