Legendary Johnson County Community College coach Sonny Maynard never set out to break racial barriers across the Midwest, he simply wanted to win baseball and basketball games.

He did win, constantly, throughout a star-studded career as a community college player and coach that spanned decades and has landed him spots in five different Halls of Fame across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.

But in doing so, Maynard also became a trailblazing Black educator who paved the way off the field during the Civil Rights era for generations of Black students, athletes, coaches and school administrators who have followed in his footsteps.

What began as an abandoned dream to play basketball at Oklahoma State University, which had desegregated in the early 1950s and did not recruit Maynard even after he was named the most valuable high school player, ultimately led to his groundbreaking role as a founding member of Johnson County Community College and a revered Black coach when few other people of color were given the chance.

“It was the greatest thing that really ever happened to me in my life,” Maynard said. “Patience pays off, just being willing to work and wait for your opportunity and then when it comes, then you take advantage.

“I had loads of experience ... everybody knew who I was, but no one was willing to hire me or take a chance on me, until we came here.”

Now 88 years old and finally retired in Olathe — Maynard only recently hung up his softball cleats, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began — the humble coach reflected this week on Black History Month and his role in the ongoing fight for racial justice across Kansas City.

“It was a long time coming, but it has finally gotten here,” he said. “Things are much much better.”

Born and raised in Cushing, Oklahoma, Maynard became a standout athlete in baseball and basketball and led his high school basketball squad to the 16-team national Black high school tournament three years in a row.

His basketball skills earned him national recruiting attention, but he still could not break through at Oklahoma State, then known as Oklahoma A&M. Instead, he was convinced to join the then-Arkansas City Junior College team across the state line in southern Kansas to play for coach Dan Kahler, years before Kahler himself became an iconic Kansas City educator in the Northland.

Maynard was named a two-time All-American at “Ark City,” now known as Cowley County Community College, and the team ultimately reached No. 1 in the junior college rankings during his tenure.

Although he initially struggled to find work in the predominantly white rural town, Maynard’s athletic prowess landed him a job coaching local contractor Bob May’s semipro baseball and Amateur Athletic Union basketball teams. The Mays built Maynard and his wife a home and with the help of his community college colleagues he was able to continue his education — including a fateful return to Oklahoma State, where he earned a master’s degree in education in 1963.

But racial discrimination continued to unsettle Maynard and he recalled one time a white Oklahoma State classmate tried to bring him to lunch off campus only for the restaurant to refuse to serve Maynard. It surprised his naive friend, but not Maynard.

“You got used to expecting that,” he said last week.

During the late 1950s and 60s, however, Maynard also served as recreation director at Winfield State Hospital, where he was inspired by the patients with mental illness and their perseverance. That inspiration led Maynard to help create an annual regional tournament there that became a precursor to the Special Olympics.

“This gave me an opportunity to look at these kinds of people — many of them were really, really happy, particularly the mentally ill,” he said. “I’m saying to myself, ‘What have I got to complain about? These people are happy.’ “

Maynard’s baseball team took third place in the National Baseball Congress tournament in Wichita his first year as coach and both the baseball and basketball teams continued winning throughout the 1960s. At the end of the decade, he even rejoined Cowley County Community College as an assistant basketball coach, the school’s first Black coaching hire.

The success earned Maynard a reputation as a top-tier coach who faced off against an aging Satchel Paige and connected with Buck O’Neil, both of whom became good friends and whom he would later join in Kansas City.

The biggest step for Maynard came in 1969 when Orville Gregory, the long-time athletic director at Cowley County Community College, was tapped to become athletic director at a new endeavor in the Kansas City area called Johnson County Community College.

Gregory tapped Maynard to follow him as an assistant basketball coach and teacher, but the all-white leadership developing the school was skeptical at first of bringing a Black man to the still deeply racially segregated metro area.

“Well, you know, I’m rather ambivalent about hiring this guy,” Maynard recalls one of the trustees telling the others, with Maynard in the room. “He’s been on a small scale, nobody’s ever heard of him before. I have one question: If we hire him, where’s he gonna live?”

