Never Afraid, Never A Doubt: The Legacy of Hershel Kimbrell, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach
by Caleb Pirtle III
Review by S. S. Bazinet

Description:
Hershel Kimbrell served as head basketball coach at McMurry University for thirty-one years, winning 448 games and being named to the NAIA Hall of Fame.

His teams were mostly too small, too short, and too slow, perhaps, but they were the giant slayers, defeating top-ranked programs for one reason.

Coach Kimbrell taught his players they were better than they were, and they believed him.
Never Afraid, Never A Doubt is the biography of a man who believed in building winners.

And it had little to do with the scoreboard.

It is the story of a man as seen through the eyes of his players. He told them: “When every muscle and joint and ligament in your body is telling you it’s time to quit and you refuse to quit, you’ll dig down deep into a place you didn’t know you had, and you’ll find out you can accomplish more than you ever thought possible. At McMurry, we take the word “quit” out of the dictionary.”

As Chris Beard, head coach at Texas Tech University said, “If the talent on the floor was close, Coach Kimbrell would beat you every time.

Review:I couldn’t stop turning pages!

I don’t care that I’m not a sports person.
I don’t care that I’ve never attended a basketball game.
I only know that I started reading Caleb Pirtle’s NEVER AFRAID, NEVER A DOUBT and couldn’t stop turning pages.

Pirtle presents the reader with the amazing story of Hershel Kimbrell, a basketball coach whose team won games nobody thought they could win. But what did it take to become that kind of coach? Hershel Kimbrell’s life started out with adversity. He grew up in the midst of the Great Depression, in a poverty-stricken family. Pirtle writes, “Plates didn’t have a lot of food on them at suppertime.” According to an old-fashioned country tradition, the youngest ate last. Hershel and two siblings were the youngest. They got to eat what was left in the cooking pots. Sometimes there wasn’t much left. After the age of four, Hershel Kimbrell was also missing a father, but he found a way to keep his spirit alive and strong.

What Hershel Kimbrell wasn’t missing was his ability to dream. As a child, he dreamed of basketball. He didn’t have an actual basketball to play with, but he took a worn-out football, stuffed with cotton seeds, and shot baskets into a metal ring taken from a barrel. As an adult, Hershel Kimbrell found a way to make his dreams a reality. He succeeded in playing basketball with great skill in high school and college. He loved the game so much that he became a coach. But what kept me interested in his story, was his tenacious spirit and “never-give-up” attitude. He not only believed in overcoming adversity, but he found of way of helping countless young men not to give up on themselves, to reach deep into their souls and find a way to go forward when there didn’t seem to be a way.

Hershel Kimbrell might have grown up without a father, but he became a father figure to his players. He believed in love, caring and lots of hard work. He took young players who didn’t seem to have much of a future and helped them to carve out a future they could be proud of. However, with Coach Kimbrell at the helm, that meant they had to endure and go beyond what they thought were their limits. They played basketball with teams that had the best players and all the perks, and yet the Indians won many of those games.

However, it’s the way Caleb Pirtle describes the details of those games that grabs the reader and keeps them glued to the page. Reading Pirtle’s portrayal of Coach Hershel Kimbrell and his McMurry Indians and the challenges they faced was as good as any thriller, and yet the stories are all true. Pirtle puts you in the middle of the action where you get to experience the excitement, anticipation and anxiety involved in brutal, punishing games that were hard fought and hard won.

Pirtle’s crisp, sharp style is the perfect vehicle needed to bring to life the story of a strong, fearless man, a man who faced incredible odds and came out a winner on the other side. It’s inspirational, filled with examples of what it means to care about others. It’s an incredible, true story about Hershel Kimbrell, told by an incredible writer.

After reading this story, I was left questioning the limits we often place on ourselves and remembering how Hershel Kimbrell demonstrated the ability we have to go beyond those limits. Highly recommended!

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For more about the author, visit Caleb Pirtle’s website. You can also visit him on Facebook and on Twitter.