Fighting
To Win
Kent State's head football coach and his wife struggled with more than a season record this fall
by Lisa Aichlmayr
photos by Allison Waltz
She had a couple of the symptoms, so they decided to run a few tests. No big deal, she is only 46
 Melody Pees: "I didn't know how badly I needed people to know." |
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The doctor said she would call if any problem came up. Otherwise, Melody Pees would receive a card in the mail stamped Normal.
But the card didn't come.
"I had to go in to talk to them, and from the look on the receptionist's face and on the doctor's, I knew there was something they didn't want to tell me," Melody Pees says.
What no one would tell her was she had cancer in her uterus, already in the second of three stages. The disease "reached up and smacked me in the head," she says.
After hugs from her doctor and a referral to an oncologist for immediate treatment, Melody Pees left the office to begin dealing with this abrupt turn.
"So I came here [to the MACC] to tell my best friend."
Melody Pees met her future husband, Dean Pees, head coach of Kent State football, when she was working at her alma mater, Elmwood High School near Bowling Green. He was coaching the football team.
Both were separately married at the time, but their love story doesn't start with a sappy pick-up line followed by dinner and a movie.
Melody Pees's husband was killed in a car accident, and Dean Pees called to offer his condolences and support, five years after they first met. Dean Pees, who in that time had divorced, was being a supportive friend when he asked her out to dinner.
"I said yes, and he hasn't been able to get rid of me since," she says. The couple married in 1990. They each had three children from their previous marriages, and three of them are current students at Kent State.
Melody Pees is the director of operations for Henschen & Associates, a software development firm based in Bowling Green. Sge handles the local clients from her home office. She grew up in Jerry City, Ohio, a town so small that "when they got their first blinking light, everyone showed up to see it," she says. She became a paralegal after studying at the Institute for Paralegal Studies in Columbus, later working in the Bowling Green area at a juvenile detention center.
Dean Pees, who graduated from Bowling Green in secondary education, coached at various positions at Ohio universities plus Michigan State University and others. In 1994, he was a secondary coach under the legendary Kent State graduate Lou Holtz at the Uniiversity of Notre Dame.
Melody Pees once praised Holtz for his motivational speaking, and he gave her a key chain inscribed, "Thank you for your loyalty to Notre Dame."
"That was a great experience for me," she says.