Youth baseball fixture Jim Kauss going into Hall of Fame – Janesville Gazette

–>

Comments


Print

The morning after his Medford High baseball team played its first-ever night game against Phillips in spring 1954, Jim Kauss, still recovering from an appendectomy that prevented him from playing in the game, crawled out of an exhaust outlet at a factory in his hometown.

He spent the night in that nook because when the team bus got back to town, it was way too late for him to catch a ride from the factory workers who made a habit out of driving him out to his family’s farmhouse after baseball practice each afternoon.

Such was the nature of Kauss’ love affair with baseball: Whatever it took, he wanted to experience all the game had to offer.

“I had the baseball bug in me so deep,” he said.

With five decades of involvement in the game now under his belt, baseball has sent him around the state and country with various Janesville-based Babe Ruth, high school and American Legion teams.

For those 50-plus years of volunteer service to the baseball-playing youth of the city, Kauss will be inducted into the Janesville Sports Hall of Fame on May 7 as part of the Class of 2016.

Joining him in the honor with an induction dinner and ceremony at the Janesville Country Club will be Carrie (Schieve) Kneser, Alyx (Stalheim) Brandenburg, Al Fagerli and Tom Klawitter.

Tom Davey and Nolan Stearns, two men who shared a dugout with Kauss as coaches of Janesville’s 13U Babe Ruth team that last summer finished third at the Babe Ruth World Series in Jamestown, New York, said Kauss’ contributions to Janesville youth baseball and the community at large have been immeasurable.

“He touched more lives in the city of Janesville than anyone who went through the city prior” and he did so through more than just the game, Davey said.

Kauss also earned the respect of co-workers at General Motors, where he worked from 1955 to 2000.

Around town, he was known as an active family man with his three children: Del, 58; Kathi, 57; and Don, 49. This activity has now extended to nine grandkids and four great-grandchildren.

“I can’t imagine the number of kids and people he has had a positive impact on,” Stearns said.

Kauss’ lifelong affinity for baseball sprouted from a seed planted by a teacher he had at a country school in Taylor County in central Wisconsin.

This teacher introduced Kauss and his classmates to a game called “kittyball”—essentially softball—and organized games against other nearby country schools.

When he reached junior high—around the age of kids he would later coach on Janesville’s Babe Ruth circuit—a neighbor told him about a township baseball team that played games weekly on Sunday afternoons.

There were no age restrictions on this team; as a teenage boy, Kauss said he played with 20-plus-year-olds with young families of their own. There were no uniforms, either, or finely manicured diamonds like those at the Youth Sports Complex. But it was baseball, and that’s all that mattered to Kauss.

Then in spring 1953, the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee.

Behind Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews, the team—which never had a losing season during its time in Milwaukee—captured the imaginations of baseball fans around the state. Boys like Kauss were particularly susceptible.

After a two-year stint playing at Medford High, he graduated in 1955 and traveled to Janesville to see a cousin graduate. Once here, his cousin and her mother “hounded me to get a job down here,” Kauss said. Within a half hour of applying at GM, he had that job.

A couple summers later, he learned the city’s youth baseball league needed umpires. He attended classes with the head umpire, Doug Berkley, then umpired youth games across the river from the factory at Monterey Park.

During this time, Kauss kept up his playing career in the State Line League and the Home Talent League. One of his teammates had a teenage son in Babe Ruth baseball, and that boy’s team, the Red Sox, needed a coach. After some persuading, Kauss took the job.

“I knew a lot about baseball. I didn’t know nothing about coaching,” Kauss said of his early days in charge of his own squad. “I felt like I wasn’t getting out of my boys what other coaches were getting out of theirs.”

In an effort to help himself help his players, Kauss said he began watching Roy Coyle and Dan Madden conduct practices with their teams. He learned much from those titans of Janesville baseball.

“I found out from coaching there was so much more to the game than I ever suspected there was,” Kauss said. “The more I coached, the more I wanted to coach. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.”

Somewhere along the line, he learned how to forge deep personal connections with the kids he coached.

“Jim can relate to today’s kids,” Davey said. “He was coaching in a different era, and although times have changed, he’s found a way to have the same approach be effective with kids. … They do buy in to what he’s saying.”

Over the years, Kauss has been in charge of Babe Ruth teams, both within the city league and tournament teams; Parker’s junior varsity team under Madden; and the city’s American Legion squad in the early 1990s. His clubs have won numerous regional Babe Ruth titles, and his Legion team reached the state tournament in six of the seven years he was in charge.

With Kauss playing a part at these various levels of development, Janesville built itself a reputation across the state as a baseball town.

State titles for both of the city’s high schools, success on the American Legion and youth circuits, and a handful of players who have had careers in pro baseball all attest to Janesville’s strong baseball tradition.

“Any kid that comes to our program is going to get a valuable coaching experience,” Kauss said. “They’re going to learn how to play this game.”

The coaches Kauss works with get better, too.

“Jim really aided me in learning how to control my emotions,” Davey said. “For that I will be forever grateful to him.”

“When I started out, I was afraid to speak up or give my two cents because I was so new,” Stearns added. “Jim gave me the confidence to be assertive in the coaching environment.”

As great as the in-game success has been for Kauss, his knack for building relationships and camaraderie within his teams is an integral part of his Hall of Fame coaching career.

Stearns, who played for Davey and Kauss years before joining them on the 13U coaching staff, recalled a time when, during a drill that involved a lot of baseballs flying around the infield, a player got hit in the head with an errant throw.

After it happened, Kauss gathered everybody around the pitcher’s mound for a prolonged group hug.

“I never had a coach that was that loving and caring for his players,” Stearns said. “I played baseball for a long time and I respected every coach I had, but I love Jim Kauss.”

The significance of the relationships he built over the years is not lost on Kauss, either.

“I got to coach some of the greatest athletes to come out of our town, but I have a thousand of them that are my favorites that never got to play on a high school team,” Kauss said. “Being able to coach them and see their little moments of success, as long as I live, I’ll never forget them.”

<!–

–>

Comments


Print