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RAYNE – When he played quarterback and free safety for the Rayne High Wolves, Kaine Guidry had higher aspirations. It was his dream to one day coach the football team.
That dream came true in February when he was named head football coach and athletic director at the school.
Guidry had been coaching for about 10 years when the position opened at RHS. After graduating from McNeese, he spent three years at Notre Dame under Lewis Cook before moving to RHS. But he was only there for four years before he moved to Crowley High.
“The opportunity came up three years later to come back to Rayne High so I put my name in the hat,” he told members of the Rotary Club of Rayne recently.
Since his arrival, Guidry has been working with the entire coaching staff to “raise the expectations” of the student-athletes, but not to a “win-at-all-costs” level.
“We want to mold good, quality men and women,” he said. “We teach that, if we do things right, the winning will come.”
And it has.
“We (the football team) are 4-3 right now and will play LaGrange next,” he said. (The Wolves won that game to climb to 5-3 on the year.)
As the school’s athletic director, Guidry is responsible for all sports at Rayne High.
“Our goal is to see that the student-athletes across the board at Rayne High School are not getting short changed,” he said.
The lifelong Rayne resident and 2005 RHS graduate said he thinks the fact that he attended Rayne High and played sports there has helped him in coaching and he aims to try to “create a family-like atmosphere among the coaching staff” with coaches that have ties to the community. “It always adds a little extra when you’re affiliated with the program,” he explained.
Looking to the future, Guidry admitted he’s looking forward to a long career at Rayne High.
“I’m hoping I can be here as long as they’ll have me,” he said, adding that he and his wife and two children – with one on the way – are “very happy” living in Rayne.
“Right now, our program is not where it needs to be, but the potential is definitely there,” he said. “We have good kids at Rayne High, from good parents in a good community.”
The local Rotarians also joined Rotary Clubs across the nation and around the world in observance of World Polio Day.
Cynthia Oliver, club Public Image chair, presented a pair of videos on Rotary International’s efforts to eradicate polio.
World Polio Day — Oct. 24 — was established by Rotary International over a decade ago to commemorate the birth of Jonas Salk, who led the first team to develop a vaccine against poliomyelitis.
Use of this inactivated poliovirus vaccine and subsequent widespread use of the oral poliovirus, developed by Albert Sabin, led to the establishment of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in 1988. As of 2013, GPEI had reduced polio worldwide by 99 percent.
Rotary Clubs across the nation — around the world — have taken up the crusade to eradicate polio.
Locally, the Rotary Club of Rayne contributes annually to polio eradication.
A country has to be completely free of reported polio cases for three years to be considered “polio free.” During those years, children must continue to be immunized.
No reported cases in Nigeria for the past three years should now make all of Africa soon declared polio free. Unfortunately, there are still reported cases in the Middle East.”
This year there were 16 reported cases in Afghanistan. There are 6,000 social mobilizers, or people working teams working, and in September, 6.1 million children were vaccinated.
In Pakistan there were 69 reported cases of polio and 8.3 million were vaccinated during the August Response Campaign.
Polio is a crippling and potentially fatal infectious disease. There is no cure, but there are safe and effective vaccines.
Polio can be prevented through immunization. Polio vaccine, given multiple times, almost always protects a child for life. The strategy to eradicate polio is therefore based on preventing infection by immunizing every child until transmission stops and the world is polio-free.
Though the PolioPlus program started in 1985, Rotary began the fight against polio much earlier. In 1979 Rotary members began a multiyear program that immunized more than 6 million children in the Philippines against polio.
In its early years, PolioPlus was dedicated to fundraising for immunization efforts. In May 1988 Rotary announced that the campaign, which aimed to raise $120 million, had raised nearly $220 million in contributions and pledges.
That same year, the World Health Assembly set a goal of worldwide polio eradication and launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) with Rotary as one of its partners. At the time, polio paralyzed more than 1,000 children worldwide every day and 125 countries were polio-endemic.
In 2007 Rotary entered into a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which issued Rotary a $100 million challenge grant to raise funds for polio eradication.
This partnership continued to grow, and in 2013 the Gates Foundation offered to match Rotary’s contributions for polio eradication 2-to-1 for five years (up to $35 million per year).
PolioPlus is truly international. Rotary has 1.2 million members in nearly every country working together to end polio for good.