By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
Joe Beard spent the last 20 years of his education career as a teacher, coach and administrator at Ludlow High School. In each of those roles, he impressed people with his drive and compassion.
“Students, teachers, parents, I’ve not met anybody who had anything bad to say about Joe,” said his long-time friend Cory Highfield, who still teaches at the high school. “He’s always been a class act and had respect for everybody.”
Joe Beard
Beard passed away Sunday evening at Hospice of St. Elizabeth in Edgewood after battling a rare form of brain cancer. He was 57.
Visitation will be 3-7 p.m. on Thursday at Middendorf-Bullock Funeral Home in Ludlow. Following the visitation, there will be a funeral service at 7 p.m. Burial will be in Arlington East Hill Cemetery in Indiana.
A native of Rushville, Indiana, Beard joined the Ludlow High School faculty in 1994 as a special education teacher and boys head basketball coach. He left coaching in 2005 to become the school’s assistant principal and athletic director. He was later promoted to principal and held that position until his retirement in 2014.
Mike Borchers, superintendent of Ludlow Independent Schools, started teaching at the high school one year after Beard joined the faculty as a special education teacher.
“He had a big space in his heart for kids who came from tough backgrounds,” Borchers said. “He always tried to work with those kids, knowing that some of the barriers they had were bigger than anything some of our other teachers had to overcome.”
Beard was diagnosed with cancer last fall. Highfield said his condition improved after receiving chemotherapy treatments for several months, but he had a relapse a few weeks ago.
“He touched a lot of lives,” Highfield said. “There was a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that Joe would do for kids that nobody ever knew about. If a kid needed something, Joe was always going to make sure the kid got whatever they needed. I’m sure they appreciated that and can look back now knowing that Joe was there to help them.”
Beard was head coach of the Ludlow boys basketball program for 11 seasons and his teams compiled a 162-118 record. The Panthers posted a winning record in each of his last nine seasons. The 2003-04 team was runner-up in the 9th Region All “A” Classic, won the Division III conference title and finished with the program’s best-ever 25-5 record.
“He was a great coach and a great teacher,” said Highfield, who was an assistant on Beard’s staff. “I learned a lot from him as far as being a coach and seeing how to treat kids.”
When he became Ludlow’s athletic director, Beard hired one of his former players and assistant coaches, Aaron Stamm, to be the girls head basketball coach.
“One thing that was pretty impressive with him was he was in it for the kids,” Stamm said of his former coach and mentor. “A lot of people talk about that now, but he was 100 percent in it for the kids and cared about the kids. He was just a perfect fit down there (in Ludlow).”
When Beard became the high school principal, he kept the students in mind while he was interviewing potential faculty members.
“He worked on trying to bring in people with different kinds of backgrounds so the kids would have different kinds of teachers to work with and not the same profile all the time,” Borchers said.
Beard was a point guard on the Rushville High School basketball team that was was runner-up in the 1976 Indiana high school tournament. He was head basketball coach at Gallatin County High School before coming to Ludlow. After his final season as a head coach, he listed his career record as 263-204 in 19 seasons.
“He was a fun guy to talk to, but he had a fire in him too,” Stamm said. “When the game started, Joe was as much a competitor as anybody.”
Complete obituary information is available on the Middendorf-Bullock Funeral Home website.
