Leaving One Home for Another : Former Cleveland Quarterback Reed Returns as Cavaliers’ Assistant Football Coach

Mark Reed is one coach prepared to put his equity where his mouth is.

After 16 years as a salesman, Reed has quit his job, sold his house, returned to college and joined the football staff at Cleveland High. When talk turns to commitment to the Cavalier program, no one can question the resolve of the 43-year-old former Cleveland quarterback.

“I just wanted to get back into coaching,” Reed said with a shrug during a recent practice session. “Coaching was always in the back of my mind.”

It might have taken 16 years for the idea to work its way to the fore, but Cleveland Coach Steve Landress is not complaining. He has welcomed Reed to the program with open arms--and a call to arms. With Reed on the staff and transfer David Erhardt at quarterback, Cleveland will become a passing team in 1990.

“Yeah, we’re calling it Air Reed around here,” Landress said. “Mark has made a big commitment. It’s nice to know that somebody who cares about football is going to be around with you all year. Once you get football in your blood, it’s tough to get it out.”

Reed, who earned a degree in physical education at Cal State Northridge in 1974, sold his Porter Ranch home this summer and has returned to CSUN to complete work for his teaching credential. He will work as a student-teacher this fall at Northridge Junior High and serve as a volunteer coach at Cleveland in what he hopes is the first step toward a new career as a teacher-coach.

“I was kind of wasting my life being a salesman,” he said. “The job I had wasn’t fulfilling anymore. It paid the bills but I hadn’t been happy doing it the past couple of years.”

Reed has brought nearly two decades of pent-up enthusiasm to the job, jumping back into the sport that brought him a measure of fame in the area in the 1960s. Reed was an all-league quarterback and two-year starter for the Cavaliers in 1962-63 and then played for two years at Pierce College.

An average-sized player at 6-foot, 195 pounds, Reed had a big-time passing arm and earned a scholarship from Arizona, then a member of the Western Athletic Conference. In 1966 as a junior, he won the starting job three games into the season and finished the year as the nation’s leading passer with 2,368 yards. His 193 completions (in 365 attempts) were the second-highest total in the country. In addition, he passed for a school-record 20 touchdowns and ran for four more.

When Reed was a senior, a sore back limited his playing time and he attempted only 139 passes, completing 54 for 759 yards and four touchdowns. Still, he directed Arizona to a 14-7 upset of Ohio State in Columbus, a result that infuriated the late Woody Hayes, the Buckeyes’ legendary coach.

“It was the opener for them and there were 80,000 people there,” Reed said. “They thought they had scheduled a sure win and when we beat them, Woody was (angered). The game was a great thrill for me.”

Reed signed with the Denver Broncos of the American Football League after his senior season, but the U. S. Army had other plans for him. He did not serve in Vietnam, but he spent two years in a Reserve unit.

After his military commitment ended in 1970, he sent letters to nearly every professional team. Only the Atlanta Falcons’ Bobby Beathard, now the San Diego Chargers’ general manager, responded.

“Beathard was a great guy and came out to Pierce to put me through a workout,” Reed said. “I grabbed some guys I knew and just started throwing the ball to them.”

Beathard was impressed enough to offer Reed a contract and an invitation to Atlanta’s training camp, run by Coach Norm Van Brocklin, a Hall of Fame quarterback. Reed survived the first few cuts, and then, for reasons he still doesn’t fully understand, quit the team and headed home.

“I hate to use that word, but I quit,” he said. “I had done well in camp and I realized I could play with these guys. But I don’t know. I was homesick. It was a strange time. I told Van Brocklin that my heart wasn’t in it, so I left.”

Surprisingly, Van Brocklin gave Reed a second chance the following year after Reed called him when Van Brocklin was in Los Angeles coaching in the Pro Bowl game.

That summer, his second chance and career ended abruptly during a scrimmage at East Tennessee State. A defender threw Reed to the ground and mashed Reed’s right shoulder into the turf. He underwent surgery and headed home, this time for good.

He returned to Cal State Northridge to complete his degree in physical education and got his first taste of coaching. He worked for Gary Torgeson in 1973, Torgeson’s first year as the Matador coach.

Bitten by the coaching bug, Reed prepared for a career in the field. He arranged to do his student-teaching at Grant High and in 1974 joined the Valley College coaching staff that included Harry Welch, the current Canyon High coach. Reed’s salary for the entire semester was $48, hardly enough to support his wife and the first of three sons.

Still, his course seemed set until Jay Carpenter, a former teammate at Pierce, called Reed and offered him a job as a salesman with an electrical manufacturing company in Los Angeles. He knew nothing of the business--or sales for that matter--but a young family to support and an offer considerably more generous than $48 persuaded him to accept the job.

“I didn’t know if I could do it, but I found out that my sports background really helped out,” he said. “You had to back it up with substance, but it was a great icebreaker.”

But 16 years of selling proved to be his limit. And thanks to the Southern California real estate market, he engineered a career move. Reed entered the housing market in the early 1970s when he bought a condominium in Reseda and left the market last month when escrow closed on his Porter Ranch home.

“I had enough equity in my home that I could get by while I went through the credential process,” he said.

It also helps to have an understanding wife, especially one with a solid job. Jody Reed works at the National Center on Deafness at CSUN. “My wife has been really good about this. She’s 100% behind it,” Reed said.

Reed seems far from rusty as he re-enters the coaching ranks. He coached his sons in youth football and baseball leagues and regularly attended Cleveland football games. “I think high school football is fun and exciting,” he said. “It’s colorful. I used to bring the family out on Friday nights to watch the Cavaliers.”

Reed has chosen an ideal year to join the Cleveland staff, although Landress would have been grateful for any warm body. Reed joins Lee Holden, the only paid assistant, and fellow walk-on coaches Keith Weiser, Nick Titariga and Mike Siam.

“Mark picked up the offense in about an hour, so it made me more relaxed,” Landress said. “He can take over the offense and I can be more like a head coach. I can work on different position players and do more teaching.”

Reed’s special project this year is Erhardt, a 6-foot-2, 180-pound senior who played last year at Canoga Park, completing 82 of 170 passes for 889 yards and seven touchdowns. Canoga Park officials sent him to Cleveland because of discipline problems last spring but he has been a model player this summer, according to his coaches.

“He ran into problems at Canoga Park and now we’re kind of glad he did because he’s going to help us,” Reed said. “He hasn’t missed a day all summer. He’s got a major league arm. He could play at USC or UCLA. If he keeps his head on right, he’ll be playing at a big-time school.”

Erhardt and Reed have bonded quickly. The student has little trouble accepting advice when the teacher still can perform.

“He still throws straight-on bullets,” Erhardt said about Reed’s passing. “This has been a great experience for me. He has a lot of knowledge about offense. He’s really patient and easygoing, but when he wants something done, he’ll have it. I feel close to him already. It’s more like a friendship.”

That kind of response reassures Reed, convincing him that he made the right call when he left sales. In a proclamation that may owe much to the zeal of a convert, Reed claims he has made his last career change.

“I got busy raising a family, but this is something I always wanted to do and I didn’t want to wait any longer,” he said. “And it’s not just the coaching. It’s teaching, too. If I just wanted to coach, I could have kept my job. I’d like to stay at Cleveland. Maybe some day I’ll be the head coach at Cleveland. That would be like a dream come true.”