Dixie Heights baseball coach Chris Maxwell had a holiday idea.
Maxwell’s plan: decorate a Christmas tree with a cap from every Northern Kentucky high school team, drive a little more than 90 minutes to Vanceburg and deliver it to a Lewis County man battling cancer.
On Thursday, David Iery looked out his front door and saw Maxwell, Campbell County’s Scott Schweitzer and Beechwood’s Kevin Gray assemble the tree – with 25 caps – in his driveway and putting it on his front porch.
“They were good enough to do that and courteous enough to do that,” Iery said Friday. “Those guys are really good guys.”
Gray wasn’t surprised every school contributed.
“Not surprised at all,” Gray said. “I tell people all the time, the NKBCA, the Northern Kentucky Baseball Coaches Association, is just some really good, really good guys, really good coaches. You know, we try to beat each other as much as we can, but when it comes time for things that people need, I mean, we come together.”
Iery is a lifelong Lewis Countian. In 1989, he broke his neck sliding into home plate and was paralyzed. In 2017, he started the eponymous David Iery Foundation, which raises money to cure paralysis and educate local youth.
Every spring, Lewis County High School awards the “David Iery 110% Award” to a baseball player.
“David’s done a lot for the kids in high school,” Schweitzer said. “A lot of us have played in different events that he’s put on, and there’s been kids (who) get scholarships. He’s not just a guy that comes in and runs a tournament and leaves; he checks in throughout the year, and we’ve become good friends with him over the years.”
Schweitzer said the tree delivery was modeled after Silver Grove native and former Newport baseball coach Grady Brown, who has two trees festooned with Northern Kentucky high school and Major League Baseball caps.
“And Chris said, ‘that’s such a cool idea,’ and … the coaches responded,” Schweitzer said. “They had 25 different hats on there, and Chris and Kevin did all the legwork.”
Iery and the NKBCA have been friends since 2018, and local schools have played games at Lewis County. At first, he wasn’t sure what was happening – he looked down the driveway, saw a truck backing up and Maxwell, Gray and Schweitzer assembling the tree.
Though Maxwell, Gray and Schweitzer could only watch Iery, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 small cell cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy, through the front door, perhaps they could see Iery’s smile was maybe as wide as the 18.4 miles from Tollesboro to Firebrick.
“Just to have all those hats and seeing those guys bring it to me,” Iery said. “I mean, it just tells you they’re a different kind of people that go out of their way to do stuff to make you feel better.”