Class of 2025 · Hall of Fame
Kevin Payne
#34 · 1976–1978 · Class of 1979
Legend Feature
Fifty years after he carried water buckets for his brother's team, Kevin Payne is still on the sideline — and still on the air.
Kevin Payne was six years old the first time Derby football gave him a job. He did not get a helmet. He got a water bucket.
That was the year his father and three other men started Derby Junior Football, and Payne was a year too young to play. So he did the next best thing: he tagged along with his brother's team, hauled water, and waited. Friday nights the family sat in the stands at the varsity games, and by the early 1970s the boy with the bucket had already made up his mind about what he wanted to be.
"Being a Panther football player was something very special," he says of those nights, "and I knew I wanted to do that."