‘Crowd favorite’ Kennedi Stacy ‘goes 100% every second’ for undefeated Transylvania

Kennedi Stacy operates at only one level — 100%.

From four years at Magoffin County High School in Salyersville to the 2023 Women’s Division III national championship game in Dallas this weekend, the fierce Transylvania senior guard has stood out in every step of her journey. Those who’ve spent considerable time with Stacy deem her memorable for many reasons, the biggest of which being her bold dedication to all that she does.

On Saturday, Stacy will get one last opportunity during 32-0 Transylvania’s unprecedented season to wow the crowd when the Pioneers wrap up their postseason run at American Airlines Arena with a shot at the program’s first national title.

The team’s second-leading scorer has averaged 14.1 points and 5.4 rebounds per game this season. But, years ago, the Pioneers had no idea what was coming.

Back in November 2018, a then-Transylvania assistant made the trek to eastern Kentucky to see a Pikeville player in her season opener at Magoffin County. Pikeville defeated the Hornets 77-48, but a particularly gritty player on the losing team caught the assistant’s eye.

“I’m pretty sure I had most of the points,” Stacy recalled, “and didn’t stop playing the whole time.”

Both of those things are true. Stacy recorded a double-double with 26 points and 12 rebounds.

That was the first game of head coach Justin Williams’ career at Magoffin County. Although he only coached her for a single season, Stacy made quite the impression.

“She sold me from the first year,” Williams said. “She was the most competitive person I’ve ever been around. And, in that first year, she went from being the best athlete, best player, to being a tremendous leader.”

Because of the nature of how Transylvania head coach Juli Fulks runs her program, it’s no surprise that learning plays a key role in many of her players’ lives. Stacy’s relationship with learning is no different.

According to Williams, Stacy’s growth as a senior allowed the team to do unexpected things. The Hornets, who finished that season with a 7-25 record, earned an important overtime victory late in the year.

“(Stacy was) learning how to trust her teammates,” Williams said. “And because of her growth, we were able to pull off a major upset in our district tournament. She is just a very, very special individual. A special person and special player.”

It took just 10 minutes of touring Transylvania during her senior year for Stacy to feel like home. But, when she arrived as a full-fledged freshman, she was thrown into much more than she expected.

Following an upperclassman’s injury, as well as teammate Maddie Kellione’s ACL tear, the team turned to Stacy to fill a much-needed guard spot for the 2019-20 season. Stacy said the sudden changes took some getting used to.

“It was very scary,” Stacy recalled. “Because one, I didn’t really know how to play with people. I didn’t really know how to play a game of basketball with other people who were better than me. And it was really difficult because I was transitioning from having to listen to a male coach to a female coach. So like, I never heard her voice on the floor. Everything was just like tunnel vision.”

Throughout that freshman season, Stacy learned from senior guards Shelby Boyle and Ashton Woodard. She said that they helped ease that transition.

“It was a great learning experience,” Stacy said. “There’d be times I’d be somewhere that I wasn’t supposed to be on the floor and Shelby … I knew anytime she was around me I was getting ready to get shoved, so I would brace myself. She’s like, ‘You’re in the wrong spot!’ and just throw me across the floor. So I learned really fast, like ‘if I don’t want to be hit, I better figure it out.’”

Her learning curve wasn’t limited to the court. In fact, she didn’t necessarily realize that she loved learning at all until she got to Transylvania.

“One of my favorite things about Kennedi is she has realized about herself that she loves to learn, and any topic,” Fulks said. “We have the craziest conversations, whether it’s science, whether it’s meditational stuff, life success, but she really is somebody who loves to consume knowledge and learn and figure out ‘the why.’ And I don’t know that (Kennedi) knew that about (herself) when (she) first came here.”

Stacy, who is studying health and exercise science with aspirations of becoming a surgical physician assistant, entered college with not much of an interest in the humanities.

She was a certified nursing assistant in high school thanks to the nursing classes offered at Magoffin County. As part of the program, she began shadowing at the local nursing home in the final months of her senior year of high school. Even after she began college, Stacy worked there during the COVID pandemic, living in Lexington and traveling back to Salyersville three to four times a week.

As a student at a liberal arts university, Stacy admitted that she found it difficult at first.

“My freshman year, I really struggled because we wrote a lot of papers, we read a lot of books,” Stacy said. “At the time … I really didn’t like to read, I didn’t like to write, I didn’t like to engage myself with things that wasn’t math, really.”

In taking classes not necessarily connected to her major, Stacy was able to engage with different professors and develop relationships that, she says, have genuinely changed her life.

As a junior, she took a class with Gary Deaton, an instructor in writing, rhetoric and communication as well as Transy’s director of forensics, in which she needed to give a presentation.

Ironically, one of the easiest-to-spot players on the court because of her fierceness strongly dislikes that type of thing.

“I hate more than anything to have to stand in front of people and talk,” Stacy said.

Despite her nerves, and, as she recalled, “I’m sweating in front of 20 people and I couldn’t get my words out of my mouth. I’m about to pass out,” Stacy delivered a speech about Coach Fulks and the statistics behind why the team operates as it does.

“Kennedi is the kind of student who reminds me of the reasons I love teaching,” Deaton said. “Especially at a liberal arts institution. She embraces learning itself as the purpose of her education. She recognizes that continuing to grow as a person and as a thinker is a lifelong endeavor. Most importantly, she applies what she is learning to her life outside the classroom, especially as it can benefit those around her. Kennedi makes everything of which she is a part, each group, each team, each community, better because of her presence. To me, that is the ultimate goal of education, and Kennedi lives that purpose to its fullest realization.”

Stacy said that, in taking these sorts of classes and pushing herself, she found a new love for learning.

“It really just set a fire in me to want to learn more,” Stacy said. “And want to do more and really know how to do things and study.”

This translated back to basketball, through which Stacy has defined herself since she played peewee basketball with boys at the age of 3.

“It just brings out who I am,” Stacy said. “Like, without basketball, I don’t really … I know I’m gonna have to figure it out soon. But without basketball, I don’t really know who I am. People ask me like, ‘What do you do?’ I play basketball. Like, there’s no other thing other than that.”

But people like Williams, Deaton and Fulks, who have spent significant time around Stacy at varying points of her life, when asked, spoke to qualities often independent of what she can do on a court. They spoke to her character, to her loyalty and to her strength.

Of course, those make watching her play all the more fun.

“Kennedi, every game, is the crowd favorite,” Fulks said. “And I think, from my perception, people love watching somebody who plays fiercely and boldly and goes 100% every second of every play. And that, as a crowd, is fun to watch because that mentality is so rare in life. And that’s what Kennedy brings to our program and has brought since the first day on. She doesn’t know how to do anything at 80%. It’s not in her mentality, it’s not in her DNA.”

Saturday

Transylvania vs. Christopher Newport

What: NCAA Division III national championship game

When: Noon EDT

Where: American Airlines Center in Dallas

Records: Transylvania 32-0; Christopher Newport 31-0

TV: CBS Sports Network

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