Kinder promotes
assistant coach Reed
to head coach
Justin Reed struggled to find the words.
The former Kinder High multi-sport star, and longtime assistant football coach, had been officially hired earlier in the day as the school’s new athletic director and head football coach.
Even though Reed always had dreamed of one day coaching his alma mater, the fact that it became a reality on Tuesday morning still proved to be an immensely humbling moment.
“Obviously when you are given an opportunity to lead a program like this one it is special,” Reed said. “To have your name be associated with the great coaches that have come through here, like Bret Fuselier and Jeff Wainwright is special. It is a great sense of pride that I can’t even put into words.”
Reed’s passion for the Yellow Jackets has always been there.
He was a four-year letterman at Kinder in four different sports, including football, basketball, baseball and golf. After graduating in 2007, Reed went on to play baseball at Louisiana Christian University (then known as Louisiana College).
It wasn’t long after graduation that Reed got into the coaching profession as he returned to his alma mater as assistant coach in 2013 before joining his former coach Wainwright at Sulphur High.
Reed served as quarterbacks coach for one season before being promoted to offensive coordinator — a role he held for five years with the Tors.
Reed then returned to Kinder coaching the running backs and quarterbacks, and then being promoted to offensive coordinator — a role he held for the past three seasons under Fuselier.
“I have been extremely fortunate,” Reed said. “I played for Coach Wainwright, then coached under him and coached under Coach Fuselier. All that time, I never saw it done the wrong way. It was always done the right way. I am going to take bits and pieces from those guys and implement it here now.”
Did Reed expect this to be happening this early in career? No he did not, but he knows that he has put in the work to get himself in this position.
“I know that I have put in the time and effort for this opportunity,” Reed said. “I live being a coach everyday. All of that hard work I have put in the last 11 years, all of that was to get me to this point right now.”
Reed’s first order of business as Yellow Jackets head coach is to develop a plan — one that he can put on paper for his student athletes — and setting the expectations for the program moving forward.
That plan will likely be as passionate as the man who gets to lead the program he truly loves.
“It means a lot to me and my family,” Reed said. “My wife is a teacher at the school and she ran track and cheered at Kinder High. It is something I don’t take lightly. I couldn’t be more excited about this opportunity. There is nowhere else I want to be than Kinder High School.”
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Clark hired as new football coach at Oberlin
Richard Clark was blessed to receive a much needed dose of reality about the high school coaching profession.
While still attending Northwestern State University, Clark got the opportunity to serve as a paid assistant football coach at Northwood-Lena High School. It was one thing to serve as a volunteer coach at his alma mater of Tioga High, but it was a completely different experience at Northwood.
“I feel like working in a place like that helped me greatly,” said Clark, who worked two seasons at Northwood as offensive coordinator. “When you get one of those volunteer jobs they are usually going to be at a large school where you don’t have to do as much.
“Every single idea that you have about the coaching profession being easy was shattered real fast when I was there,” Clark added. “It helped me grow up and it set the tone for what it was going to take to be a head coach.”
That experience came flooding back to Clark earlier this week after he was hired to serve as the new head football coach at Oberlin High School. Clark replaces Durell Peloquin who retired in December after seven seasons at Oberlin.
Peloquin went 57-26 overall, winning one playoff game each season, including a trip to the Class 1A semifinals in 2019.
“Oberlin is the type of the job you want because the only reason that the job is available is because someone decided to retire,” Clark said. “The first matter of business is that I am going to sit down with Coach Peloquin and ask him what they do the best. Then I am going to work with the administration to improve things. I am not here to reinvent the wheel.”
Clark’s coaching career began immediately after graduating from Tioga High School in 2016, where he also was a standout offensive lineman for the Indians. After serving as a volunteer coach at his alma mater during his freshman year at NSU, Clark took the job at Northwood-Lena.
Clark’s on-the-job training didn’t stop there because he had a great opportunity to serve as a volunteer coach under the legendary Dennis Dunn at North DeSoto.
“People that have success everywhere they go are successful for a reason,” Clark said. “Coach Dunn was so big on relationships. He really showed me that the relationships with your players is the difference maker, much more than football knowledge.”
After graduation, Clark got a job as defensive coordinator at Pine Prairie but that soon became something more. A few games into the 2020 season, the head coach was fired and Clark was named as interim coach.
“It was another situation where I was like ‘alright we are going to accelerate this learning process.’” We had two guys that knew football and the other one got fired. That first week as the interim coach we had a hurricane, and we were forced to play Montgomery on a Wednesday. It felt natural once we got it going and I learned a lot of valuable lessons.”
After leading Pine Prairie to a school record five wins and averaging 36 points per game in the 2021 season, Clark left to become the offensive coordinator at Bunkie High for the 2022 season. But the chance to be closer to his home of Rapides Parish and to take over a quality program like Oberlin, was too good to pass up.
“We were looking to get closer to home and this was a great opportunity,” Clark said.