Reed battles on, off gridiron


Donnell Stadium was something it was never meant to be Friday night.Quiet.

Excruciatingly quiet.

So quiet you could almost hear a heartbeat.

So quiet you could whisper a prayer that the heartbeat didn’t stop, and wonder if that prayer could be heard half a football field away.

The visitors side of Donnell Stadium should have erupted in thunderous cheers when the finals seconds of Coldwater’s 35-24 win over Patrick Henry in the Division V state semifinals ticked off the clock. Instead, the fans in the far bleachers, and those in the entire stadium, embraced a stunned silence as trainers and paramedics worked on the prone figure of Coldwater coach John Reed.

When the game ended, Reed and his staff walked onto the field, intent on congratulating the Patrick Henry coaches for a game well played. A step or two across the sideline, though, Reed collapsed.

“He said he felt a severe pain in his side and went right to the ground,” Coldwater assistant Tim Hoying would say later.

When a person has a slip, a misstep, a stumble there can be a slap-stick humor to it.

When a person collapses, there’s nothing funny about it.

When a person collapses, there’s a scary seriousness to the act, a sense that something might be terribly, terribly wrong.

In Reed’s case, there was.

Reed has recently been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Stadiums are the arenas we build for athletic competition. The battles we witness are between the athletes on the field.

John Reed has won many of those battles.

An Upper Sandusky native, Reed is among Ohio’s winningest prep football coaches with a 283-125-1 record. His career has included stops at Parkway, Upper Sandusky, Marion Harding and Lebanon, But his best work has been done at Coldwater, where his 168-30 record includes Division IV state championships in 2005 and 2007 and a state-best 123 wins over the past 10 seasons.

That kind of success can induce an aura of invincibility around a program and, by association, the people connected to it. As we saw at Donnell Stadium on Friday night, however, there are bigger battles than those fought on Turf Fields.

And the cheers, delayed for so long, finally did rain down from both sides of the stadium when Reed sat up and was helped to his feet. Flanked by two paramedics, he started off, a bit unsteady at first but then stronger, and headed for the locker room under his own power.

Reed hesitated after a few steps, and looked almost apologetically toward the Patrick Henry players grouped near the north end zone. Circumstances had made it impossible for him to congratulate them on a hard-fought game. But Patriots’ coach Bill Inselmann, a class act in his own right, had sized up the situation as well. He was already hurrying over to Reed to offer a hand shake, a few words of encouragement, perhaps a prayer for his recovery.

Winning is the bottom line in sports. And for a few hours Friday night, Coldwater and Patrick Henry battled for a prize called victory.

Sometimes sports is just a stage, though, for the battles that really matter.

Hanneman: 419-427-8408,

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