WHAT’S Up With…Kelly Mulvihill Stahlhuth

Written By Ron Cobb

Kelly Mulvihill Stahlhuth didn’t completely divorce herself from tennis when she moved on from her job as women’s coach at Washington University and joined the athletic department in the Bayless School District.

She’d been consumed by tennis from the time she was 6 until the day in 2020 when she walked away from the Hilltop Campus after 15 years of coaching the Bears. She was 52 years old.

It was a successful run during which she was named the ITA Division III Women’s Tennis Coach of the Year in 2015. During a five-year stretch, her Bears reached the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament four times.

But Kelly was ready for a new challenge.

“Sometimes coaches stay a little past their time,” she said. “I didn’t want to wear out my welcome. It was time for a new chapter.”

Since she started at Bayless as a part-time assistant athletic director, she has been on a fast track, rising to full-time high school athletic director in her second year and then district activities director in her third.

Tennis wasn’t among her top priorities when she got to Bayless, but it wasn’t to be ignored. One of the many tasks Kelly took on among a wide variety of Bayless sports was reviving a tennis program that had been moribund since the 1980s.

“It was kind of sitting there in the wings,” she said, “but you needed someone to get it off the ground.”

That person proved to be Kelly, with assistance from school counselor Calvin Kohler, a former Missouri Baptist tennis player. In addition to her duties as district activities director, Kelly took on the job of girls and boys tennis coach. But it was a challenge. Not a single student who showed up to try out for tennis owned a racket. None of them had picked up a racket, much less knew how to grip it.

Kelly was able to round up some rackets, including some donated by the USTA.

“The hard part,” Kelly said, “is getting them out there because we don’t have courts on campus yet. Maybe someday we’ll have two. But once they get out there, they just love it.”

The Bayless tennis teams practice at Willmore Park – 2.3 miles from the high school in south St. Louis County – and play matches at Dwight Davis.

One of the problems – or rather challenges – is that Bayless High School is so incredibly diverse. According to school statistics, of the 508 students enrolled in 2020, 63.4 percent were white (but for 53.4 percent of those whites English was not their first language), 14.2 percent were black and 13.2 percent were Asian. Fifty-eight percent of the students are on free/reduced lunch.

Languages spoken at home included Arabic, Bosnian, Persian, Filipino, French, Haitian, Kurdish, Lao, Nepali, Pashto, Croatian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Tai, Turkish, Vietnamese and Yoruba.

“We are truly the most diverse school in St. Louis,” Kelly said. “I think what draws to our district is that it is really a melting pot and very welcoming and inclusive. It’s a thriving area.” One of Kelly’s tennis players was a girl named Dzenisa who didn’t win until her final match.

“We wanted that win for her,” Kelly said, “because for awhile you’re like ‘hey, you won two games.’ And then she won four games. And then she got a W and it’s cool to see them celebrate that.”

Kelly’s job as district activities director is to create programming after school for students in the elementary, junior high and high school. Activities can range from things such as archery to chess.

“How do we not know that we might have a grand master here?” she said. “I never had art talent. Tennis consumed me, so it’s neat because I’m learning about those students who get more involved in different routes than I did.”

The route Kelly took was plenty rewarding. In high school at St. Joe, she won three state singles championships and was top 10 nationally in the 16s. At Indiana, she was a two-time All-American and two-time Big Ten Player of the Year. She did it with one coach – her dad, Kevin Mulvihill, who was overbearing and dictatorial to a young Kelly. Not surprisingly, Kelly went the other direction as a coach. To her WashU players, Kelly said, she was sometimes annoyingly positive.

“Some of my players might lose 1 and 1 and I’d still find something positive in that,” she said. “When you get your butt kicked, you’re like there’s nothing good.

But I always found the good.” Kevin Mulvihill is 82 now, and Kelly’s mother, Mary Pat, is 81. They live in Webster Groves about seven blocks from Kelly and her husband, Bruce, who was one of Kelly’s assistant coaches at Washington U.

When asked if her father would be proud now of what she accomplished, Kelly said, “I can say, without tooting my horn, he’s extremely proud, which I’m so thankful for.

“I see what his intentions were, but they were way messed up, and he says that now. He's apologized to me millions of times. He said ‘I can’t believe you survived.’”

Of Kelly and Bruce’s two sons, Thomas is 27 and a data analyst in Los Angeles. Ethan, 25, is a civil engineer in Dallas.

Now Kelly has a new family at Bayless, one that takes a lot of nurturing.

“That’s what’s great about my new role,” she said. “Right now I’m into great idea thinking, and we’ll start getting more things to fruition this year.”

The new school year starts Aug. 21, and at some point Kelly is certain to remind her fellow district administrators how great it would be to have a couple of tennis courts on the Bayless campus.