Coaches often do their best to leave their troubles at the office. Sure, it’s nice to vent to your spouse, but it’s not like he or she wants to hear about the intricacies of your 1-2-2 zone in the bedroom. It’s not like he or she is going to come up with some miraculous new offense to solve your team’s persistent scoring droughts.
Unless of course you’re married to another coach.
Joe and Katrina Reed are just that since their wedding in 2012. Joe heads the boys program at Yorktown while Katrina, or Kat, is the head varsity girls coach at Episcopal. Talk about an interesting dynamic.
“The major problem we have,” Joe says with a smile, “is we are both used to being in charge.”
Maybe that presents some challenges every now and then but it also seems to be a recipe for success, both professionally and personally. These are two driven people who compliment each other well. Both can empathize with the other because both can understand the hard work and long hours necessary to run a basketball program. They’re the same, though they’re also different in many ways.
“We play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” Kat told us. “From a basketball standpoint, too,” Joe added. “I’m more an X’s and O’s coach and she’s excellent at building relationships with her players and team-building.”
In short, they are what they seek to build every year on the court–a good team.
They need to be. Being married to a coach can put a stress on any family. When there are two coaches, two seasons, two programs to be run it leaves little time to relax and little time to kick back.
Essentially the family is responsible for running four hours of practice every day on different ends of Arlington/Alexandria. On top of that there’s paperwork, the need to talk to players before and after practice, to check in on the JV and freshman teams, design gameplans, scout opponents, and so on and so on.
Oh, there’s also the pair’s full-time jobs (they’re both teachers). There is also the pair’s three-year old daughter Annalisa. Annalisa spends a lot of time in the gym and the bleachers. She’s possibly the cutest gym rat you’ll ever see. Unfortunately Mom and Dad can’t always give her a ton of attention when they’re, you know, doing their jobs on the court.
The Reeds make it all work and that’s really why their story is so remarkable.
“It’s really all a family affair,” Kat says. “He comes to my practices. I coach his boys Fall League team. We celebrate the accomplishments of both teams, athletically and academically, on and off the court.”
During the season they’ve even managed to have family dinners with Annalisa, just not at home. As Episcopal is a boarding school the Maroon have a dining hall. The pair often eat there during week and Kat says that’s been “life-saving” from a family standpoint.
The dinners also allow Coach Reed to bond with her extended family–the Episcopal girls. Both coaches’ extended families seem to love helping out with Annalisa, too. The logistics of it all is challenging but doable and ultimately rewarding. Like so many coaches around NOVA the Reeds do it all for a reason.
“Watching young men and women transform into successful young people is everything to us,” Kat says.
We had a hard time extracting the exact circumstances of how these two coaches met and went on a first date. They were both assistant coaches at Catholic University– Joe for the guys and Kat for the women. He called her, she claims she didn’t remember who he was, and the next thing you know they were dating. They’ve never known each other when they weren’t basketball coaches.
This season both seem particularly excited to get underway. The Yorktown boys return a lot of talent and add a few transfers to a team that should be a very significant factor in the Liberty District. Episcopal returns a ton of talent after making a surprise run to the ISL AA Championship last season.
That included a victory over Sidwell Friends, a team that defeated Episcopal 73-36 just ten days earlier on February 14th. The strategy in that first game simply didn’t work.
“I thought a more up-tempo style tempo in that first game might work,” Joe said. “Not so much. We thought about it and Kat made some adjustments and things went better the second time.”
“The girls played so well too,” Kat added. “I really love our team.”
It was unclear which team Kat was talking about there. She’s a part of two really good ones, on and off the court.
–Chris Jollay