Although they live far apart, twins Heather and Jeff Kunkel keep in contact and support one another. They talk at least once a day to offer encouragement.
Jeff Kunkel walks to home plate.
The University of Michigan catcher takes the first pitch, over but low, for a ball, and steps out of the batters’ box to readjust.
The fans in Ann Arbor, Mich., look on and continue their chatter.
But not everyone is taking the casual approach to tracking this at-bat.
Miles away in Columbia, a young woman is following it attentively.
In front of a computer in her room, Heather Kunkel’s heart is racing. Jeff’s twin sister and the shortstop of the Missouri softball team gets edgy at times like these.
“I get more nervous when he’s at bat than when I am,” she said. “I just want to see him succeed and do well and I know he wants the same for me.”
The process is repeated when she is playing. Her brother will listen to live radio broadcasts on the Internet or follow her progress via Gametracker, an online play-by-play program.
To be sure, he gets just as anxious.
It is just another sign of how close the Kunkel twins have always been.
“He’s been a friend all throughout my life,” Heather Kunkel said.
Her brother agrees. “It was always nice having someone going through the same things growing up.”
They speak a few times a day to see how things are going. During the spring, talk shifts more to sports.
If one is struggling, the other will offer advice. Much of the time they will analyze their performances in their most recent game.
An unbridled passion for sports has made Heather and Jeff Kunkel even more tight-knit.
No weenie batter
A young girl strides to home plate with a determined look on her face.
“Wait for the right pitch and drive the ball when it comes,” she thinks.
She knows all-too-well about the mental side of baseball, and this is part of it.
She has been playing baseball and other sports almost since she has been able to walk.
She is 10 now and, because of the hours of enjoyment and competition, has become an exceptional athlete.
She is so skilled, in fact, that she still plays on the boys’ team.
So she is used to the taunts that are now being yelled her way as her cleats dig in. They come at the start of every game lately.
‘What’s a girl doing on their team?’ opposing players wonder aloud.
‘Weenie batter, weenie batter,’ comes the familiar insult.
The hitter is Heather Kunkel and her detractors are just another group of pre-teenage boys.
The pitcher winds and delivers and Heather lines a shot into the outfield. Her parents, Walt and Pam, and other fans go wild. But the other team falls silent.
“Once they saw her play and they realized she was better than them, they shut up a bit,” Jeff Kunkel said.
Heather’s teammates were always civil. She had been playing with them since their tee-ball days. They never gave her gender a second thought.
That might have been because her father was the team’s coach. Or because her brother was never the kind to incessantly pick on his sister, the other boys taking note.
“I think the guys I played with respected and treated me better because they knew I deserved to be there,” Heather Kunkel said.
She has always loved playing sports, no matter what game or who with, since she was growing up in Olympia Fields, Ill., a Chicago suburb.
You name it, she has played it. At Oak Forest High School from 1997-2001, she earned 12 varsity letters — four each in basketball, softball, and volleyball — a record for any student-athlete in the school district.
“Nobody’s ever done that,” said Sue Bonner, the athletic director at Oak Forest. “Ever.”
Bonner had a special relationship with the Kunkels during their time at Oak Forest and still keeps in close touch.
She was Heather’s basketball coach at Oak Forest and also taught the twins in a physical education leadership class.
That class, taken in their junior year, was designed to teach students the rules of all the games that were played in PE.
As seniors, they would then be able to lead the exercises in class and serve in a supervisory role.
“They were so competitive with each other yet so cooperative with each other,” she said. “They loved to win and loved to compete, but always the right way — with class.”
The twins stood out among the other PE aides, most of whom were fellow athletes.
“It never bothered them that people grouped them together,” Bonner said. “It was just very neat.”
Bonner remembers the first time she met Heather Kunkel. She was the assistant AD at the time and was walking through the school gym during volleyball practice.
Kunkel, very shy then, thought that Bonner was coming to confront her.
A recent article in a local paper had misquoted the girl.
She was quoted as saying that she expected to play varsity sports as a high school freshman, though she says she had uttered no such thing. Her ultimate worry was that the parents of other girls would think she was arrogant.
