43 years at Hamilton Heights, Chuck Reeves is 'most well-known and loved man in community'

ARCADIA — Jarrod Mason was a scrawny high school freshman in 1990 without a driver’s license or consistent means to get to school for Hamilton Heights football weightlifting workouts.

Enter Chuck Reeves, who offered to take the 20-minute drive to Mason’s home in Aroma, a tiny village in the northwest corner of Hamilton County, and bring him to school. Mason watched out his dining room window that first morning, tracking the lights on Reeves’ Dodge pickup through the darkness on the driveway up to Mason’s house.

It was right about the time Reeves’ pickup reached a little bridge on his driveway when Mason realized he forgot to tell him about the bump in the road. This was the start, an essentially the end, of what has become known as the “coffee story” to Mason, Reeves and many others associated with Hamilton Heights football over the decades.

“I open the door to the truck and there’s coffee everywhere,” said Mason, now the principal at Hamilton Heights. “On the dash. On him. On the ceiling. I’m like, ‘Man, I totally forgot to tell you about that bump.’ He looks at me and says, ‘I know.’”

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Mason and Reeves both laugh at this visual now, more than 30 years later. But that image of Reeves, covered in coffee, yet somehow not angry — or at least not showing it — represents the calm, steady hand that has helped guide Hamilton Heights football for 43 seasons. Reeves, who cuts his own hair in a throwback buzzcut style, will step down at the end of this season.

“He’s like the foundation of Hamilton Heights football,” said sixth-year coach Jon Kirschner, who coached with Reeves for four years as a fellow assistant before he was hired as the head coach. “You can look at out (at practice) and see many of our coaches who played for him. Coach Mason has two boys playing for him. We have dads, uncles, cousins, older brothers, you name it. There are so many families that know coach Reeves as ‘my coach.’ From a school perspective, there’s not one person who doesn’t know who coach Reeves is around Hamilton Heights.”

Reeves, 64, retired as a math teacher in May. His wife, Debbie, plans to retire as an English teacher at Hamilton Heights after this school year. Their plans for retirement are to move to South Carolina to be closer to oldest daughter Heather’s family and two grandchildren.

“It’s going to be fun,” Reeves said. “A whole ‘nother chapter.”

Reeves joked his wife made him retire a year early so he could get used to the idea. “I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t on the football field Friday nights,” he said. Reeves came here in 1981 fresh out of Purdue to teach and coach at Walnut Grove, a middle school in the Hamilton Heights district. The 1977 Warren Central graduate quickly moved over to coach the junior varsity and as an assistant with the high school teams, gaining a reputation for his versatility to coach any position and adapt to different styles.

“The great thing about Chuck is that he will offer his opinions, but he will also listen to yours,” said Adam Knoll, who played on Hamilton Heights’ first sectional championship team as a senior in 1995 and has coached on the Huskies' staff with Reeves since 2014. “When Chuck says, ‘Oh, that is really good,’ you kind of think, ‘OK, I might actually know what I’m doing.’”

Hamilton Heights cycled through three coaches in the 1980s before Kevin Roth took over in 1989. Reeves took over the defensive coordinator role for Roth, who led the Huskies to a 51-40 record in nine seasons. He took one year off coaching, in 1998, before coming back to help coach the defense alongside Gene “Smoke’ Starrett.

“Some coaches are in it for a long time and spend their careers at 10 or 12 different places, moving around all the time,” Reeves said. “I just stayed here and let them come to me. Each coach is a little different, and I learn more stuff from them. I always feel like it’s good stuff if you execute it correctly.”

Reeves counts that first sectional championship among his career highlights. The Huskies enjoyed success under Steve Stirn, too, who was 72-35 with four sectional titles in his tenure and produced one of the state’s top quarterbacks in Dustin Sherer, who went on to play quarterback at Wisconsin.

Reeves said he was comfortable playing the “good cop” role, which fit his personality.

“It’s funny because when I talk to guys I played with or guys who are older than me, we always talk about coach Reeves being our favorite coach,” Knoll said. “He was a great teacher, too. Everybody had him for math and he coached track. He was just a coach who made it fun but also didn’t give you a break. Because of the way he is, you want to take it seriously because you know he knows what he’s talking about.”

Though he joked he “likes coaching too much” to want to be a head coach, he did fill that role for one year — sort of. When Stirn was forced to resign and later charged with providing alcohol to a minor, Reeves and Starrett were hired as co-head coaches in 2007. Reeves coached the offense and Starrett the defense. The team finished 8-3.

“We sat in on the interviews and then said, ‘OK, we’ll do it for a year,’ Reeves said. “I just don’t like all the management stuff head coaches have to do. I like to coach football and be with the kids.”

Another coaching highlight came in 2012 when Hamilton Heights reached the Class 3A state finals for the first — and, to date, only — time under then-coach Mitch Street. But it is not the wins and losses, or even the trophies, that necessarily make these Friday nights more gratifying for Reeves.

“Sometimes you are up and sometimes you are down,” he said. “But to see the kids work hard and get better is what I enjoy. If you do that and end up .500, that’s OK too.”

Reeves has not lost his touch with the younger generation. For the past several years, Kirschner has used him to coach the quarterbacks. This season during games, Reeves has an iPad on the sideline during games and can help diagnose corrections in real time.

Hamilton Heights senior Bodie Derrer calls Reeves “the most well-known and loved man in this community.”

“He’s a great dude and he’s helped me become a better quarterback and athlete,” Derrer said. “He’s helped me with my mental game. There is going to be a big hole to fill because he’s always behind the scenes working his tail off. He’s one of the most respectful and knowledgeable coaches I’ve been around.”

The Huskies are 3-0 and receiving votes in the Class 3A poll going into Friday’s game at Northwestern. Hamilton Heights has the unfortunate reality of having defending state champion and top-ranked Bishop Chatard and second-ranked Guerin Catholic in the same Sectional 28 field, but Derrer said the goal is a state title.

“We would love to get him there,” Derrer said.

Though this is the last go-round for Reeves at Hamilton Heights, he hasn’t ruled out sniffing around South Carolina when he and Debbie make their move south. His Friday nights will be free, after all.

“There’s a couple good programs near where my daughter lives,” he said. “Everybody needs a volunteer assistant. All you have to do is give me a little room, a computer, some Vince Gill music and I’ll be good.”

It won’t be the same around Hamilton Heights next year. But as Kirschner counts up the number of assistants who have played for Reeves, it’s obvious his fingerprints will be on the Huskies program for a long time.

“He poured into me when I was young and saw something in me,” Mason said. “There are a lot of us who feel that way. He knows the kids, knows the potential they have and has the biggest heart of anybody you’ve ever met. You can’t replace somebody like him.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IHSAA football: Chuck Reeves has been a Hamilton Heights for 43 years