John Kurty: Baseball

  • Type: Athlete
  • Sport(s): Baseball
  • Year: 2019

John Kurty is being inducted into the Maritime Sport Hall of Fame based on stellar performances over six years in Nova Scotia (in the H &D League) and New Brunswick  (the Maine and New Brunswick League), both high quality professional baseball leagues, which saw many players graduate to the Major Leagues over these years.

During the period, beginning in 1950, he played for the Stellerton Albions, where he was the number two hitter just one year ahead of the Albions’ amazing three-year championship run in the H&D League from 1951-53. However, performing as an outstanding catcher and pre-eminent hitter for two years as a member of the Kentville Wildcats, John would battle hard against some of his former teammates who had remained with the Albions.

The following year he crossed the border into New Brunswick from his hometown in Massachusetts and played with Presque Isle of the Maine-New Brunswick Professional League. Winning the batting title (see trophy) in 1953. In 1954 he returned to the Presque Isle Indians as the player-coach/manager with a team that won the Grand Falls Lighting Trophy as league champions. This would be the beginning of an amazing long career in coaching, managing and mentoring others, especially youth in his hometown and home state (more to follow). The team was also highly competitive the following year, albeit losing out in the finals.

But that is sport: winning and losing, but always competing diligently with honour.

According to Burton Russell, also an inaugural inductee into the MSHOF in 2015, those were “the golden years of Maritime baseball”. 

Aside: The Maine–New Brunswick league was one where hockey legend, Willie O’Ree (another MSHOF inductee), played before his major league tryout in Georgia, where he ‘made the roster’, but as black man in the deep south, he decided to return home to a career in professional hockey; he continues to mentor/counsel youth today into his 80s.

John Kurty graduated from Penn State University in 1951, where he was the catcher for Penn State in the NCAA National Baseball Championship game that same year. After that special accomplishment, he returned to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for the next four years, before eventually returning to Massachusetts to begin his coaching career – many have called him a “coaching legend” – first in high school within his home town of Ludlow, where he was described as being “passionate about educating through athletics”.

He then moved to Westfield State, coaching soccer for 11 years; golf for 10 years; and volleyball for another seven, retiring as PE Instructor in 1988. Throughout that period and at retirement, he was the “winningest coach” in soccer, active or retired, within New England, leading Westfield to ten conference titles, five NCAA tournament appearances, and three North-East College Soccer titles. Later (1984) he would be inducted into the Westfield Athletics Hall of Fame in its charter or inaugural class.

As such, John Kurty is a welcome addition to the 2019 Class of the Maritime Sport Hall of Fame, exhibiting the best characteristics of sport: “ability, perseverance and achievement” – and in keeping with our second goal of the MSHOF, via coaching and mentorship, giving back to youth, “helping countless young people how to improve their play, while (always) stressing sportsmanship and being good citizens”.

Son Jack Kurty, Jack’s sister Carol and their mother (John’s widow, Rita) are all in the audience today; Jack will accept the folder and plaque to be installed on the wall in the 2019 inductee row. Carol will present John Kutry’s uniform for our case displays