Kathryn King is sitting in the bleachers in a sweltering gym at Howard High School on a Saturday night, sweat pouring down her face as she watches ten inner city youth go head to head on a basketball court. Although the game has her rapt attention, she’s not cheering anyone on. To do so would be to show favoritism, and both teams are hers.
King’s husband, Jordan, is coaching one of the teams from the sidelines across the gym. “Rebound! Rebound! Rebound!” he shouts, his voice echoing over the squeaking of a dozen pairs of tennis shoes, refs included.
The teams are participants in the Chattanooga Parks and Recreation Department’s Late Night Hoops program, which gives teens in the city something to do on weekends besides get in trouble. King and her husband put together the two squads after joining the Youth Empowerment Committee of Chattanooga’s Gang Task Force.
King had wanted to help the young people of the city, but says they have helped her more. “I was going to help them achieve their dreams, but I have learned that, right now, their needs are more basic. These kids are happy if I bring them a PowerAde at the end of practice,” she says.
King lives a different life than her boys on the court. A Chattanooga native, she attended Girls Preparatory School, earned an undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt and attended law school in Boston. When she returned home, she secured work at EPB, where she now works as an in-house attorney. But despite those and other differences, including the color of her skin, the youth have embraced her.
“Building trust has been surprisingly easy. I just have to be persistent and keep my promises,” she says.
King doesn’t look old enough to be an attorney at the company that provides its customers with the fastest Internet in the U.S. But even though she’s only in her early thirties, she’s been around the block a time or two – literally.
“When we had widespread outages last year after the tornadoes, everyone pulled together to take care of our customers. I know the area well, so I drew on my experience delivering pizzas in college to take meals to the crews out in the field,” she says.
It was a different kind of day than King was used to having. The bulk of her work involves poring over contracts, helping with litigation and assisting with company strategy. But she was glad to lend a hand.
“Seeing the devastation was a formative experience for me. People were running to our truck wanting to know when their power would be back on,” she says.
King has had other memorable days during her seven years with EPB, including a block of 365 days leading up to the company’s launch in 2009 of its communication business, during which she dealt with a slew of regulatory issues and slept about three hours a night.
“Companies with a lot of money and success did not want us in that market, so we met a lot of resistance. But we believed we were going to succeed, and instead of quitting, we moved forward and accomplished what we set out to do,” she says.
King can take pride in what she’s achieved at EPB, especially in light of her humble beginnings with the company. In 2005, a competitive job market in Boston and the suicide of her brother at age 22 brought her home. She started looking for work while she was preparing to take the bar exam, but was unable to secure a job. Frustrated, and concerned about looming student loans, King took a position at a temporary agency. Her second assignment was a one-month project updating files at EPB.
She completed the work in one week. Impressed, the vice president of the legal department asked her to stay. “I knew something would work out if I got my foot in a door and showed someone I was smart and could do a good job,” she says.
Working at EPB has been a growth experience for King. For example, her early work as a liability claims adjuster for the company didn’t go well, as she found a way to deny every claim. “I was being a great lawyer, but a terrible claims adjuster,” she says, laughing.
During the yearlong ramp up to EPB’s launch of its communications business, she learned to accept her natural limitations as a human being. As a student, she’d always measured success numerically, whether through her GPA at Vanderbilt or by finishing in the top 15 percent of her class at Suffolk University Law School. But in the nuts and bolts reality of the business world, she was left without any measuring devices.
“My mentors told me I don’t know what I don’t know. I was going crazy thinking about what I was not seeing, and wondering what I was missing,” she says.
To ease her mind and to become a more effective lawyer, King learned everything she could about what EPB does. She even went into the field with one of the company’s female engineers to watch her work. The experience allows King to serve as a scout for the company when there are outages.
“I come in with a list of things I think I’m going to get done, but what I end up doing is sometimes a surprise and doesn’t involve much legal work. That’s great because want to be a part of everything that’s going on here,” she says.
Although King has the air of someone doing what fate intended, she didn’t decide to pursue law until the end of her days at Vanderbilt. Growing up, she idolized Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and loved “Inherit the Wind,” but she had no ambition to study the law.
People even told King she’d make a good lawyer because of how persuasively she could argue.
“My dad is opinionated, so we’d have heated discussions, and he’d tell me his points but wouldn’t give me long to respond. That honed my ability to make a point and make it well,” she says.
One ongoing “heated discussion” with her father involved her choice of major at Vanderbilt: philosophy. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, and he was concerned about her making a living, so her plans for her future became the basis for many intense conversations.
By the time King graduated from Vanderbilt, she had no desire to pursue philosophy further, so she chose law as a path toward a practical career. As it turned out, philosophy provided King with a solid foundation for law school.
“You read volumes of information you don’t understand, you study logic and most of your classes involve debating ideas,” she says.
King says she and her dad laugh about their “heated discussions” now, and she looks back with appreciation at her formative years. “I attribute a lot of my legal skills to my raising. My mother was a public school teacher, and taught me the value of education, my dad taught me to argue and my stepmom taught me about being a professional and working in that kind of an environment,” she says.
Although the circumstances that brought King home, especially the death of her brother, were difficult to handle, she loves living in Chattanooga. This is a big change from when she was a teenager and couldn’t wait to leave. “I’m excited about what’s going on in Chattanooga and I’m proud of this town,” she says.
King is making the most of living in the Scenic City. In addition to working for a local company and being an involved activist, she enjoys playing golf with her husband, practicing yoga, attending church with her mother, walking the two rescue dogs she and her husband have taken in and devouring books on the porch of her home on Missionary Ridge.
From her vantage point, she can see the expanse of the city she loves. As beautiful as downtown Chattanooga is, she seems to enjoy her view from the stands at Howard High even more.
“These kids are half my age, and they’ve lived twice as much as I have. When my brother died, I was afraid to love and to hope. But these kids have inspired me and taught me I can handle more than I know.”