Inductees

On a bus ride home from a basketball game, with his senior season at Summersville High School coming to an end, Denny Hunt felt the real world tugging on his letter jacket.

Going into business? Well, he had jotted that down as a potential college major. Yet that wasn’t him. And so he sought out his coach, Speedy Branstetter.

“I walked up to the front of the bus and said, ‘What do you have to do to coach?” Hunt recalls. “He said, ‘Well, it’s not easy.’”

Hunt never wavered in his decision and now look. This winter marks his 47^th as a basketball coach and, over the past decade, he has doubled as the Executive Director of the Missouri High School Basketball Coaches Association.

It’s a resume worthy of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, which proudly inducted Hunt with the Class of 2021.

Incredibly, 40 of those seasons have been spent coaching high school boys basketball. His stops include Fair Play, Hartville, Republic, Buffalo, Central, Springfield Catholic and Crane. He also was an assistant coach at Kickapoo for 10 seasons, and a Kickapoo girls varsity assistant for the late Stephanie Phillips (MSHOF 2011).

In all, he has been part of five Final Four boys teams – 1987 Hartville (Class 2 state runner-up), Kickapoo’s 2003 and 2006 Class 5 state champions and its 2005 state third-place team, and 2019 Springfield Catholic (Class 3 state runner-up).

It’s been a great setting.

“You’re associated with great people,” Hunt said. “And it’s a service industry, so it’s special. I’ve enjoyed the people – my assistants, my players. They’ve been great to me.”

A 1969 graduate of Summersville and 1974 graduate of Missouri State University, Hunt learned from some of the best in the business.

In college, he mentored under MSU baseball coach and athletic director Bill Rowe (MSHOF Legend 2016), took mental notes watching then-MSU basketball coach Bill Thomas (MSHOF 1990) and student-taught under the guidance of Greenwood Laboratory School basketball coach Larry Atwood (MSHOF 1989).

“I will always remember the advice (Atwood) gave me,” Hunt said. “He said, ‘Son, you work hard and anything you do is right.’”

A rebuild at Fair Play led to a 15-win season in Hunt’s third year there, and it caught the attention of Hartville’s superintendent, who had coached for Morrisville in the same conference years before.

At Hartville, Hunt’s teams were 153-84 over 10 seasons (1978-1987). The 1987 team (29-3) made history with a series of firsts for the program – the first Final Four and first time in a state championship game. Only Cape Notre Dame ended the Eagles’ run.

By then, he had built up Hartville’s youth program, which drew fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders. Each grade had eight teams of eight, and several of the 1987 players had developed there.

Success followed as Hunt headed to the Springfield area, and eventually was part of a tremendous decade with Kickapoo boys basketball (1997-2007).

“We just had great players,” said Hunt, the varsity assistant and junior varsity head coach. “I felt like our junior varsity teams could beat a lot of varsities. It was a good system.”

Eventually, Hunt was assistant coach at NCAA Division II’s Drury University and Southwest Baptist University for a combined seven seasons. He returned to the high school ranks in 2019 as an assistant at Springfield Catholic and then was the Irish’s head coach two seasons before heading to Crane.

Since 2012, Hunt has been the Executive Director of the Missouri High School Basketball Coaches Association, or MBCA.

“It’s been a great deal. I really enjoy it,” Hunt said. “I love coaches, and I know it’s a hard job. Anything we can do to recognize players and coaches, it’s fun.”

The MBCA honored Hunt in 2012 with its Gary Filbert Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted him in 2015.

Additionally, Hunt directs the Norm Stewart Classic and put together a 48 hours of basketball shootout with teams across the state.

The 2021 calendar year also has been a highlight.

Not only was he honored by the National High School Basketball Coaches Association with the Court of Honors, but his Missouri Sports Hall of Fame’s induction comes years after Hunt and his wife, Patty, worked the Hall of Fame’s inaugural Enshrinement in 1994.

Even better, Patty and their daughters, Samantha and Alexandra, have long had his support.

“Patty is a great coach’s wife,” Hunt said. “I wouldn’t have made it without her. And the girls have been right there, too, in athletics.”