By Tracy Gupton

Versatility, hustle, dedication and, most of all, talent, were the trademarks of Kim Welsch when she participated and excelled in multiple sports while attending Columbia High School in the 1990s. The former outstanding soccer, volleyball, cross country, softball and basketball player for the Lady Roughnecks will be one of four new inductees into her alma mater’s Athletics Hall of Honor on October 17, 2025. 

One of two former Roughnecks athletes being honored at halftime of the “Battle of the Bernard” football game two Fridays from now who returned home to teach and coach at Columbia High School, Kim Welsch Blank is currently the head girls soccer coach at Brazoswood High School in Clute. Calvin Phillips is the other Roughnecks athlete who also coached at Columbia High School who will be honored along with Kim Blank, Teddy DiBlasi and Jonathan Champagne. Kim and her husband, Scott Blank, met while both were playing college sports at the University of North Texas in Denton. Scott, also a former teacher and coach at Columbia High School, was a defensive end in college for the “Mean Green” of North Texas.

Kim Welsch is the daughter of Bernice and the late Craig Welsch, and the granddaughter of former CBISD Superintendent Kenneth Welsch and longtime West Columbia Elementary School teacher Evelyn Welsch. She carries on the Welsch legacy as devoted educators, along with her sister Laura Welsch Lackey who taught and coached at West Columbia Junior High School and currently teaches at Brazosport High School.

Her older sister Laura, a 1987 graduate of Columbia High School, was Kim’s volleyball coach at West Columbia Junior High. A 1996 graduate of Columbia High, Kim Welsch Blank had the opportunity to share the spotlight with her older sister, Corinna Welsch Baffa, for one year with the Lady Roughnecks in the 1992-93 school year when Kim was a freshman and Corinna a senior.

Both Welsch sisters excelled in several sports at Columbia High. Kim was the only freshman on the varsity volleyball team. Kim earned first team all district in volleyball her sophomore, junior and senior seasons. She was captain and earned Most Valuable Player of the team both junior and senior seasons. Kim advanced to region in cross country all four years she was in high school. She was both first team all district and the most valuable player on the Roughnecks’ soccer team her junior season in the 1994-95 school year at CHS.

“I played on the boys soccer team,” Kim says of her early years as a Roughneck. “My sophomore year, I played on the first softball team we had at Columbia High.”

Kim takes great pride in having lettered in five sports in high school. She was the MVP in volleyball in both her junior and senior seasons, and was also the MVP in soccer her junior year. Kim suffered cracked vertebraes her senior year and spent most of the 1995-96 school year in a back brace.

Despite recovering from a back injury, Kim Welsch was highly recruited in soccer out of high school. Ole Miss and Alabama were among the major universities pursuing Kim when she made the decision to follow her sister Corinna to Denton to play soccer for the Mean Green Eagles of the University of North Texas.

Kim started every game as a freshman in college but missed out on an opportunity to play college soccer with Corinna as she had in high school due to Corinna tearing her ACL when Kim was a freshman at North Texas State. Kim enjoyed a successful college career on the soccer field and has been involved in coaching the sport she loves so much for the past quarter century.

She is in her 16^th year of coaching girls soccer at Brazoswood High School. Kim was named The Facts’ all-Southern Brazoria County girls soccer coach of the year for the 2024 season when she relished the opportunity to coach her daughter, McKinley Blank, who is now a freshman soccer player at Southwestern University in Georgetown.

Kim kicked off her teaching and coaching career at Class 3A Kaufman High School in the 2000-2001 school year, where her husband Scott coached football. After being named Coach of the Year for Kaufman’s district, Kim Blank made her way back to her home town in 2001 when she started the girls soccer program at Columbia High School like she had done in Kaufman. In her second year back in West Columbia, Kim was also the head volleyball coach. She was named both district and county coach of the year during her four years coaching girls soccer in West Columbia.

“It is a huge deal to start a program,” Kim says. “I was so passionate about it. I really wanted to be a part of starting the girls soccer program at the same high school where I had played on the boys soccer team.”

She said it is ironic that the first year she took over the girls soccer program at Brazoswood, her husband Scott coached the Lady Roughnecks’ soccer team to their first playoff appearance in school history. The following year, Scott Blank joined his wife on the Brazoswood High School coaching staff.

Kim credits her parents for pushing her to achieve greatness in every sport she tackled in high school. “My parents were very supportive,” she says. “My Mom, who played college volleyball at Wharton County Junior College and Sam Houston State, never missed a game, and my Dad worked hard to give me those opportunities” to travel all over the place to play soccer on select teams outside of high school.

Scott and Kim Blank now live in Lake Jackson. They are the proud parents of Gannon, Riker, Reagan and McKinley. Gannon is employed at LNG as a process operator and the twins, Reagan and Riker, are both students at Texas A&M now.