Can you imagine reading about sports in the Addison Independent and not seeing Andy Kirkaldy’s byline? 

“By ANDY KIRKALDY” has been in the Addy Indy for over 30 years. On the sports beat for the past 25 years, he’s been reporting on up to three games a week he has seen in person and summarizing others from coaches’ reports. 

Andy has been a fixture in his baseball cap (or tuque in chilly Vermont weather) and reporter’s notebook at hundreds (thousands!) of athletic events at Addison County high schools and also at Middlebury College (though to a somewhat lesser degree as the college has its own Athletics Communication staff). 

Andy is retiring at the end of this month. 

He and spouse Kristine are “in the process” of buying a house in Harwichport on Cape Cod. Kristine retired this past spring after teaching Spanish and French at Vergennes Union High School for the past two decades. 

What a gift Andy has been to sports fans in this community.

Andy loves sports and he knows whereof he writes. “We all do things in which we lose ourselves,” he told me when we met last weekend. “When I play sports I forget I am a self-conscious human being.”

At 71, he still plays pick-up soccer with both fellow greybeards and younger folks. He was forced a few years go to forego pick-up hoops because of a balky shoulder (It’s called “aging,” a condition he and I share). 

A reporter, Andy is straightforward and comprehensive, providing essential information early, and describing in absorbing detail the highlights and drama of the contest he is witnessing and reporting on. 

He avoids the clichés that can infect sportswriting, bad sports writing. 

INDEPENDENT SPORTS REPORTER Andy Kirkaldy jokes with his alter ego from Rutland, longtime Rutland Herald sports reporter Tom Haley, and compares notes at a Mount Abraham Union High School softball playoff game this past June.
Photo by Mark Bouvier

Andy covers youth sports and takes his job seriously. “We tread carefully,” he said. “These are kids, just developing. We keep it positive, don’t criticize much for mistakes they make.

“I pull for the local team when they play schools from outside the county.” When county teams — Middlebury, Vergennes, Mt. Abraham, play one another, they get top billing. 

The Independent news editor, John McCright, his boss, had this to say about Andy’s work: 

“Andy is a strong writer, consistently turning in stories with a beginning, a middle and an ending. That may sound silly because it seems obvious, but readers might be surprised how difficult it is to do that time and time again. 

“To keep up with it week after week for decades at such a high standard — that’s remarkable.”

John Edward Andrew “Andy” Kirkaldy was not born in New England; he was born in 1954 in actual England. 

His father, a Scotsman and a doctor, was in the RAF (British Royal Air Force) and stationed in Yorkshire, England. He met and then married Andy’s mom, an American lass from Fall River, Mass., when he was interning in the States in Massachusetts. 

When Andy was one, their small family relocated to Nova Scotia, where they stayed for four years near Halifax. They came to America, now a family of four, having added Andy’s brother Peter, and settled in Westport, Mass., where his dad opened a general medical practice. 

From grades 5-8, Andy attended nearby Friends Academy and then spent high school years at Governor Dummer Academy (now just Governor’s Academy). In both places, participation in sports was emphasized, which was fine with Andy. 

“I had some aptitude for and was reasonably good at sports,” but he was never the star player on a team. In high school, “I got cut from more teams — soccer, baseball, hockey (I’ll never forgive the hockey coach!). I was an intramural all-star.” He eventually played varsity soccer at Governor Dummer and two years of B Team soccer at Middlebury College. 

He has thrived nonetheless in sports competition throughout his life. “I have been on many championship teams,” he explained, “in hockey, basketball, baseball, volleyball, softball” . . . on adult league teams. Playing sports has been a lifetime enterprise.

“I was the Vermont state foosball champion in 1976,” he said with a smile. 

ANDY KIRKALDY TAKES a break in the old Middlebury Municipal Gym with his pal the late Pete Quinn, a local basketball guru who coached both the Vergennes High girls’ and boys’ basketball teams. Andy and Pete were teammates on Woody’s Restaurant teams in the adult men’s league team.

Andy played for 20 years (’70s-’90s) in the Middlebury Adult Men’s Basketball League. In fact, he was the founder of the league. “I played a year in the Bristol League and thought ‘I’m gonna start a league in Middlebury.’

“I approached the rec director and found that the town gym was clear on Tuesdays and Thursdays after 8 p.m. So I advertised to see if there was interest. The first year we had five teams. It was ‘call your own fouls.’

“The first thing I did was to get the best player I knew for my team, and that was Pete Quinn.” 

With Andy at the helm and Pete, Larry Sims, and Rob Brewer leading the way, Woody’s Restaurant was one of the best teams in the league for the 20 or so years of its existence, winning the championship 11 times. 

Andy is also the father of athletes. His daughters, Kaitlyn and Kiera, played both field hockey and lacrosse at Middlebury Union High — and both played field hockey and lacrosse in college, Kaitlyn at Wellesley and Kiera at Simmons. Kaitlyn was All-State in both sports at MUHS.

Andy’s path to this full-time position at the Independent had some twists and turns along the way.

After graduating from Middlebury in 1976 with a degree in Anthropology-Sociology (“I liked studying how people organize themselves and view the world”), he visited relatives and traveled “up and down” in the U.K.: “I took the ferry to the Orkney Islands.

“I’ve been back to Scotland many times,” he told me. “In fact, my daughter (Kaitlyn) was married there.”

He worked a year for his hometown newspaper, the Westport News, before coming to Middlebury for good in 1978. He worked many jobs up here, often at the same time: “I was writing for the Valley Voice, working in restaurants tending bar, and selling and appraising real estate.”

“My longest stint bartending was at Woody’s, but I also worked at Fire & Ice, Mister Ups, and the Rosebud Café,” a popular (raucous?) watering hole when the drinking age was 18, just a stone’s throw from the Alibi, a three-story bar/bowling alley/pool hall that occupied all of Star Mill in Frog Alley. 

At the Rosebud, Andy met Kristine Barnes, class of ’82 at Middlebury, who was a server there. They married in 1987 at the Middlebury Chapel with Andy’s dad officiating, followed by a reception at the Snow Bowl lodge.

Eventually, opportunity knocked.

“In 1994, I picked up a copy of the Indy and read a ‘Clippings’ column by Steve Costello, the news editor. He wrote that he was leaving. Peter Conlon was a reporter, and I figured he’d get promoted. So I marched into Angelo’s office and asked, ‘Are you going to need a reporter’?

“So I became a reporter. But there was a catch. It was only part-time and had nothing to do with sports. I became the Vergennes correspondent. I have been covering Vergennes since 1994.” 

When sports reporter Bob Chatfield left in 1999, “I took over that beat.” 

The rest, as they say, is history.

Angelo Lynn, Independent editor/publisher, said, “Andy’s background knowledge of the coaches and teams and his love of the game made him one of the best sports writers in the region. As he moves into retirement, we can only be grateful he was part of the team for so long.”

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Karl Lindholm can be contacted at [email protected]. He was in a fantasy baseball league with Andy for over 20 years and reports that “Andy’s team, the Special Ks, won the league most years.”