The year is 2008. Jim Reid, the outside linebackers coach for the Miami Dolphins, is sitting down with Dolphins linebacker Joey Porter. Both men were discussing their big victory over the New England Patriots the week prior, and their plans for the bye week. 

Then… Reid was gone. For two whole minutes.

Reid had no pulse. He was placed on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance. The team quickly rushed him to the hospital. Luckily, the training room stood adjacent to the lounge, saving Reid’s life. The next morning, doctors and other medical personnel performed a quintuple bypass surgery on his heart.

He spent a couple of days in the hospital recovering, but his main focus remained on football. While his life was at risk, his concern was with the 2-2 San Diego Chargers coming to town. He never missed a scouting report, even with his life on the line.

“All I wanted to know is, ‘Can I still coach football?’” Reid said.

James T. Reid grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, a city about 15 minutes north of Boston, known for its hard-working people and strong sense of community.

Reid grew up playing with friends at Morrison Park on Central Avenue. One day, a bully picked a fight with him一and won, then did so again weeks later. Reid wanted payback, so he found out what sport his bully played and signed up himself. That sport was football.

“I saw him playing Pop Warner football,” Reid said. “I asked my Mom if I could play, and she said yes. I said, ‘Where does that kid play?’ [She said] defensive end. The opposite of defensive end is tight end. I wanted to be a tight end.”

Reid put on some pads, threw on a helmet, picked up the pigskin and instantly became married to the game.

He did get his revenge on the football field, ironically leading the kid who bullied him to quit the sport.

In Medford, high school football didn’t mean as much if you didn’t knock off rival Malden on Thanksgiving, no matter what. As a sophomore, Reid did just that, scoring twice as the Mustangs’ tight end in a 22-0 victory.

His high school performances earned him a scholarship to play safety at the University of Maine, where assistant coach Bob Pickett recruited him. On his first day in Orono, Reid met Walt Abbott, his soon-to-be head coach. As soon as they spoke, Reid knew he wanted to be like Abbott one day.

Abbott emphasized treating people with dignity and respect while holding them to a high standard. Reid saw him as a role model, and besides his father, recognized him as one of his biggest influences. Reid was named captain of Abbott’s Black Bears in his senior year.

“When you don’t have [a lot of support and money, coaches] guide you in areas where when you are growing up, you don’t think your parents know anything and your coaches do,” Reid said.

After graduation, Reid was on his way back to Medford to be a history teacher, assistant football coach and assistant baseball coach, but Pickett, who left Maine to become UMass’ defensive coordinator, had other plans. He called Reid and asked if he wanted to get his master’s degree while working as a graduate assistant at UMass, and Reid said yes. 

Reid started coaching for the Minutemen in 1973. On his way to becoming head coach, he held three different coaching positions – outside linebackers coach, defensive backs coach and defensive coordinator – over a span of 14 years.

While he was the defensive coordinator, he recruited a speedy linebacker out of Winchester, Massachusetts named Paul Manganaro. Manganaro wasn’t the best student or very disciplined when he arrived in Amherst. Reid developed him enough to where he felt comfortable naming Manganaro as his first captain in his senior year.

“[Reid] was a great motivator,” Manganaro said. “Players wanted to perform for him to the maximum of their capabilities. That guy had passion, commitment and focus.”

A number of his former players agreed that Reid was tough on his men. His art of motivation was unique and intense, but it worked a majority of the time because they knew he cared about them. 

As a coach, many consider Reid a defensive genius. His aggressiveness with his pass rush was evident to some of the greatest football coaches the sport has seen. Current Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo started as a graduate assistant when Reid was the defensive coordinator at UMass.

“I always respected and valued how aggressive he was defensively,” Spagnuolo said. “I think that’s the staple of any good defense at any level. If you aren’t aggressive, you’re not passionate about what you are doing.”

One of Spagnuolo’s key mentors was Reid. Early in his career, while representing the UMass football program at a local clinic, he delivered a nervous speech full of filler words. Reid, with his trademark teaching style, simply told his student to pause – a piece of advice Spagnuolo has carried with him ever since.

Reid had many different values and beliefs, spanning all the way back to Maine with Abbott, but the one that stuck out the most was his emphasis on education.

According to Reid, the greatest challenge he faced as a first-time head coach was to hit his goal of a 100 percent graduation rate. He believed conditioning players while teaching them the fundamentals of football was directly parallel to the fundamentals of life itself.

His former players knew him for his 5:30 a.m. stadium stair runs he made them do when they missed class. Reid even did the runs with the players so they didn’t complain.

