StemCell Therapy

LE MARS | Hours before Marty Kurth won his 500th game as a baseball coach at Gehlen Catholic High School in Le Mars, he walked through his house with a black fungo bat, the kind he's used thousands of times to hit fly balls and grounders to his players.

"I use the bat as my cane," Kurth said. "It helps me get around the house."

Coach Kurth is going blind. In layman's terms, he has suffered a stroke in each eye the past 11 months, resulting in a sudden loss of blood flow to the optic nerve. The first stroke, which afflicted his left eye, happened on July 25, 2016. The stroke to his right eye took place on June 3, just 19 days ago.

Kurth is still coaching, doing so from the dugout, not in his coaching box on the field. He relies on assistant coaches Solomon Freking and Ty Kurth (his son) and Jays players such as Cooper Davis to describe action on the field. The Jays won 10-0 at Hartley-Melvin-Sanborn on Monday night, giving Kurth his 500th victory. With that victory level and a pair of state championships (1995 and 1999) among his six state tournament appearances, the Westmar College graduate is a lock for a spot in the Iowa Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.

The accolades matter little right now, if they ever did. Kurth remains focused on his 2017 team, a club that began the season 0-4 and has ripped off 11 wins in the last 13 games. When he's not studying lineups or opponents, he's pondering a somewhat uncertain future, one that for the first time in his adult life doesn't include teaching or coaching full-time, as he recently resigned.

"I was at the point of my career where I thought maybe after next year I'd retire," said Kurth, a native of Remsen and a second-baseman on Remsen St. Mary's state championship baseball team in 1983. "Now what? I have no idea what the good Lord has planned for me."

Kurth hasn't been one to run from challenges in the past. A physical education teacher who was toiling as Gehlen athletic director several years ago, Kurth was charged with finding a head coach to direct the girls' basketball program. When his search turned up empty, Kurth told school officials he'd lead the team for a maximum of two years.

"I ended up coaching eight years," he said.

Not only that, Kurth piloted the 2012 Jays basketball team to the school's first state basketball tournament. And, he surpassed the 100-win total, all for a guy who was awfully "green" when it came to high school girls' basketball.

The news of his failing eyesight came as a shock to me. I didn't realize it until Barry Poe mentioned it in a Sunday story in the Journal, a wrap-up of Gehlen's title in the J-Club Tournament on Saturday. I was there that day and saw Kurth sitting in the dugout, an oddity for a hands-on coach who was always prepping the field and his players for another game.

"When I lost my vision in my left eye in July 2016, I woke up that morning and closed my right eye and could not see myself in the mirror," he said.

He began worrying at that point, not only about his left eye, but his right eye, too. Kurth's sister, Cheri Hoebelheinrich, who resides in Florida, lost vision in one eye when she was 37. She lost the vision in her other eye one decade later. Kurth's father, who died at age 56, began losing vision in one eye at age 37, too.

"We hoped that after I lost the one eye that I'd have time, like maybe 10 years," Kurth said. "But not even 11 months later, I woke up on June 3 and knew something wasn't right."

Kurth hit infield to his Jays that weekend in the CYO Classic, which played out on fields in Carroll and Glidden, Iowa. Before the second game at Glidden, a 10-0 victory over St. Edmond High School of Fort Dodge, Kurth had trouble catching a toss from his catcher as he hit ground balls. It's the kind of catch he's made a million times, second-nature.

"I couldn't see the ball," he said.

Jen and Marty Kurth visited the Truhlsen Eye Institute at the University of Nebraska Medical Center two days later. Doctors there identified the cause, the same affliction that struck his left eye last July: non-arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy, or "NAION" for short.

"There's no cure," he said. "It's what my sister had, too."

Jen said that while the condition isn't genetic, it can be familial. Researchers continue to study it. The Kurths continue to pray.

Marty Kurth tried to qualify for a "NAION" study, but his participation was ruled out because he has too many red blood cells.

"We got opinions from Duke University and Johns Hopkins Medicine and they didn't want to give me the medication in the study because they didn't know what the ramifications might be with my blood disease," he said.

Jen Kurth, who works in the business office at Floyd Valley Healthcare in Le Mars, said that "NAION" typically affects smokers, diabetics and those with high blood pressure. Marty, she noted, fits none of those descriptors.

Marty Kurth said he can currently see a little out of the upper right hand corner of his right eye. He also has some peripheral vision in his left eye. "I told Ty that if you closed your eyes so that your eyelids were touching and you tried to see, that's kind of what it's like for me right now."

He hasn't lost his sense of humor, though, and it showed on Saturday as the Jays battled Newell-Fonda. When Gehlen pitcher Collin Buden got ahead in the count before hitting one batter and walking the next, the old head coach became anxious on Saturday: "I hollered out to the mound and said, 'Alex, don't make me come out there. You know, I will find you!'"

The players and Budden got a kick out of it, their longtime coach making the best of a difficult, life-changing predicament.

Kurth knows he's fortunate to have Jen, their children Kendra, Mitchell and Ty, and Jen's parents offering love and support, as well as a world of friends and current and former Gehlen students, players and competitors throughout Plymouth County and Northwest Iowa.

"I'm 52," the Gehlen legend said. "I feel good. The good Lord has a plan. We hope to find out what it is soon."

In the meantime, researchers will continue to work, as will the baseball players sporting the Gehlen green and gold. And the wise, old coach in the dugout? He'll lean on his fungo, listening, feeling, smelling for the optimum time to call a pitch-out or a hit-and-run. Maybe Marty Kurth is becoming visionary, in a figurative sense.

"My daughter wanted to make a shirt after Monday's victory," he said. "It was going to say, '500 wins. Not so hard. My dad did it. The last six with his eyes closed.'"

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Le Mars baseball coach rallies while battling blindness - Mason City Globe Gazette

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