THS softball and baseball head coach Matt Davis, 39, was diagnosed just under a month ago with Stage 4 colon cancer. He died at Northeastern Health System in Tahlequah on Tuesday from complications related to the disease.
“I’m stunned,” Cloud said Tuesday in a break from staff meetings Wednesday morning. “This all came on him so quick. He was a big, strong guy and in my mind I thought he would take the chemo and beat this thing, even as bad as it looked because he was so young and all.”
Davis, who had coached softball at Tahlequah for two seasons and was about to begin his first year at the helm for the baseball program in the upcoming school year, coached in the Heartland All-Star Classic softball tournament at Connors State in mid-June. Later that week, he was seen by a doctor and was hospitalized that weekend for tests that determined the extent of the disease, Cloud said.
“He went home and didn’t do real good on the chemo,” Cloud said. “Some of us coaches would go by and visit. He had good days and bad.
“He’d changed his diet and stuff and was trying to get healthy and I don’t know. He never shared with me there was anything that was not normal. Pretty big shock when we found out what it was.”
In 2015, Cloud made Davis the third softball coach in a single year. He’d just hired Bryan Howard out of Mustang in the summer to replace Brett Morgan, who had the job for a season. When Howard had second thoughts after assuming duties over the summer, Cloud, who had the job prior to becoming athletic director in 2014, turned to an old buddy.
The two had been summer league teammates while in college. Cloud was hired as a graduate assistant pitching coach at Northeastern State when Davis, who originally played at Crowder College, showed up as a senior transfer to NSU from the University of Arkansas. They then coached against each other after Cloud took over the Tahlequah program and Davis was at Pryor. After eight years at Pryor, Davis coached one season as a baseball assistant at Catoosa under Jeff Gunter, now Hilldale’s baseball coach.
“It was a unique relationship where I played with him, coached him and coached against him,” Cloud said. “We all have our flaws but Matt absolutely loved every kid he coached. He was rough around the edges, old school, no-nonsense. We were so hell-bent on beating each other we wouldn’t talk during the season. End of the season we would but it was that competitive nature I enjoyed about him.”
Gunter talked about how Davis, as a college pitcher, translated that skill into coaching.
“You could trust him as far as handling pitchers and the coaching part, the drills and knowledge he had, he had it all and did it well,” he said. “He coached his daughter Kennedy (in softball at Catoosa) and he coached her hard. But she understood that and she knew he meant well. They were inseparable.”
Kennedy, a current member of the Tahlequah softball and basketball programs, will be a senior this school year.
Emily Sampson, a junior-to-be who played both fastpitch and slowpitch for Davis, remembered a coach whose demeanor reminded her of herself.
“We didn’t so much butt heads as we were just like each other in so many ways that I could take what he was saying to me,” she said.
Except the time, she said, that it was staged.
“Practice was going kind of bad one day and he called me over and really made it look like he was chewing me out,” she said. “What he told me was to act like he just tore me up and I was in so much trouble. Well, when I got back to the girls they were like ‘are you OK, what did he say to you?' It was funny. But all the girls got hooked up after that so it worked.”
Hannah Boswell echoed her teammate about Davis' sense of humor. She also talked about the impact it had on a team Davis was looking forward to coaching this year with much of the team returning.
"It's so sad but I think it'll push us even harder, not just for him but for Kennedy too because she's been through so much," she said. "I hope it really brings us together and we take that hopefully for both of them to the state tournament."
For now, Cloud says, he along with Dylan Neal and Brett Bardell will oversee fastpitch, which begins official practices on Monday. Bardell had been named to take over slowpitch when Davis was appointed to baseball.
“We’d put together a plan thinking he’d be out early fall and just put titles aside and go to work,” Cloud said. “That was the extent of our talks because we were hoping he would heal. But we’ll have a game plan for Monday and be ready for the first scrimmage on the 29th (of July).”
Neal had taken over the summer baseball team when Davis took leave three weeks ago, but Cloud said nothing had been discusse... Click here to read full article
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