“They could say, ‘Hey Jim, we are firing you because you are 2-9,’ but they would never be able to say, ‘We are firing you because you had a 50 percent graduation rate,’” Reid said. “No way, that would never, ever happen.”

Despite Reid’s prioritization of the classroom at UMass, his style of football was still a winning one. In the six years he was head coach in Amherst, UMass made two NCAA Division I-AA playoff appearances and won the Yankee Conference three times. Reid also won the Yankee Conference Coach of the Year award twice while with the Minutemen.

In 1992, after 19 consecutive years at UMass and six as the head coach, Reid resigned after the school told him he couldn’t give out the scholarships he promised to incoming freshmen. At the time, he was working with Joe Cullen, the now defensive line coach for the Kansas City Chiefs.

“We had won three championships in five years, and Coach Reid took a stand and resigned,” Cullen said. “He basically saved the football program, in my opinion. They were going to secretly take all the scholarships away, and that didn’t happen.”

Reid leaving forced the hand of the administration, and according to past Minuteman Rene Ingoglia, they wound up honoring all the scholarships he had offered.

Along with Cullen, Reid left his beloved nest of Amherst for a defensive coordinator position at the University of Richmond. After one year, he transitioned to Boston College and ended up returning to the Spiders in 1995 as their new head coach.

In 1997, Richmond played the University of Virginia in the third week of its season. They came in 2-0, ready for the test. However, the Spiders registered just 85 rushing yards on 36 attempts and finished with 86 yards through the air. 

It was a game to forget for Richmond, so much so that Reid prepared a ritual for the team on having a short memory. The next day, on a Sunday morning, he brought the team on a hike through the woods and asked his players to bring their VHS tapes that contained the film from the defeat. They walked out to a pre-dug ditch where Reid asked the players to hand over their VHS tapes. Reid took them and tossed them in the grave.

“Don’t ever speak of this again,” Reid said, according to former Richmond player Shawn Barber. “This film is so bad, we aren’t going to even watch it.”

Reid’s players had the short memory he demanded from them. The next week, Richmond earned a 56-3 victory over VMI, with the Spider running backs combining for 236 yards on the ground. Richmond’s defenders used Reid’s motivation to their advantage, collecting five VMI turnovers while limiting the team to 97 yards of offense.

“The fact that he put all of that together [was incredible],” Barber said. “He probably dug that grave himself.”

Along with being an elite motivator, Reid had a good eye for talent.

Although it was easier to recruit in Virginia, Reid kept up his Massachusetts roots, recruiting defensive end and linebacker Marc Megna out of Fall River in 1993. Megna didn’t have the speed and burst off the line that impressed Reid, but his hustle and effort earned him a full scholarship.

“I never wanted to let Coach Reid down,” Megna said. “He cares about people to another level.”

From the first day of practice, their connection grew stronger. Megna grew up without a father, and Reid filled that void. 

“He had this unbelievable will to give great effort and care about human beings,” Megna said. “He cared more about developing young men than winning games.” 

“If I’m being completely honest, he was my hero. He did what he said he was going to do. He said what he meant. He never lied. He pulled no punches, and I knew he cared about me because he was hard on me.”

To Reid, Megna had a certain something about him. The defensive end had an innate ability to get to the quarterback so well that his coach wondered how it could be done. The answer wasn’t what anyone would expect. In the time he was at Richmond, Megna’s mother had cancer. When Megna rushed the ball carrier, he viewed them as the person with the last bottle of serum to cure his mother.

Megna’s ability took him all the way to winning the Dudley Award in 1998, given out to the best college football player in Virginia. Reid knew Megna’s mother couldn’t afford tickets to see her son receive the award, but he made sure she was there.

“When I looked up and saw my mother there, I knew that was Coach Reid,” Megna said.

Megna holds the Richmond school record for sacks with 32 and ranks first and second for sacks in a single season. He was drafted in the sixth round of the NFL draft by the New York Jets and bounced around many different teams domestically and abroad before playing his last football game in 2005. Richmond Athletics inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2013. 

Reid helped the Spiders grow from a losing team to a group that was consistently competitive within their conference. He captured two Atlantic 10 conference championships for Richmond. As the head coach for nine seasons, he recorded a record of 48-53-1 and remains No. 3 all-time in total wins for the program.

After Richmond, Reid made a couple of quick stops at Syracuse, Bucknell and VMI before taking his talents to the NFL. Miami Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano hired him as his outside linebackers coach in 2008. Even in the NFL, Reid modeled the work ethic he instilled in players by working day and night, constantly watching film to figure out packages on how to get to the quarterback.

