Scott Radley: Local basketball community mourning shocking loss of coach Kelly Dunham

Most people take some time off after hip surgery. Especially when it's their fourth. Correction: Everyone in that position takes time off.

Everyone except her.

Just days after doctors sliced her open, burrowed around to repair the joint and put her back together a few years ago, there was Kelly Dunham back coaching basketball with the help of a walker. And not long after that, patrolling the sidelines of the Mohawk Mountaineers women's team thanks to the help of a cane.

This wasn't exactly out of character. Two years before, she'd coached a Mohawk game just three weeks after giving birth, suggesting an uncommon passion for the game and a rare relentlessness.

I think that would be a terrific word for her," says current Mohawk women's head coach, Kevin Duffy. Relentless."

But what made the 51-year-old truly memorable wasn't so much what she did on - or beside - the court. A day after her sudden passing from cancer on Sunday, person after person mentioned her basketball acumen but lingered on her personality. Yes, relentless described her, but so did humble, beautiful, big personality, special, positive, warm-hearted and a bunch of other words and phrases.

Her life was a basketball story in the same way Field of Dreams was a baseball movie. Yes, the sport formed the backdrop but it was really about the people.

When you say Kel, you think big smile, big personality, big hug," says McMaster coach Theresa Burns who's known her for 30 years and who'd brought her back onto the Marauders' coaching staff just over a season ago. She is so loved by so, so, so many people."

If you could measure a person by the size of her heart, Kelly would be 10-foot-6," Duffy says.

She was actually five-foot-eleven. Despite being born with congenital hip issues, she was a terrific player who would gold, silver and bronze provincial medals at high school in Sarnia. She ended up at Mohawk - as Kelly Buchanan back then - and helped the Mountaineers to their last provincial championship in the spring of 1991.

When the weather turned nicer, she'd be starring on the school's softball team and being named MVP twice. Which contributed to a trophy case full of other honours and eventually a spot in the college's sports Hall of Fame.

Once done playing, she threw herself into coaching. Over the years, she coached Transway teams, was an assistant at Mac, was head coach at her alma mater, helped with the CANUSA Games and ran the under-19 Basketball Ontario elite development team for a few years.

She's the last person who would ever be in the limelight or take credit," Burns says. But she coached at every level and was an exceptional coach."

Again though, try as you might to get people to talk about her coaching, the conversation invariably detours to her personality and a series of stories about a big smile, bigger hugs and a laugh even bigger than that.

Former Canada Basketball president and CEO, Michele O'Keefe, had known her for years even before the two ended up being trained together as evaluators for the national team program. While many people would study players to pick up what they needed to work on or where they were weak, Dunham was the opposite.

She looked at things differently," O'Keefe says. She looked at things positively."

Perhaps it's because of that always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life attitude that so few people knew she was ill. Or maybe it's because things happened so quickly. But what was thought to be a gall bladder problem three weeks ago turned into something far worse.

It was only in the past 48 hours or so that players on her team and some others who knew her well became aware how ill she was. Even Duffy only learned on Saturday night and send a text offering his support. But before she could reply, she was gone.

Burns was struggling to find words a day later. Dunham's impact on the sport was enormous, she explained. Here and throughout Ontario. Pretty much everyone who's ever been involved in the local girls' basketball community knew her and was impacted in some way by her.

I'm having a hard time with this one," Burns says. Kel was special."

Duffy - who's known her for two decades and was hired as her assistant and then took over when she decided to step aside because her kids were growing - was having the same issues dealing with it. It was just too devastating to process.

When things are crazy in this world, we need good people like Kelly here," he says. It just doesn't seem fair."

Scott Radley is a Hamilton-based sports columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sradley@thespec.com