The Life of Kevwe Akpore: Soldier, Warden, Coach, Son of Orogun
Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, a Story of Service, Sacrifice and Second Chances
By Foster Akpore
Twenty-five years ago this week, the world stopped to watch two towers fall. For most of us, September 11, 2001, lives on as a memory of where we were and what we felt. For Kevwe Akpore, it marks something else entirely: the line between the man he was and the man the next two decades would demand he become.
This year carries a second, quieter anniversary alongside the first. In 2026, it will be ten years since Akpore retired as Deputy Director of the Illinois Department of Corrections — a milestone that, set against the 25th anniversary of 9/11, has pushed him to finally put his full journey in perspective. The last decade, spent as an adjunct instructor and soccer coach, has been meaningful work — but by his own account, it is the smaller chapter, set against the two full-time careers, military and corrections, that consumed most of his working life.
Akpore was already a soldier in the United States Army when the attacks reshaped American foreign policy and, with it, the trajectory of an entire generation of servicemen. In the years that followed, he would deploy across some of the most volatile theaters of the post-9/11 world — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq — during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, coordinating 880 combat and logistical missions in a war that came to define his early adulthood. Now, a quarter-century after that September morning, Akpore is finally ready to tell the fuller story: not just of a soldier answering a call, but of a life built, piece by piece, on the discipline that call demanded — a life that began in Nigeria, as a son of Orogun and a son of Demas Akpore, and carried him from the battlefield to a warden’s office to, of all places, the sideline of a college soccer pitch.
A Name Already Written
To understand Kevwe Akpore, it helps to first understand the name he carries. His father, Chief Demas Onoliobakpovba Akpore, was one of Delta State’s most consequential figures — an educator who was himself a student at Government College, Ughelli, before returning to serve as its principal, founding Orogun Grammar School, and later making history as the first elected deputy governor of the old Bendel State, from 1979 to 1983. At his side was Chief (Mrs.) Grace Temisan Akpore.
The sporting instinct in the family ran through Demas’s own brother as well. The late Engr. Samson Anakimoni Akpore, distinguished himself alongside Demas at Government College, Ughelli — both brothers rising to become Athletic Captains, Cricket Captains, and Soccer Captains of Warri House.
Born March 27, 1965, Kevwe himself inherited that legacy directly, passing through the same gates at Government College, Ughelli, that his father and uncle once walked. It was there, in a family already defined by athletic captaincy and academic distinction, that the foundation was laid for everything that followed — a life that began, first and always, as a son of Orogun, and would eventually stretch from Delta State to the American Midwest, gathering degrees in military science, manufacturing engineering, public safety, and law enforcement administration along the way.
Answering the Call
Akpore’s military career spanned nearly two decades, rising through the ranks to Major. But it was the years following September 11 that tested everything his training had prepared him for. Deployed across the Middle East during the height of the War on Terror, he was entrusted with coordinating hundreds of combat and logistical missions under some of the most demanding conditions American forces would face in a generation. Like sports, service ran through the family in this chapter too — his elder brother, Jomo Akpore, and younger brother, Newman Akpore, both served in the U.S. Army in the same Gulf Wars theater, a shared chapter of duty among the Akpore brothers far from home.
The record of that service speaks for itself: the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary and Service Medals, the Iraq Campaign Medal with Campaign Stars, and the National Defense Service Medal, among others. But for Kevwe Akpore, the deeper legacy of those years wasn’t the decorations — it was the discipline forged under pressure, a discipline he would carry into every chapter that followed.
From Command to Custody
When Akpore retired from the Army in the late 2000s, he didn’t retire from service — he redirected it. He rose to the highest levels of Illinois’s correctional system, ultimately serving as Deputy Director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, with administrative oversight across multiple facilities statewide, including the Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg. In that role, he was responsible for public safety, staff welfare, and institutional stability across a system managing thousands of lives — adult men, women, and juveniles alike.
It was, in its own way, the same mission in a different uniform: hold the line, protect the people under your charge, keep the institution standing. He retired from state service in 2016 — a retirement that, in 2026, marks its own quiet decade-long milestone — closing a public-safety career that had spanned two very different chains of command, one in fatigues and one in a warden’s badge, but a single, unbroken thread of duty.
Finding the Sideline
It’s the next chapter of Akpore’s life that surprises people most — even though, measured against the rest of his career, it’s the smallest one. The decade since 2016 has been part-time work, first as an adjunct instructor and then as a soccer coach, set against two full careers, nearly two decades each, in the military and in corrections. But it is here, on the sideline, that Akpore has quietly built a second legacy in a sport that runs in his family and a community he has served in Galesburg for nearly forty years.
As head coach at Carl Sandburg College from 2017 to 2021, he rebuilt a struggling program into a national contender, culminating in a historic 2021 season: a 16–5 record, a #7 national ranking, the program’s first Arrowhead Conference Championship, its first NJCAA Region title, and an appearance at the NJCAA Division II National Championship. That year, Akpore was named NJCAA Region IV Coach of the Year.
His ties to Knox College run even deeper, spanning three separate decades in multiple roles, assistant coach, head women’s coach, and twice head men’s coach, and continuing today as Assistant Women’s Soccer Coach, guiding student-athletes into the 2025–2026 season. Alongside his college coaching, he has spent more than two decades volunteering with Galesburg’s YMCA and its high school soccer programs, shaping young players long before they ever reach a campus, including, in time, his own family. He shares that life in Galesburg with his wife, Tracy, and their twin daughters, Kiara and Sade, and his nephews, JJ and Voke Omu. Kiara, Sade and JJ all played for Galesburg High School before continuing on to their own collegiate careers, while Voke Omu continued the family’s soccer tradition at Carl Sandburg College. Kiara and Sade are now raising their own children in the same tradition, extending a fourth generation of the Akpore family being shaped on the field before anywhere else.
What the Anniversaries Mean Now
Twenty-five years is long enough for a nation to forget, and long enough for a life to be fully lived. For Kevwe Akpore, the anniversary of September 11 isn’t a closed chapter — it’s the hinge his entire story turns on. Paired with the ten years since he stepped down as Deputy Director of the Illinois Department of Corrections, 2026 arrives as a rare kind of moment: the chance to look back on two full careers, forged first in a boyhood in Orogun and a name inherited from Demas Akpore, and see the whole shape of a life at once.
“From the front line to the sideline” isn’t just a tidy phrase for a life that resists easy summary. It’s the truest measure of the man: that discipline tested by history’s worst day, and later by decades spent guarding the line between order and chaos, didn’t harden into something guarded or closed. It opened outward — into a classroom, onto a soccer field, into the lives of a fourth generation of Akpores now learning, on the same kind of field where it all began, what it means to serve something larger than yourself.