Reed enters 23rd season leading UTC optimistic
A sign on the door of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga softball locker room reads: “If You Are Not Prepared To Put The Team First TURN AROUND.”
Walk into the Mocs’ indoor practice facility, and team pictures have been placed on the walls, with a notable omission the one from 2013 — which dealt with a lot of internal drama.
That year could have been enough to drive most coaches away from the game, but not Frank Reed, who remains undeterred entering his 23rd season as UTC’s head coach.
And so much has changed in the world of college athletics. Some of those changes — such as student-athletes receiving an extra year of eligibility due to the coronavirus pandemic — will be gone after the 2024-25 school year. Others — such as name, image and likeness compensation, the NCAA transfer portal, and more relaxed rules that make it easier for players to move from one program to another — are going nowhere.
And yet Reed remains, having gained a certain level of perspective with his endurance. A trio of well-known football coaches leaving their longtime posts in the span of a week last month — Nick Saban at the University of Alabama, and in the NFL, Bill Belichick (New England Patriots) and Pete Carroll (Seattle Seahawks) — didn’t shake him.
“Don’t think my wife didn’t remind me the day all those guys retired that I’m right there with them age-wise,” the 76-year old Reed said recently. “My only answer is that God brought me here 23 years ago, I don’t know why, because I wasn’t coming. I didn’t feel like I was being led to come, and then we prayed about it and God brought me here.
“The first six months, I hated it. I wished I had never come, but now 23 years later, I realize why he brought me here, so now I’m looking for him to tell me it’s time to go, and I haven’t felt that yet.”
Reed doesn’t pretend he has the highest approval rating in the world — “I’m sure that everybody you speak to in this community won’t have something good to say about me” — and he doesn’t pretend all his players love him while they play for him, but he’s adamant about them graduating and hopes that later in life they realize why he is how he is.
That has led to individual success for former players off the field, and if the team is bonded well, what he has done since taking over prior to the 2002 season is be successful, especially come tournament time. A six-time Southern Conference softball coach of the year, Reed has guided the Mocs to 15 SoCon tournament titles and UTC has qualified for 12 NCAA tournaments under his tutelage.
“I like the saying that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it,” said outfielder Addy Keylon, a
“I like the saying that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s worked this long, and we have proof on the walls over there that Coach Reed’s plan has been working for 23 years. We’re just hoping it works out again this year.”
— UTC SENIOR OUTFIELDER ADDY KEYLON
former Ooltewah standout. “It’s worked this long, and we have proof on the walls over there that Coach Reed’s plan has been working for 23 years.
“We’re just hoping it works out again this year.”
How does he do it? Well, Reed leans heavily on team bonding and team building, and the results speak for themselves.
“It goes without saying that even outside of softball, being a team player is the most important thing you can do,” senior utility player Kaili Phillips said. “You always have a role. Even if you’re sitting on the bench, you have a role. Coach Reed said from the beginning that if you’re not willing to sit on the bench for the whole year and be guaranteed a ring at the end, are you even a teammate? And that speaks volumes.
“We’ve got standards, and one of the top ones is to be a teammate and don’t leave teammates behind, and that’s the truth about it. You’re going to play together, you’re going to be on the field, you’ve got players backing the pitcher up, so what do you have to do? You have to find the cohesiveness, you have to find that heartbeat that makes the team what it is at the end of the year, and I think this year we found that pretty early, to be honest with you.”
Last season, that cohesiveness never quite happened. Statistically, the 2023 Mocs were basically the same team that won the SoCon title a year earlier, but they struggled to get over the hump and win close games, with 15 of the team’s 27 losses by one or two runs. There were other challenges, too, from the renovation of Frost Stadium taking away their home field to trouble getting gear, but that’s behind them now.
With season No. 23 for Reed starting Thursday in the Louisiana Classic and the Mocs scheduled to get in five games over three days in Lafayette, Reed has crunched those same numbers and feels like UTC could be back in the mix for a title — which could provide more reason for him to come back again.
“There’s a lot of stuff that comes with the territory,” he said of criticism. “But I’m the only one that has to answer for it. I’m going to get up every morning and know in my heart that I’m trying to do the right thing.
“Contrary to what everybody else in the league plays for, we play for the tournament. It’s nice to win the league, but how sad would it be if we won the league and didn’t make the tournament and end up staying home that weekend? I look at the league as an opportunity to play the teams in the tournament so you can prepare for that. I feel like we could lose the league and win the tournament and feel like it’s been a successful season, but if that happened in reverse, I don’t think it has the same bite to it.
“But we can be a pretty good team this year.”
Regardless, he’s going to keep trying to build the UTC softball program as long as he’s allowed to.