Jack Kokinda, winningest high school baseball coach in Palm Beach County history, has died

Jack Kokinda, the winningest high school baseball coach in Palm Beach County history, rounded the bases and touched home plate for the final time last week.

Kokinda, who retired from teaching and coaching at Cardinal Newman High School in 2012, died Monday following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 76.

“Jack was a classy guy. He was Cardinal Newman through and through, a class act. He was well-loved,” current Cardinal Newman baseball coach Joe Russo said.

Kokinda began his coaching career in 1969 after graduating from Butler University. He was hired by Newman Athletic Director Sam Budnyk, the winningest football coach in county history, to be an assistant football coach at the West Palm Beach private school. Little did he know then that it would be the first and only stop of his coaching career.

“I was going to come down (from Indiana), stay one year, live on the beach and live a different existence,” Kokinda said upon announcing his retirement 11 years ago.

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Budnyk, who retired in 2004, also was considering Kokinda to be the school’s golf coach in 1970, but when the baseball position opened up, Kokinda asked for that job instead. It was a match made in heaven.

Kokinda would guide Cardinal Newman’s baseball program to 17 district championships, three regional titles and a state runner-up finish in 1993. His teams amassed 703 wins, averaging 17 wins a season.

“Would have been nice to win a (state) championship, but a lot of guys never get that chance. I did what I wanted to do and it was worth it,” Kokinda told The Palm Beach Post upon his retirement. He was inducted into the Palm Beach County Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.

Kokinda's Cardinal Newman team had a memorable game vs. Miami-Westminster Christian, Alex Rodriguez

Despite falling one victory short of capturing the state title in 1993, one of the most memorable moments of the Crusaders’ run to the championship game occurred in the first round of the playoffs that year. Newman hosted defending state champion and nationally ranked Miami-Westminster Christian in a game played at Palm Beach Community College’s Bill Adeimy Field.

Newman tied the game in the bottom of the seventh inning and won it in stunning fashion in the bottom of the ninth when Westminster All-America shortstop Alex Rodriguez, the nation’s top-rated prospect who would go on to stardom in Major League Baseball, airmailed a routine throw for a force-out over the second baseman’s head, allowing Newman to score the game-winning run.

After that exhilarating victory, Kokinda couldn’t hold back his emotions. “I’m as excited as I should be. I wish I could sound coherent. I hope I’m making sense,” he said.

Kokinda coached numerous players who went on to play in college, including his oldest son, Chris, who played at the University of Florida. His youngest son, Steve, who would play at PBCC and later in the Seattle Mariners organization, was a member of the ’93 state runner-up team.

Kokinda made it a point to keep in touch with many of his former players, one of whom was Sam Howell, whose sister, Diane, was married to Kokinda for 51 years.

Howell was the pitcher for Newman when his future brother-in-law notched the first of his 703 wins in 1970 and later coached with Kokinda in the early 1980s before becoming the head coach at Santaluces High in Lantana.

“He was upfront with everyone. What you saw is what you got,” Howell said. “He was a great baseball coach.”

Russo, the long-time baseball coach at Palm Beach Gardens who has amassed over 500 wins and came out of a brief retirement to take over the program at Newman this year, remembers when he and Kokinda reached a milestone in their careers several years ago.

“When I got my 100th win, Jack got his 400th win the same week," Russo said. "When we played each other later (that season), the parents presented both of us with a plaque. He was Cardinal Newman through and through.”

Said Budnyk of Kokinda: “He liked football, but he loved baseball. He was a hard worker, blue-collar. He ran (the program) the way it should be run.”

As Chris Kokinda recently was sifting through some bins of memorabilia his father saved over the years, including newspaper articles and scorebooks dating to the 1970s, he said he was reminded of so many fond memories. Kokinda was the Newman head coach but also its head groundskeeper, lining the baselines and batter’s box before home games and raking the pitcher’s mound after games. He used to prepare the infield for a game by dragging it in his 1974 Chevy Nova with the drag wedged in the open trunk with the help of the tire iron.

And, of course, there was that unmistakable jog of a lanky bow-legged figure making it down to the third base coaches box just before the first pitch. Another memory that evokes smiles and laughter whenever his sons and former teammates gather to reminisce is the time Kokinda accidentally lit a section of the field on fire.

“He truly loved the game, it wasn’t a pastime,” Chris Kokinda said. “He still had that funny, kind of snarky sense of humor even in his last days. I’ll steal a quote from Pete Rose, Dad got ‘high on the uniform.’ Cardinal Newman was a very special place in his heart. Cardinal Newman was where he was most comfortable. That little corner of Spencer Drive was his world.”

Kokinda celebration of life at future Cardinal Newman home game

Mary Martens, the director of development at Cardinal Newman, said the school plans to have a celebration of life for Kokinda at a Crusaders home game this season. A private service will be held for the family on March 18. The family has requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Cardinal Newman High Baseball Program, attention Mary Martens, 512 Spencer Drive, West Palm Beach, FL 33409.

“He was amazing. All his players just adored him,” Martens said.

Kokinda is survived by his wife, Diane, sons Chris (Kerri) and Steve (Jill), and grandchildren Cameron, Trent, Jackson, Caden and Kellan.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Former Cardinal Newman High School baseball coach Jack Kokinda dead at 76