Overall, he used his opportunity in the pros to learn more about identifying talent.

“You can learn a lot from a player by watching how he celebrates a great play,” Reid said. “You want to have people on your team that focus on the positive, and when something bad happens, they work harder instead of blaming someone else.”

One of Reid’s crowning achievements in the NFL came during that bye week when he was in a hospital bed. His preparation was so incredible for the Dolphins’ following game that Sparano awarded him the game ball following the team’s 17-10 win over the Chargers.

“If I collapsed on the field, they would have to drag me out and not use that as an excuse to miss one rep or practice play,” Reid said. 

The Dolphins finished atop the AFC East that year with a record of 11-5, making the playoffs. The season prior, the Dolphins had a record of 1-15, and in the following season, they fell back down to 7-9. 

After one season, Reid departed the NFL at the age of 58 to return back to the collegiate level.

“I think [in college] you have the opportunity to shape people’s lives a little bit more,” Reid said. “Go to class, treat people with dignity and respect. I kind of missed that.”

He coached at the University of Virginia before leaving to spend three seasons at the University of Iowa. His last stop was returning to Boston College, before finally coming back to Amherst, Massachusetts, under then-head coach Don Brown.

When he returned, the alumni network wasn’t at the place he and others wanted it to be. He contacted Frank DiTomasso, a former star player, a couple of years prior to get the Gridiron Club – a UMass alumni organization aimed to raise money to provide resources that positively impact student athletes – going again. It was difficult to find alumni and people who wanted to support UMass football at the time, but Reid’s presence helped get more donors on board.

“Coach Reid came back and I noticed we were able to get a lot more alumni players to come back and join the club,” DiTomasso said. “He still reaches out after a game, especially after a tough loss, and [talks] to you about the positives that came out of it.”

Along with the alumni, Reid always brought the community with him too. People know him as someone who makes a great impact on not only his players, but individuals throughout the Pioneer Valley as a whole. Some didn’t know Jim Reid as the UMass football coach, but knew him as a local guy that embraced his community in many ways.

“If you [walked] down the streets of Amherst, you saw an old timer and you said ‘Hey, do you know Jim Reid?’, and they might say, ‘Yeah, we know him,’” Reid said. “‘He was the coach of the Lassie League softball team that were state champions.’ I was involved with all the summer rec leagues. When you want the community to follow you, then you absorb the community with you.”

Besides recruiting alumni to support the team, Reid’s current role as an analyst revolves around writing up defensive concepts the Minutemen will face, but you can also find him all around campus doing academic checks to make sure players are going to class, a role that reflects his core value of education and developing young men.

After the head coaching change at the end of 2024 for the Minutemen, Reid was 74 years old and pondered his options, considering retirement. Luckily for UMass, new head coach Joe Harasymiak convinced Reid to stay a little bit longer.

“I just want to be able to get UMass back on track, and then I can die happy,” Reid said. “Football has become important again … I feel like [UMass] is my family.”

During practices this past spring, Reid worked with the running backs and scout team. He could be seen doing push-ups or giving words of encouragement to inspire his players, which is what he does best. 

At the end of team meetings in the spring, the group had a hype session before they broke off.  Reid spoke in front of everyone with the same ferocity and humor he’s had throughout his whole coaching career. Then, without warning, he tore off his shirt and picked up a medicine ball. He started slamming it on the ground as the players counted with him. The whole place erupted, and Reid walked off without a shirt on.

“I joke with him every day,” UMass long snapper Jovoni Borbon said. “He has so much knowledge that I could just watch the way he carries himself and how he speaks as an adult.”

Harasymiak sees Reid in the same way many others do.

“Coach Reid has seen everything,” Harasymiak said. “We joke that if you cut him open that he would be laces and leather. It would be a football inside of him … If some of our guys had a third of what he has, we will be alright.”

After 53 years of coaching across all levels, Reid has seen it all, but his values have never changed. He loves motivating players, but he also loves watching players learn how to motivate themselves. He wants everyone in the room to know they are in college to get an education first and be an athlete second. He’s a coach who’s tough as nails, but when a player needs someone as soft as a blanket, Reid is there for them.

“If you go all the way back, and look at a person or an occasion that saved my life, I look at football having done that for me,” Reid said. “As long as someone wants an old man to coach, they have one.”

“Football is football,” Reid has always said, but throughout his life, everyone knows the game meant more to him than just a phrase. Thanks to football, Reid has a second family, one that he cultivated through tough love, care and respect. He loves the community, the same way he loves his players. 

There will never be another Jim Reid.

Ezekiel Altman can be reached at [email protected] and followed on X @EzekielAltman.