Northern Illinois Basketball Coaches Will Raise Money For One Of Their Own This Weekend

All NIC-10 coaches will be wearing Team Kasper shirts when their teams take the hardwood for the opening weekend of the NIC-10 regular season.

The shirts will be in support of longtime area basketball coach Gordy Kasper. Gordy started out coaching over 25 years ago when he was an assistant under Mike Miller at Guilford. When Miller left to coach in Galesburg, Gordy followed him where they clinched a runner-up finish in the State Finals. After three years in Galesburg, Gordy would return to Rockford with his wife Aimee who he had met in Galesburg. Since then Gordy could be found coaching at Freeport, Belvidere, Durand, and Jefferson before settling in at Boylan for the past 14 years.

Gordy was diagnosed with colon cancer in the Fall of 2020 that had metastasized in his liver. After 12 weeks of chemotherapy, the tumors had shrunk but still presented problems in his liver. Next up was targeted radiation while undergoing another 10 weeks of chemotherapy.

In early November of this year Gordy was finally approved of surgery to remove 2 tumors from his liver and 1 from his colon. Gordy would spend another week in the hospital and is still recovering from home.

Gordy finally received some good news earlier this week when the doctors informed him that all his margins were clear and his lymph nodes were clean. Gordy will have another surgical procedure in January to reverse a procedure that surgery recovered.

Gordy will miss another 3 months of work and has unfortunately run out of sick days. He is waiting to see if he will qualify for short-term disability but in the meantime the hospital and medical bills continue to pile up at home.

This is why the NIC-10 coaches will be wearing their Team Kasper shirts this weekend, to highlight his cause and convince people to help out through Gordy's GoFundme campaign (AKA the closest thing we have to universal healthcare).

If you'd like to help out this integral member of the Stateline basketball community you can donate to the GoFundme campaign below and/or share this post with others in the community.

Thanks and good luck Gordy!