In a time when a coach is fired for one bad season or skips town in favor of the next best gig, it's refreshing to come across a story like the one of Chunk Reid's.
On Jan. 15 at St. Vincent's in Savannah, Reid coached the Vidalia Lady Indians to victory. The win pushed the Lady Indians to 15-2 and 8-1 in Region 2, but the win was bigger than merely what their season's record indicated. For Reid, the win was monumental. It was his 850th as a girls basketball coach.
That win total in and of itself is a remarkable feat. In fact, it pushed Reid to within 12 wins of the state's all-time winningest high school girls basketball coach, Alvin Copeland, who retired from Northeast Macon with 862 career wins. Perhaps most impressive about Reid's run of longevity is that every single win has come while coaching the same program - the Lady Indians.
Reid took over the Lady Indians beginning with the 1970-71 season. Since then he's averaged nearly 19 wins a season and has won at least 20 games in 23 of those seasons - he's four wins away from another 20-win campaign this season. He's coached the Lady Indians to 10 region titles, 31 state tournament appearances and a state championship game appearance. The only accomplishment missing from his impressive resume is a state title.
Reid's coaching tenure with Vidalia is now in its fifth decade. Some of the players he's coached have gone on to have children that he's also coached. Vidalia is basically all he knows. He graduated from there in 1961 after lettering in both basketball and baseball.
After attending nearby Georgia Southern, he cut his teeth in coaching as an assistant on the Cochran football staff.
"I don't know (what drove me to coaching)," Reid said. "After high school, I just kind of felt like I'd like to get into coaching. Of course, I never dreamed I'd be coaching girls basketball."
A few years after his stint at Cochran, he returned to Vidalia for good, coaching baseball the '69 and '70 seasons and serving as an assistant on the football team's staff. Reid led his 1970 baseball team to the state finals. Then, at the start of the 1970-71 school year, there was a coaching vacancy within the girls basketball program. Reid accepted the position and has held it ever since.
Now he's on the verge of becoming the state's all-time winningest girls basketball coach.
"Time creeps up on you," said Reid, now 72. "You don't realize you've been it at that long. You don't think about it until someone starts asking you these questions (about career wins) and then it dawns on you.
"I've been doing this quite awhile, and I enjoy it."
After Vidalia's victory over McIntosh County Academy on Friday, Reid is now 10 wins away from the record with five regular season games remaining. If the Lady Indians can win those games and their region tournament - they won their region last season - that would be seven more wins, putting Reid within three of the record heading into the Class AA state tournament.
Three wins in the state tournament would not only tie the record for Reid, but would put the Lady Indians in the state championship game. That would mean a win in the title game would not only give him the record, but it would also give him his first state championship.
How special would that be for Reid and the Vidalia community?
"That would be amazing," said John Koon, who is in his 14th season as the Lady Indians' play-by-play announcer for WTCQ 97.7 FM.
"He wouldn't want to talk about that because he's focused on the next game and winning the region, but to win it with this bunch - with no seniors on the team - and to get that far and win state and break the all-time record, that would mean a lot more than just breaking the record in the middle of the season."
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