Soccer speaking, Kirk Bast came into the money when he became coach at Arapahoe.
He hasn’t squandered his inheritance.
Since taking over the Warriors’ boys squad in 1989, then adding the girls and eventually dropping the boys so he could be an assistant coach at the University of Denver, Bast has guided the Warriors to eight of their 14 state championships.
Five of Bast’s titles — most recently in 2006 — have come while coaching the girls, who began the season ranked No. 1 in Class 5A and are 3-0-1 despite missing players to injury and club commitments.
Bast, however, always plays the hand dealt, even when that means directing a girls program that has been the gold standard in prep soccer since winning the 1978 championship — the first year girls soccer was sanctioned by the Colorado High School Activities Association.
And even if that hand looks like a no-win situation.
“Dumbest thing you can do is to follow a legend,” Bast said of replacing Stu Johnson, who won four titles with the Arapahoe girls and led the junior varsity boys team on a run of around 200 matches unbeaten.
Bast has become quite a legend himself.
As a varsity coach, Bast is 510-91-46. At Arapahoe, he is 465-85-37 overall and 297-47-16 with the girls team, which beyond the five titles has two second-place finishes and two more trips to the final four.
During that run, six of his players have been All-Americans, and more than 60 have been all-state selections.
One of those all-state players is his youngest daughter, senior attacker Kaitlin Bast. Kaitlin, who will play next season at DU, played varsity and won a title as a freshman — not because her dad is the coach, but because the seniors told Kirk they needed her talent.
“We have probably two different sides,” Kaitlin said of the relationship between Kirk the dad and Kirk the coach and Kaitlin the daughter and Kaitlin the player.
Said Kirk: “I was a coach long before I was her dad. I will enjoy coaching another kid next year.”
Raised in St. Louis, Kirk Bast grew up playing pickup soccer with the children and friends of people such as Harry Keough, Frank Borghi and Gino Pariani, who all played on the United States’ famous 1950 World Cup team that defeated England 1-0 and was the subject of the 2005 film “The Miracle Match.”
“These guys were literally the best kids in the nation, and we were just playing in parks at the time,” Bast said.
Bast, who was “never a great player by any stretch,” played collegiately at Rockhurst in Kansas City, Mo. Bast eventually found his way to Denver and would hook up with the ABKs — Arapahoe Ball Kickers — as the school’s team was first called when it was a only a club sport.
The songs the teams sang on the bus back then are the same today. Heck, they even drive the same way to every stadium out of habit and tradition. Because tradition — i.e. winning with an array of talent — is something Bast would never think of changing.
