Football coach taught boys how to win at life
On the rare occasions Wayne Reese Sr. decided to sit still for a while, he would wander out to the front porch of his New Orleans home, lean back in a chair and let the afternoon breeze brush his face.
He was never alone for long.
“He couldn’t be out there 10 minutes before someone would come up,” said his son, Wayne Reese Jr. “I would hear the stories all the time. Just the other day someone told me, ‘You know, your father is the reason that I am the man I am today.’ ”
In New Orleans, a city weathered both by natural and socioeconomic storms, Coach Reese was both a pillar and a safe harbor.
He knew success on the field – amassing 250 career wins and seeing players like hall of fame running back Marshall Faulk reach the NFL – and off it, where he coached generations of young people – now lawyers, general contractors, bus drivers and educators – on how to win at life.
By March 13, the day Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards ordered all state schools to close in response to the coronavirus, Reese was suffering the symptoms of what he thought was a cold.
Less than three weeks later, on April 2, he took his last breaths from a ventilator in a makeshift coronavirus wing of Tulane Hospital in New Orleans. He was 75 and is survived by his wife, Stella Chase Reese, and four children and six grandchildren.
A month after Reese’s death, current and former players said they miss their coach’s presence the most. “When Coach Reese talked, you listened,” said Clifford Chattman, now a 22-year-old senior defensive back at Texas A&M.
Chattman was 13, a shy, indifferent student, when Reese came to his seventh grade class and spoke with the boy, already a star on his rec league football team. During the meeting, the coaches didn’t talk with him about football, and they didn’t try to recruit him. Reese simply asked the boy about himself and how he was doing in school.
After Chattman came to play at McDonogh 35, Reese was unrelenting about the importance of good grades and taught Chattman to ask his teachers for help if he struggled in class. When colleges came recruiting, Reese urged him to pick the school where he felt most at home. Chattman will earn his bachelor’s
“Just the other day someone told me, ‘You know, your father is the reason that I am the man I am today.’ ” Wayne Reese Jr. son of legendary high school football coach Wayne Reese Sr.
degree this summer in youth development.
“Coach told me, ‘No matter the situation in life, just be yourself. You’ll always go the furthest in life by being yourself,’ ” Chattman said.
For Reese, that meant being the rock that everyone around him could lean on. They saw it three years ago when one of his players, Devin “Duke” Winters, passed away from a sudden heart attack the morning he was supposed to leave for a visit to Syracuse University.
Reese was returning from a coaching seminar when he heard the news, his friend and athletic director Kevin Sanders said. Instead of going home, Reese and the other coaches huddled at school to brainstorm how best to support Duke’s family and classmates.
Up until the day Reese left his office for the last time, Sanders said the coach had a photograph of Winters in his window. His voice welled with emotion as he recalled his son recently pointed out that April 2, the day Reese died, was also Duke’s birthday.
“He said ‘Duke got the best birthday present ever,’ ” Sanders said. “‘He got his coach back.’ ”
The last time he spoke with his father, Reese Jr., also a high school head coach who twice went head to head with his father’s teams, had to hold back his own tears as his father told him that all he wanted to do was go home.
“I had to tell him: ‘You’re not the coach right now, you’re the player. And the doctors, they’re the coaches. So if they say you have to stay there right now, then that’s what you have to do.’ ”
After his death, Reese’s students, colleagues and friends organized a drive-by caravan around the school to honor him within social distancing rules.
A trumpet player from the school’s band played the alma mater next to the school’s marquee, which bore Reese’s name along with a tribute that read: “The man, the legend, our coach!”