Rebecca Kill: The woman Jerry Kill recruited to marry him

Interest was piqued regarding Rebecca Kill when Coach Jerry Kill mentioned her numerous times during the press conference. He told the story of how persistent he is “œ I can tell you, if I can capture that lady and I did that a long time ago; I was 21 years old and she was 19, and we’ve been married ever since. I want to let ya’ll know now, I know there’s just been a big search. I wasn’t her first choice. I was second or third down that line. I had to work at it. “œHe also joked that she was not his daughter, and indeed, his wife. The entire crowd wanted to see who the 1st Lady of Gopher football would be, and she didn’t disappoint. As lovely as she looks she is a very articulate, warm, kind woman who seems to be a lady that is not the woman behind her man, but the one beside him.

GH: How did Coach Kill’s battle with cancer change things?
RK: It makes you put your priorities in order. He used to put football a little ahead of everything else. After this happened, you realize that you might not be around. You tend to put God 1st, and family next, and then football. That’s where we’ve been, we made that negative thing become a positive thing because we started a cancer fund that helps people that need assistance. What we went through has made us better people.

GH: Do you plan on doing a lot of fundraising in Minneapolis?
RK: Our fund is actually located in Southern Illinois; because we promised those people there that we would do this. I still work with them, thank goodness for email so I can do the applications with Southern Illinois Healthcare. They really run it for us, which is the only way we could have kept it going because it’s gotten big, it’s actually bigger now than when we were there. I work through that. I’m not sure what I’m going to do up here, I need to get a feel for what needs to be done and get situated, and we’ll figure it out.

GH: How overwhelmed are you uprooting your life so quickly? Do you have children coming with?
RK: We have two girls, one will be 23 on Thursday, and one will be 20 years old. They are in college, one is a senior at Southern Illinois, and Tasha is a sophomore at Northern Illinois. She’ll finish out this year, and I don’t know what she’s going to do beyond that. We won’t make her move anywhere; we’ll just see what happens. It is overwhelming at 1st, but we’ve done it a few times, I feel like I can handle it okay. It’s hard when he’s here, and this is what any coach’s wife. The guys have to leave in a couple of days, so we get stuck with getting the house sold, getting the kids taken care of and all those things. It’s just part of it, and you just have to do it. It is kind of exciting to move to different places, a different house, and different people.

GH: Speaking of a different place, how appealing is Minneapolis to you?
RK: It’s very appealing. We were just an hour away from Chicago, but we still had to drive to Chicago, we didn’t live in Chicago. This is very appealing.

GH: This may be thinking too far ahead, but do you think you’ll live close to campus (like Tubby Smith) in a townhome or condo, or out further in a larger home?
RK: We really haven’t had a chance to talk about it. I know he likes to be closer to work; he works a lot, so it’s hard to be too far away with his work schedule. We’ll have to weigh out all the possibilities and see what happens.

GH: Have you gotten a lot of reactions from the NIU players and families?
RK: There have been, I haven’t had a chance to really talk to anyone because it happened so quickly. We haven’t had a chance today because we’ve been doing all this (media events). There are going to be some kids that are very upset, and there will also be kids that are happy, that’s just the way it is, it’s part of life.

GH: When you say this happened so quickly, when was the first time Minnesota had contact with you?
RK: I believe it was Saturday.

GH: Last Saturday? Or two days ago?
RK: Two days ago.

GH: That is the very 1st time you heard from the Gophers?
RK: That’s when I found out.

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