{"id":47717,"date":"2021-03-27T16:57:44","date_gmt":"2021-03-27T22:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/kitchen-is-closed-bayfield-girls-basketball-coach-steps-aside\/"},"modified":"2021-03-27T22:57:44","modified_gmt":"2021-03-27T22:57:44","slug":"kitchen-is-closed-bayfield-girls-basketball-coach-steps-aside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/kitchen-is-closed-bayfield-girls-basketball-coach-steps-aside\/","title":{"rendered":"Kitchen is closed: Bayfield girls basketball coach steps aside"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"After
After four seasons, Bayfield girls basketball coach Josh Kitchen resigned to focus on family.<\/span>Joel Priest\/Special to the Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The improvement of the Bayfield High School girls basketball team was clear under the coaching of Josh Kitchen. But when players decided not to join the team during the COVID-19 altered 2021 season, the Wolverines were up against a big fight.<\/p>\n

Shortly into the 2021 season, Bayfield High School posted a job opening for a new girls basketball coach, as Kitchen had informed the school of his plan to resign after the season. BHS would finish 1-12 overall and 1-8 in the 3A Intermountain league, far from the way the Wolverines expected the year to go before the pandemic hit a spring earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of teams in our league, their coaches came up to me right away like, \u2018I can\u2019t believe it, we thought you guys would be top 15 easy, if not going to state,\u2019\u201d Kitchen recalled. \u201cYou know, they thought we had a real shot at it. It was definitely challenging \u2013 especially for some of our seniors who\u2019d spent so much time playing varsity \u2013 and kind of frustrating not to fulfill that dream.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween losing girls to moving and club volleyball and COVID, all kinds of stuff, the girls we had worked really, really hard. Obviously, it wasn\u2019t the season we expected. We were putting together girls that hadn\u2019t spent a lot of time playing together, weren\u2019t used to certain positions, but I thought in general the girls stepped up and did a really nice job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kudos to Kitchen poured out from across the league in 2021 despite the team\u2019s record. Pagosa Springs head coach Charles Rand credited Kitchen\u2019s defense for silencing his team\u2019s best shooter.<\/p>\n

Centauri head coach Troy Reynolds noticed how hard the Wolverines continued to play.<\/p>\n

\u201cHats off to coach Kitchen. He was making those girls play hard. They played aggressive and did a good job on us, I felt,\u201d said Reynolds, who coached the Falcons to a league title and into the state\u2019s Great 8 round of the tournament.<\/p>\n

\"Bayfield
Bayfield Wolverines head coach Josh Kitchen, left, and top assistant Jamie Wursten talk shop during road action at Pagosa Springs during the 2019-20 season. That was a special season for the BHS team, as it went 9-13 overall.<\/span>Joel Priest\/Special to the Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Kitchen admitted he\u2019d actually been mulling over resigning for some time, primarily to focus on a family proud to have completed adoption of a possible future Wolverine.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy wife and I had talked about it probably for six months before the season even started,\u201d Kitchen said. \u201cAt the end of last season, we\u2019d even thought about it. I was like, \u2018I\u2019ve got to do summer basketball,\u2019 and then it was kind of one of those things where I\u2019ve got to keep coaching. So we made the decision probably two months before the season even started, because we knew that if I got into it, I just wouldn\u2019t want to stop.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told the girls about halfway through the season, mostly because (BHS) was posting the job (opening). I\u2019d wanted to wait until the end of the season. So I told the girls and told my coaches. It was very, very challenging to tell them because I genuinely would, under different circumstances, have never given up that job.\u201d<\/p>\n

And under those circumstances, Bayfield\u2019s opponents continued to be impressed by the Wolverines.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think Josh has done a great job with the Bayfield girls. It\u2019s been a rough season for all of us, but he\u2019s done an exceptional job in the situation that he was dealt,\u201d Alamosa\u2019s Shawn Cody said. \u201cI was proud of how they responded; the Bayfield girls played really well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kitchen said it will be hard to move on because of how much he loves the team and coaching. He\u2019s proud of what was accomplished by his coaching staff through four seasons, and he didn\u2019t close the door on a return to coaching down the road.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just so hard to think I\u2019ve given up something we\u2019d worked so hard for, but ultimately, I get to spend time with my daughter, and that\u2019s way more significant in my life right now,\u201d Kitchen said. \u201cI\u2019m hoping someday I can go back. But we\u2019ll see where life takes us; it\u2019s just right now trying to keep my priorities as straight as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bayfield coach praised for work in four years with Wolverines<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47718,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[600,1871,427,346],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-47717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-basketball","tag-bayfield-high-school","tag-prep-sports","tag-sports"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47717"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=47717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}