She turned beet red as Bonner approached.
Panicking, Kunkel pleaded with Bonner that she had never said those words. Bonner could only smile, and put her arm on the girl’s shoulder.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ she told her. ‘Even if you did, that is not a bad goal to set.’
Different paths
At 11, Kunkel started to take softball more seriously. She knew that she did not have time for both softball and baseball and had to make a decision.
She excelled with her choice and was playing on a traveling 18-and-under team in eighth grade, the Sharks.
Such exposure was great experience and seasoned her before she even started high school.
Her brother played golf and baseball at Oak Forest. He was able to assist his mother, a media relations volunteer at Chicago Bulls’ games, since he did not play a winter sport.
He would often talk sports with writers from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. He was able to meet many Bulls’ players.
His sister, meanwhile, became acclimated to balancing academics and athletics.
“Ever since I was little I was going from one thing to another and one sport to another,” she said. “I was just used to it.”
She would help out at Bulls games when she could, often running statistics upstairs to John Paxson, a former Bull and now the team’s general manager.
When it came time to choose a college, both were happy with their decisions.
Jeff Kunkel’s choice came easier than his sister’s. He liked Michigan’s strong background in academics and athletics. There was no other place for him.
Heather Kunkel was recruited by many schools, including Stanford and South Florida.
Missouri was on the back-burner. The team already had a shortstop, Dara Throneburg, and Kunkel wanted to play as soon as she could.
She had met former Missouri assistant Mindy Johnson at a camp at Stanford University. But South Florida impressed her most.
That suddenly changed when the incumbent Throneburg decided to leave Missouri before Kunkel’s senior year in high school.
Johnson and then-head coach Jay Miller brought her to Missouri for an official visit. She was glad she came.
“The girls were all great when I came up here,” she said. “I thought it was a place where I could have fun.”
Family affair
Walt Kunkel’s friends won’t be able to enjoy a weekend with their pal until June, at the earliest.
No golfing. No fishing. No barbecues.
He has little time for any of that. He is busy with his full-time job: tracking the athletic pursuits of his twins.
“We’re kind of sports nuts,” said Pam Kunkel. “We’re kind of geared that way.”
So flying and driving around the country to see their children play seems like anything but work for the couple.
“As parents, we’re very proud of both our athletes,” Walt Kunkel said. “It’s been a dream.”
The Kunkels try to see as many of their kids’ games as their schedules allow.
Olympia Fields is about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Ann Arbor. Columbia is six hours away.
When they can, the Kunkels travel together to see their kids play.
Their daughter’s season started two weeks before their son’s this year, so they were able to see her in tournaments in Tallahassee, Fla., and Tuscaloosa, Ala., in the middle of February.
After a week at home, they will be traveling again.
Walt Kunkel and his brother drove to Port St. Lucie, Fla., to see Michigan play this weekend. Meanwhile, his wife will be watching the Missouri softball team in Louisville, Ky.
“It’s very exciting to travel around,” Walt Kunkel said.
Moving on
After redshirting during his first year at Michigan, Jeff Kunkel enters his junior year of eligibility coming off a breakout season.
A switch hitter, he batted .306 last year and led the Big Ten with eight pickoffs.
His sister came into her senior year at Missouri having started 165 of 166 games she’s played in. One of three seniors on the team, she is hoping to help the Tigers to their first College World Series appearance since 1994.
Soon the twins’ college careers will be over and it will be time to move on.
They will still talk all the time and share a special bond, but the anticipation of following one another and offering advice during a slump will be gone.
Their parents both believe their kids can be great coaches. Heather Kunkel is pursuing a degree in education, so coaching some day at a school might be a foregone conclusion.
“It won’t be too long before she’s coaching,” her brother said.
Though he is unsure about his own future, Jeff Kunkel doesn’t rule out a future in coaching, either.
No matter what, he knows he and his sister will stay close and competitive, both on the playing field and off.
“We’ll be doing the same thing down the road, just in a different part of the game,” he said.