How a basketball coach overcame a near-death experience to return to the sidelines

Tasked with leading one of The Basketball League’s expansion franchises this past spring, all coach Ed Corporal did was guide the Frederick Flying Cows to a 20-6 record and the Atlantic Northeast Division championship.

That might have been one of the easier feats he accomplished.

Corporal, a former high school basketball coach at Meade, overcame a pair of strokes in 2013 that left him paralyzed on the left side of his body and required more than a year of physical therapy to regain the ability to walk. That ordeal has provided him with a fresh perspective.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said with a laugh. “[Doctors] told me I wasn’t going to live, they told me I wasn’t going to walk, they told me I was never going to coach again, but I’m here. I’m still standing, and I’m doing what I always wanted to do.”

Anthony Mazlish — who, along with Michael Witt, co-owns the Flying Cows — couldn’t imagine the team without Corporal, who has coached in The Basketball League (TBL) since 2019 and is the winningest coach in TBL history.

“We wanted to come out of the gates and do well, and he’s a proven entity,” Mazlish said. “Could we have done well with somebody else? Maybe. But this was a good bet.”

Corporal might be remembered locally when he served as an assistant to Meade boys basketball coach Butch Young for the 1999-2000 season and then took over the girls basketball team for the 2000-01 and 2001-02 seasons. Afterward, he coached at several high schools and small colleges in and around Kansas City and the Arkansas RimRockers and Arkansas RiverCatz of the American Basketball Association.

After playing a pickup game at the University of Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, Kansas, with some staffers and assistant coaches on Sept. 25, 2013, Corporal remembered feeling ill that night and asking his daughter, a student at Kansas at the time, to check on him the next morning.

“When I woke up and tried to go to the kitchen, I just fell flat on my face,” he said. “I remember having to crawl back to bed.”

Corporal’s daughter called for an ambulance to transport her father to a nearby hospital, where doctors diagnosed a mild stroke and recommended that he stay overnight. While sleeping that night, he suffered a second stroke that left him immobilized on the left side of his body.

The doctors delivered more sobering news to Corporal’s family, many of whom had flown to Kansas.

“They didn’t think I was going to make it,” he said, adding that gout and high blood pressure complicated his health. “So my kids’ mom was preparing all the kids for the possibility that I was going to die.”

Corporal survived but spent four months in the hospital relearning how to gain movement in his left side and the ability to walk. He said he was reminded of lessons he had imparted to his players.

“The first thing I thought about was, I have to practice what I preach — overcoming obstacles, being mentally tough, staying driven, fighting through this,” he said. “I’ve got to lead by example. So I never thought, ‘Oh, God, why me?’ I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to get back to the bench. I just want to coach again.’”

Katie Reyner, a physical therapist who worked with Corporal, acknowledged that the strokes took a toll on him.

“It was pretty devastating,” she said. “When he first came to our unit, he had difficulty sitting up, he couldn’t stand up. He had a lot of deficit.”

Under Reyner’s supervision, Corporal became independent enough to use a wheelchair and a device called a hemi walker but still needed to hold onto someone to walk. In late February 2014, he was discharged to rehab at another hospital for two more months.

Corporal progressed from using a quad cane in June 2014 to a single-point cane in December 2014 to walking without a cane in March 2015. Throughout the process, he was driven by a refusal to back down.

“I was never going to let the stroke beat me,” he said. “It was like a game to me. I was going to beat it.”

Eleven years removed from the strokes, Corporal continues to deal with the aftereffects. He walks with a limp, and his left hand is too weak to grip objects. But that didn’t stop him from guiding the Enid Outlaws to the TBL championship in 2021 and the Flying Cows to new heights in their debut and building a 92-34 career record in the TBL.

“I get out and I show the guys how to play defense,” he said. “I’m not moving as fast as they can, but I use that to my advantage because I’m like, ‘Hell, I had a stroke, and I can get down here and move my feet just as fast as you. What’s your excuse?’ So I used that a lot.”

If Mazlish, the Frederick co-owner, had any concerns about Corporal’s physical limitations, those evaporated in last summer’s heat of Las Vegas where they walked around to scout players at Summer League games and Corporal kept up without complaint.

“No matter what level, you’ve got to be able to fight through adversity,” Mazlish said. “So to me, that was immediately impressive. What he’s done to overcome it told me a lot about his character and his perseverance.”

Reyner stopped working with Corporal after he went to rehab in February 2014 but continues to talk to him. She has been floored by his recovery.