Kim Darrah's path from All-American college hoops to Mountain Grove tennis coach

It may really be true that “necessity is the mother of invention.”

After a few years as a teacher and an assistant basketball and volleyball coach at Buffalo High School in Missouri, Kim Darrah moved back to her hometown of Mountain Grove, which is about 60 miles east of Springfield, Mo.

Her son, John, loved to watch tennis. And like his mother growing up, he liked to play the sport recreationally at one of the town’s two public courts. As John got older and better, Darrah and her husband, Ron, decided to invest in tennis lessons in Springfield, taking John on the two-hour round trip to work on his game.

John steadily improved, so Darrah and her husband approached the leaders at Mountain Grove High School and asked if they would consider adding a boys’ tennis team. Their answer to Darrah was simple: “You’re a coach. We’ll add the team as long as you coach it.”

That changed Darrah’s path. She knew how to coach, but coaching tennis was a different story.

“When I knew I was going to be the tennis coach, I wanted to make sure I knew everything I needed to know,” she said. “I started playing and got into the USTA leagues. I started to play competitively, because I wanted to know exactly what I was doing.”

Apparently it worked, because Darrah is in her 12th season as the head coach of the tennis team at Mountain Grove. She’s also still competing in USTA Missouri leagues in 55+, 40+ and 18+ divisions, though injuries have curtailed her activity recently.

Basketball Hall of Famer

Darrah grew up in Mountain Grove playing sports with and against her five siblings. Since the school didn’t offer tennis as an interscholastic sport, the family’s tennis participation was recreational only. They had cousins in California who were more serious about the sport. So when they visited, Darrah and her siblings picked up their game a bit.

For Darrah, playing interscholastic sports was not possible until her freshman year because the school didn’t offer sports for girls until Title IX was enacted in the early 1970s. Darrah, whose maiden name is Penner, competed in the only sports the high school offered for girls: volleyball, basketball and track.

Her best sport was basketball. She was selected to play in the Lions Club High School All-Star Game, which pitted the best players from Springfield against the best players from the surrounding area. The area team was coached by David Stair, the women’s basketball coach at Evangel University in Springfield.

Stair asked Darrah to consider playing there. She had grandparents in Springfield, so she decided to enroll at Evangel. After four years, including two as an NAIA All-American and a member of the 1986 national championship team, she left as one of the all-time greats in Evangel basketball history. She was inducted into the Evangel University Athletics Hall of Fame in 2022.