LAKE CENTRAL: Officials charge Kevin Foster with rape of 11-year-old girl; Indians hire Melby as coach
BY JEFF CARROLL
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219.933.3373
This story ran on nwitimes.com on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 12:35 AM CST
http://www.thetimesonline.com/articles/2005/02/15/news/top_news/809378fb6fb924e586256fa9000c3a78.txt
Monday was supposed to be the peak of Kevin Foster's young football coaching career. He was going to be approved as the varsity head coach at Lake Central.
Instead, Foster was in front of a judge in Coshocton County, Ohio, answering charges that he raped an 11-year-old girl.
"I've lived in Coshocton all my life," said Foster, informed of his release on bond by Coshocton Municipal Court Judge Dave Hostetler. "I'll be here when this gets resolved."
As recently as Friday, Foster was shopping for a suit to wear to his Monday introduction as Lake Central's new coach.
Three days later, life as he and those around him had known it had crumbled.
Monday afternoon, Foster surrendered to authorities in Coshocton County, and Lake Central introduced Bill Melby as its football coach.
When Lake Central trolled surrounding states for head coaching candidates and came up with Foster, people who knew and worked with him in Ohio were sad to see him go, though excited for him because of the opportunity.
Ridgewood High School, Foster's current employer, is a school of about 400 students, approximately the size of Wheeler. Lake Central's enrollment is listed as 2,743.
"He's ambitious, very positive," Ridgewood athletic director Todd Stoffer said last week. "He's a good community person, a good PR person. He's well-spoken, a good-looking guy. He's got a nice family."
There was good reason why the Coshocton County community was sad to see Foster leave -- he had led the school to its only two playoff appearances in the 60-year history of the Ridgewood High football program.
"You always dream of being a head coach," Foster said last fall. "First of all, I love football, but it's a lot more intricate than that. There are a lot of reasons I liked it."
In the late 1980s, Foster starred at nearby River View High School as a linebacker and running back.
He didn't live the typical exalted life of a star high school jock, however. From the time he made his first headline as a sophomore, his new fame caused friction within his family and his church.
Foster grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, which takes a hard-line interpretation of the biblical verse Galatians 5:26 in the New Testament: "Let us not become egotistical, stirring up competition with one another."
Torn between his faith and football, Foster chose football, despite intense pressure from the church and from within his family.
"I ... had a strong desire and love of something I wanted to do and was made to feel it's wrong," Foster said in the midst of last year's 9-2 season. "It caused problems in our family for a while, and I was kind of the black sheep."
He went on to play at Waynesburg College in Pennsylvania, where he met his wife, Kim. After serving as an assistant coach at his high school alma mater, he was hired in 2001 to oversee the rebuilding project at Ridgewood High.
Then, last week, he landed the job at Lake Central, another reclamation project, and planned to move Kim and the couple's three children here. From the outside, everything appeared perfect.
Yet as the weekend unfolded, Coshocton authorities were putting the final touches on their investigation in preparation for Monday morning's arrest.
Foster had no prior arrest record. Hostetler set the terms of his release. Foster paid $500 of a $5,000 bond. He is to have no "social interaction" with anyone younger than 18. He also is required to keep a 100-yard distance from the alleged victim.
"That is the distance of a football field," Hostetler said at Foster's hearing.
At first, the morning announcement that Melby had supplanted Foster as Lake Central's choice looked like a cut-and-dry case of cold feet.
The story of Foster's impending hire broke in Friday's edition of The Times. The same day, a story appeared in Foster's hometown paper in Coshocton.
The Coshocton report upset Foster. Tribune sports editor Jim Barstow, a 19-year-veteran reporter, spent all night Thursday trying to reach Foster and Stoffer for comment regarding Foster's impending resignation.
Hoping to quell the story for one day, until Foster had a chance to address his players, Foster and Stoffer avoided phone calls from Barstow, who confirmed the story through other sources.
"We've got a situation here," Stoffer said in a phone message left to The Times on Friday morning. "Now Kevin truly doesn't know what he's going to do."
Over the weekend, Lake Central athletic director Mark Peterson sent a release to local media calling off Foster's planned Monday morning news conference, saying it would be rescheduled for a later date.
But Monday about 9 a.m., Lake Central Superintendent Janet Emerick announced Melby would be introduced as the school's coaching choice. Not even two hours earlier, Coshocton County police Cpt. Jon Mosier was signing a warrant for Foster's arrest on the rape charge.
Foster's alleged sexual misconduct is said to have taken place from Jan. 1, 2004, through this past Saturday.
Lake Central worked to distance itself from Foster on Monday, funneling the answers to all questions back to the hiring of Melby.
"It's been a different kind of journey," Peterson said. "Sometimes you take different kind of roads to get to the place you want to be in."
While people in St. John could turn the page, Coshocton County won't be so lucky. Foster has been placed on paid administrative leave.
"All of us are devastated by these allegations," Ridgewood Superintendent Victor Candenzana said in a prepared statement.
In Foster's community, and particularly at Ridgewood High School in the town of West Lafayette, people may never figure out how a former local football-star-made-good ended up making the worst kind of headlines.
"He gave us moral stories all the time and told us to do the right thing," student Megan McPherson told NBC 4 in Columbus, Ohio.
"Everyone who I've talked to is in a state of shock," said Barstow, the Coshocton sports editor. "I've known him since his sophomore year in high school and have always known him to be a very good person. I still hope it's not true."
The Coshocton (Ohio) Tribune contributed to this report.