Chiefs greats Buck Buchanan and Bobby Bell lived in Overland Park and Prairie Village, but few other Black families lived on the Johnson County side of the city at the time and college leaders worried about how the Maynards would be received.

“I would like to have the job and if you are willing to give me a chance,” Maynard recalled telling the group with a smile, “Where I’m going to live or stay, that’ll be my problem. I think I can handle that.”

Maynard won the position — one of the only Black founders of the community college when it was still run out of a church in Merriam. He, his wife Edna and his young daughter, Che’rell, moved to Overland Park and, despite college leaders’ concerns, Maynard said they were accepted into the community.

He was named coach of the college’s new Cavaliers baseball team the next year and led the team to 504 victories over the next 14 seasons, including three Junior College World Series appearances in 1974, 1980 and 1984, according to school records. His teams never recorded a losing season, achieved five national rankings, won three regional titles and 19 of his players went on to be drafted by professional baseball teams.

Maynard quickly became a beloved member of JCCC leadership and came to be the “face of the school, so to speak,” said Steve Benson, who played for the first JCCC men’s basketball team that Gregory and Maynard coached. Maynard did not highlight that he was one of the only Black coaches in the region at the time, he simply set about coaching and winning, a lot, Benson said.

“With Sonny, you know we’re all white Johnson County basketball players, we’d never had any Black coaches,” Benson said. “There really wasn’t an issue, he made it so seamless. He was just our coach. The guys all liked him and he really cared for all of us ... He just made it easy for who he was working with and the players.

“They would do anything for him and he would do anything for them,” he continued. “That’s what it’s all about, anyway. Coaching is teaching and influencing kids and trying to get them on the right track.”

In 1980, Maynard was selected as a coach for the United States Baseball Federation’s Japan-USA All Star Series held in California and the old Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Nebraska. The team lost its first game against Japan but won six straight to win the series that year and then-President Jimmy Carter wrote Maynard a letter of congratulations.

Maynard was tapped to turnaround the college’s women’s basketball program in 1986 and transformed a winless team into the second-place team in the conference two years in a row, school records show.

In 1992, JCCC announced it would form a college Hall of Fame and picked just two inaugural inductees: Gregory and Maynard. The honor recognized Maynard’s success as both a coach and an original administrator and founder of the college.

Cowley County Community College and Southwestern College, where Maynard earned his bachelor’s degree, inducted him into their halls of fame in 1999 and 2000 and he also has been added to the Conoco AAU in Oklahoma and Missouri Valley AAU halls of fame.

In his garage this week, Maynard surveyed just a portion of his trophies, plaques and awards that were enough to fill a half-dozen chairs and tables arranged around him. Reams of old newspaper clippings and season programs along with signed memorabilia from former players, famous athletes and coaches covered nearly half the roof of one of his family’s cars.

But the accolades mean less to Maynard than the example he hopes he set for others.

“I always felt that most important, fundamentally, was to try to lead by example,” he said. “You can get a lot of things done if you don’t complain about everything and just try to lead by example.”

Maynard’s former coach Kahler, who went on to become the first principal of Oak Park High School and an iconic Kansas City educator, recalled traveling with Maynard in his 2001 book “Successful Schools.” Kahler described riotous drives to basketball games with a laughing young Maynard and Lafayette Norwood, who later became a renowned KU basketball coach, and how those conversations underscored the importance of “mutually caring relationships” between teachers and students that all three men came to embody.

“In more than seventy years on this spinning planet, I have never known a nicer person,” Kahler recalled telling the crowd gathered for one of Maynard’s hall of fame inductions.

Maynard smiled rereading the passage inside his garage last week and credited the vision of leaders like Kahler and Gregory with teaching him that even in the tumult of the Civil Rights era, Maynard’s perseverance could inspire change. He hopes it still does.

“There’s a difference in people, but it’s not color,” Maynard said. “I learned that from these people I was telling you about in Ark City who took me in. They of course were white and I tell you what, they were just outstanding people because had it not been for them, I probably wouldn’t have been where I am today.”