B.C. LIONS: Special teams coach Jeff Reinebold is still a rebel
Longtime CFL coach returns to B.C. still marching to the beat of his own drum
We apologize in advance because Jeff Reinebold has hopped into the time machine and, through past experience, we’ve learned you can’t stop him, you just have to settle in for the ride.
So we’re probably not going to get to his college days at Maine — “Not really an athletic powerhouse or a cradle of coaches,” says the B.C. Lions special teams coach — where his crew included future NBA coach Rick Carlisle and, wait for it, a high-scoring winger from the hockey team named John Tortorella.
And we’re probably not going to get to his stint with the Las Vegas Posse where he worked for Ron Meyer during the CFL’s ill-advised American expansion phase. The Posse’s first training camp was in the parking lot of the Riviera Hotel on a hastily constructed grass field 70 yards in lengths without goalposts and ... never mind, we really don’t have the time to get into the saga of the Posse.
We don’t, in fact, have the time or space to do justice to Reinebold’s career, but to understand the man, which takes some doing, let’s go back to the origin story of his coaching career.
The 60-year-old football lifer first fell in love with the CFL when he was at Maine and watched games on the CBC station out of Halifax.
“I just thought, ‘This is really cool. There’s so much going on here,’” he says.
As it happens, one of Reinebold’s early mentors was Greg Newhouse, an assistant on Don Matthews’ staff with the Lions in the mid-’80s. Reinebold, who was then an assistant at Montana, watched Matthews’ innovative, attacking defence and was transformed. A few years later, Larry Donovan, who coached at Montana, took over from Matthews and brought his young assistant with him.
That was three decades ago. Reinebold
still regards it as the break of a lifetime.
“You have to understand, I didn’t aspire to coach in the NFL,” he says. “I aspired to coach the B.C. Lions. That may sound crazy, but it’s true.
“I mean, I was a fan of those guys,” he says, running through names like Kevin Konar, Ty Crews and Keith Gooch. “But I couldn’t tell them that. So I had to learn. Of the thousands of football players I’ve been around, I still remember those guys.”
And it’s a safe bet they’ll remember Reinebold.
The career assistant has returned to the Lions in 2018, just 28 years after he first arrived, and he’s fired up about the opportunity. Mind you, he was fired up about Vegas and fired up about his stop in Edmonton and another gig with the Lions in 1996 and his head-coaching stint with the Bombers in the late ’90s and his return to the CFL with the Alouettes in 2012, which led to another gig with Hamilton before he landed back on Wally Buono’s staff this year.
It’s not, he concedes, a life for everyone. But it’s his life and it has allowed him to live in his beloved Hawaii on the north shore of Oahu. It has brought him into the orbit of some memorable characters and it has given him a lifetime of stories and memories he wouldn’t trade for anything.
We should all be so lucky.
“I came to this point pretty early,” he says. “If it’s about the money, you’re in the wrong business. You can work half as hard and make twice as much money selling insurance or real estate. It’s the relationships. It’s the thrill of competition. It’s watching a young kid have that a-ha moment.”
Reinebold’s father was a career baseball coach. When he told his dad he wanted to coach football, this was the fatherly advice he was given.
“He said: ‘Jeff, there’s no money in it. There’s no security. You’re going to bounce around all over the place.’
“But he said, ‘If you’re going to do it, don’t be a ham-and-egger, don’t do it a little of the way. Go all the way because you owe it to the players.’”
That’s a debt he has always honoured. Buono, who’s been in the Canadian game even longer than Reinebold, was eager to bring the veteran assistant on to his staff. Last year, the Lions’ return game slumped badly and Reinebold is seen as a key to revitalizing Chris Rainey.
“I was excited when we talked,” Buono said. “He brings a certain level of energy and he knows how to get the best out of people. My thing is if you can sell it to me, you can sell it to the players.
“He had a lot of choices. He came here because he wanted to.”
Reinebold says his job hasn’t changed much over the years. True, millennials require more explanation, an indulgence he’s willing to grant. To a point. But that thing that attracted him to coaching and the CFL in the first place is still there.
“I don’t want to dramatize it, but I think football players are made of something unique,” he says. “Whether it’s Kamloops or Kansas City or Kissimmee, Florida, I think we’re all attracted to the game for the same reasons. I have so much love for these kids, who sacrifice so much to do this.
“The CFL is such a great league. It allows the fans to get close to the players the way they can’t in the NFL. It allows the coaches to interact with fans and media at a different level. It would be really hard to have this kind of conversation with an NFL head coach and all you’d get is cliches anyway.”
Sorry, I’m tearing up as I write this. Back in 2010, Reinebold was surfing with his son — sorry, didn’t have time to mention that earlier — when he thought he’d developed a rash from his board. Turned out the rash was a malignant melanoma that was in danger of spreading to his organs.
Surgeons excised a chunk of his stomach, but Reinebold told them he wouldn’t take chemo treatments. He went to Oahu — “If I only had a little time left, I knew where I wanted to spend it” — had some alternative treatments and beat the cancer.
“It opens your eyes to all those cliches,” he says. “I hate them, but they’re true. Tomorrow isn’t promised to anyone. That was a tipping point for me. Shoot, now I feel better than ever.”
Well, not earlier in the week. Reinebold was talking to Buono on the field when he got drilled by a receiver running a deep pattern. He reported the mishap to his wife Leslie in a phone conversation that night.
“She asked me, ‘Do you have the tape of that?’” Reinebold said.
He had a laugh over that one. He generally does.