Billy Kennedy coached Texas A&M into the NCAA Tournament while battling Parkinson's Disease

It's Madness....madness, I tell you!

Yep, it's that time of the year. Unless you live under a rock you know that the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament started yesterday. How are your brackets? Yeah, mine suck, too.

Texas A&M opens up tonight with a game against Green Bay. The Aggies are big favorites tonight and after an excellent season, they're expected to make it to the second weekend of the big dance....maybe further. Their story isn't much different than maybe twenty teams playing this weekend, except for one thing.

The Texas A&M coach, Billy Kennedy has Parkinson's Disease.

Billy Kennedy has been a college basketball head coach since 1998. He's coached at Centenary, Southeastern Louisiana, and Murray State before getting the A&M job in 2011. Before this he was an assistant coach for sixteen years. Kennedy is a basketball lifer.

He first showed signs of PD while he was still coaching Murray State. It was a neck pain that didn't get better. That's not one of the typical PD symptoms but every case is different....very different. His doctor didn't pick up on Parkinson's. Kennedy was told it was part of the aging process. Man, does that sound familiar.

Kennedy then got a new job. Texas A&M. The Southeastern Conference. Billy Kennedy was in the big time....and his Parkinson's progressed. More pain and tremors. He was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's and this was before he had coached a single game at his new school.

Coaching college basketball is a stressful job. When you add in a new diagnosis of a disease that doesn't have a cure, you can only imagine what Kennedy was going through. He then made a decision that so many of us with Parkinson's make....he kept quiet about the disease.

“I hadn’t even signed my contract yet. For 30 days I held it in. First off, I’m not wired to talk about my problems. I also had a new job and a new staff that had just moved their families. There was a great deal of stress.”

Sound familiar? If you have Parkinson's you can relate to this. It took me three months after the diagnosis to tell my family and another couple of months after that to tell anyone else. Plus most likely, none of us has a job like Kennedy's.

He hit the wall and the A&M administration told him to take a leave of absence. Kennedy sat out a month and changed his lifestyle. He started to get more sleep, took his meds, exercised and ate healthier food. That's the stuff everyone is supposed to do but it's crucial to living a productive life with Parkinson's.

Kennedy is now in his fifth year as the A&M head coach and today will be their first trip to tournament since 2011.

“They could have bailed out on me given the struggles we had early on,” Kennedy said of his bosses, “but they stayed the course, and I feel blessed because of that.”

As I said earlier, every case is different but Billy Kennedy is showing that you can lead a normal life with Parkinson's. It's nice to have role models.

Here's my last story about Parkinson's and eating right.

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