How Reed answered the coaching call
Picture this:
A college student in North Idaho, with spring break on the horizon.
He gets a call, asking if he’d like to give up his spring break to coach some girls at an AAU basketball tournament.
What would you do?
Kelly Reed said he always knew he wanted to be a coach someday.
This is how it happened.
REED, A 1988 Coeur d’Alene High graduate, was a sophomore at the University of Idaho when the phone rang.
It was his mother, Peggy.
An eighth-grade AAU girls basketball team was practicing for a tournament in Yakima, but the coach couldn’t make it for some reason.
The Reed family having lived in Moscow for three years previously, Peggy knew the parents of one of the players, Kelli Johnson.
She asked Kelly if he was willing to fill in as coach.
“You’re seriously asking me to give up my spring break,” Kelly replied. “Yeah, I don’t know about that.”
“She said, ‘yeah, it was Kelli Jean’s team ... they’re pretty good, I hear.’”
“I’m like, ‘all right. I’ll go to one practice.’ And if it seems like something I want to do, then I’ll do it.”
So he went to practice, and there was Kelli Johnson, pushing 5-foot-9 as an eighth-grader, “and could really handle the ball,” Reed recalled.
Her teammate was Heather Owen, who went on to star at Stanford and play in the WNBA.
“So I walk in and there’s all these girls, and not only are they tall, but they can play,” Reed recalled. “Whoa!”
“Absolutely, I’ll coach these guys,” he said.
As he recalled, that AAU team beat everybody they played in Yakima by 50-60 points.
Sally Greene, Moscow High’s girls basketball coach at the time, watched Kelly coach and invited him to join her staff as a varsity assistant.
That led to two years as an assistant with the Moscow girls.
In 1990-91, when Johnson and Owen were freshmen, and Barbara Hudson was a junior, the Bears were still in A-1, Idaho’s largest classification, but were denied a trip to state by a loss to a Coeur d’Alene High squad coached by Dave Fealko and led by Keri Schwenke and Corissa Yasen.
Moscow moved down to A-2 the following year and, led by Johnson and Owen, dominated, winning three straight state titles.
Reed, who was an assistant on that first title team, was in Nampa last Saturday, as the 1992, ’93 and ’94 Moscow High girls basketball teams were honored by the Idaho High School Activities Association as a Legends of the Game, at halftime of the state 5A girls championship game between Post Falls and Eagle at the Ford Idaho Center.
“For a girls team we were exceptionally tall, but they were athletes,” Reed recalled of those Moscow teams.
One of the reasons Reed was eager to be there for the honor was to re-connect with Johnson, someone he has known her entire life, through the friendship of their parents.
Johnson went on to star at Idaho, and is now a sportscaster in the Bay Area.
How was she as a point guard all those years ago?
“Wise beyond her years,” Reed recalled. “The first time I ever worked with her, I was blown away how well she handled the ball. And when we started to play, she just knew how to play that position. Her basketball IQ was exceptional. Rarely made mental mistakes; she always knew where to go with the ball. She knew when to push, when to back it off. She didn’t need a lot of coaching; she knew what she was doing.”
ALSO on that AAU trip was Darren Malm, now a District II official. His brother, Brad, was head boys coach at Troy at the time. A couple years later, Darren told Kelly about an opening on Brad’s staff, as a JV coach and varsity assistant, and Kelly jumped at the chance to coach his own team.
Reed did his student-teaching at Troy.
Lee Brockke, the athletic director at Priest River at the time, used to be at Troy, and after a couple of years, Brockke hired Reed to be Priest River’s boys basketball coach.
While at Priest River, Reed developed a coaching connection with Jim Winger, who had recently taken over as boys basketball coach at Lake City, which had just opened in 1994. Winger was also a Coeur d’Alene High grad, four years older than Reed, but the two didn’t get to know each other until Reed was at Priest River, talking basketball over the phone with Winger.
After two years at Priest River, a job as JV boys coach and a teaching opening in health came about, and Winger hired Reed at Lake City.
Reed has been a Timberwolf ever since.
“So if my mom would have never called and said, ‘Do you want to coach these eighth-graders and take them to Yakima, who knows?” Reed said.
Kelly Reed attended pre-school, kindergarten and first grade in Moscow. The family moved to Coeur d’Alene when he was in second grade.
His mom was a P.E. teacher. One of her students while in Moscow was Van Troxel. Van’s mom was Kelly’s kindergarten teacher.
REED, 47, is in his 27th year as a high school basketball coach, and 21st coaching at Lake City. He has been a basketball coach, mostly as a varsity assistant, for all but three years that Lake City has been open.
He coached football with Troxel for 14 seasons at Lake City, including seven as a varsity assistant during which time the Timberwolves won their two state titles.
He is entering his 16th (or 17th; he can’t remember) year as head track coach at Lake City.
He’s currently also coaching a seventh-grade boys AAU basketball team. He started with them when they were fifth-graders.
AND IT all started by getting a phone call from mom, and saying yes to coaching a team he knew little about, and giving up a prized spring break to do so.
“Sometimes I do think about, what if I’d said ‘No’?,” Reed said. “Being in Moscow allowed me to get to Troy. Being in troy allowed me to get to Priest River. Being in Priest River led to Lake City.
“It’s just weird how it worked out.”
Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.