It was a match that by all rights should never have taken place. It was the 1930’s and the time of the Great Depression. He, like many of his time, was forced to drop out of school after the eighth grade and go to work to help support his family. She, unlike many of her time, not only received a Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern, but also a Master’s. She was a teacher and he was a wholesale shoe salesman, yet somehow they managed to form a union that brought three children into a loving and nurturing environment.

Ted Kissell Sr. met Marigold (Goldie) Lindelof on a blind date and decided that it was time to make it a permanent union in 1938. Over the next few years, Judi, Ted Jr., and Lolly were born They created a family environment that was very unusual for the 1940’s and 1950’s in that they taught their children that it was okay to be different. The 1950’s were a time of cookie cutter homes and “Leave it to Beaver” type households. Children were taught to mind their parents and those in authority and not ask a great deal of questions about why things were as they were.

Things were a little different in the Kissell household in that the children were encouraged to form their own ideas and not to be afraid to be different than the Jones’.

Ted related, “I grew up in the Chicago area in the western suburb of Hinsdale. It was very homogonous, very provincial, but at the same time great for a kid in the sense of feeling safe and secure. It was a typical Midwestern town, not unlike Oakwood. Both of my parents were very independent and there was a strong belief that it was okay to be different which was not the normal conformity belief of the 1950’s. My mom was a little unusual as a person and my dad was definitely a character. We grew up knowing that it was okay to be different, okay to be your own person. You were not expected to run your life just to gain other people’s acceptance. It wasn’t something that was ever said in our home, it’s just the way that it was. It is one of the things that has made me emotionally or psychologically well suited for a job that by the very nature of it, you are going to be criticized.”

As with many boys, Ted formed a strong union with his father through sports.

“My dad loved athletics and it became the basis for our relationship as it is with many fathers and sons,” Kissell says. “I am very much a child of the fifties. Baseball was the national pastime and that is what my dad and I liked the most.” Goldie loved literature and made it a very special part of the Kissell children’s upbringing.
“My mom and I shared a love of literature,” he says. “As a result, I had a strong basis for an individual relationship with each of my parents.”

He had played all of the sports as a kid, but because of his small size gravitated to individual sports like wrestling and tennis where size didn’t matter.

“After a couple of years in high school it became apparent that I had far more talent in tennis so I focused on playing tennis year around,” he recounts. “I had a very good coach and a school with a great tennis reputation so it was never looked down upon as an elite country club sport.” He was good enough to be recruited to play tennis for Indiana University. However, after two years at the school, Ted left Indiana and was married while finishing the last two years of school at Elmhurst College outside of Chicago.

The love of literature did not end when Kissell graduated from college. Like both of his sisters, Ted became an educator and taught English for many years. It was his long time love for sports, the desire to educate young people both in and outside the classroom and a little bit of necessity that eventually got Kissell into the coaching ranks after moving west.

“My former wife and I had moved west and were living in Tucson,” Kissell says. “To be able to coach would help you get a job teaching. So while teaching high school in Tucson I also coached tennis for several years. I would also teach tennis in the summers and directed some tennis camps in California for the same guy that was running the John Wooden summer basketball camps.”

His own education about life continued on the job. Ted had grown up in a comfortable home in a comfortable neighborhood, but that was not were he found himself in Tucson.

He looks back saying, “I taught in an inner city school with declining enrollment. It wasn’t as challenging as some, but you would run into situations where kids would bring guns to school. A good portion of the kids just didn’t want to be there. At the same time, a number of Advance Placement kids were there. I was kind of a utility infielder in that I would move from English to Social Studies and different levels of kids. It was a very interesting teaching situation in that one period I would teach kids that didn’t want to be there and the next with some of the brightest kids in the area.”

Although the love of teaching was still a very important part of his life, Kissell’s upbringing and the penchant for being different and questioning authority brought him to a decision.

“I was troubled with the fact that the teaching system was anti-merit,” he admits. “By virtue of getting one year older and not necessarily any better, you made more money. It is the very opposite my competitive background. I would see guys in their fifties that were pretty much burned out. These were teachers that at age 30 were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and the system just ground them down. I was worried that I would follow the same path so I decided that I needed to get out.”

Never one to be afraid to make a change in direction, Ted decided Law School was the answer. It was this decision that would change his life irrevocably.

“I decided that I would go to law school at the University of Arizona. Before enrolling, I was approached about becoming the tennis coach,” he says. “The Pac-10 was the number one tennis conference in the country. I was not very well qualified at the time. They had the best coaches in the country and here I was a high school coach with a mediocre Big Ten career as a player. I believe I got the job because there was a good deal of pressure put on the AD to take someone local. I took the job with a lot to learn.”

And learn he did. The problem was that he not only learned a great deal about coaching and just as much about people, but he also learned as much about losing as he did anything.

“I coached for six years at Arizona. We had a solid program. We did well against our big rival Arizona State, but we struggled against the big names, USC, Stanford, and UCLA. To give you an idea of how tough the league was, one season Arizona State was 0-10 in the league and rated in the Top 20 in the country.”

He continues, “There is a great deal of difference between high school and college. It didn’t bother me that other people knew more than me; I just really wanted to win. I hadn’t been used to losing, we had been extraordinarily successful at the high school level. We had a record of 128-1. I had a lot to learn at the college level. I made some mistakes in recruiting in the beginning. I recruited too much for talent and not enough for character. It is a lesson all coaches have to learn. In tennis there are so many prima donnas. From the time that they begin to show their talent, they are given special privileges.”

Despite the fact that he had been named PAC-10 Coach of the Year honors in 1981, there were many things that weighed on Kissell’s mind during this time of his life. He loved tennis and sports in general, but he began to question if he had the mettle to be a coach.

“I knew it wasn’t for me after just a short time because there just wasn’t enough variety; there wasn’t enough breadth to hold my interest,” he recalls. “It is too focused, just not for me. I’m just not temperamentally suited to the stress of coaching. There are different kinds of pressure associated with what I do which is different than what a coach feels. I think that it was critical to my development because it is important that I understand what the coach feels like when they lose a game. The wins were more like relief to me and the losses were devastating. But I am only one of ten million coaches that have said that who have gotten out of coaching. The losses are always there. It is when the wins stop being joyful that you need to get out.”

It was decision time for Ted Kissell. He loved college athletics. He loved competition on every level of life, but he realized that he had gone as far as he could as a coach and he needed to find another avenue for his drive. It was at that time that a change in leadership was taking place in the Athletic Department at Arizona.

“I was really lucky in that Dr. Cedric Dempsey (current NCAA President) took over as AD at Arizona. He talked to me about the possibility of doing something else in the organization. The Athletic Department was very operationally focused and as a result, the growth and development of the department had taken a back seat for some time. I had the good fortune of working for someone who was one of the very best in his profession. So I had two of the things that you need early in your career: a mentor and the opportunity. We were an organization that was on the move so I had a load of opportunity to do well.”

Kissell did well in his new role as an administrator at Arizona rising to the level of Associate Director of Athletics for Sports Programs and External Affairs. Yet, he longed for more. He wanted to know just how capable was he. Could he run his own program? It was 1992 and the University of Dayton had lost their long time Athletic Director, Tom Frericks, to cancer. It was Ted Kissell’s time.

Part II continues on Saturday.