Coach
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Jason Reynolds on Coach
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A closed door, pried open by hundreds of thousands of kidsReynolds had finished four Track books and considered the series complete. His resistance to returning was principled, not lazy: he worried that a prequel set before Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu were born would strand readers without the characters they loved, leaving them alone with a man they only knew as a supporting figure.
“I’m a person who believes that a thing that is done is done... hundreds of thousands of kids were like, ‘We want to know more about Coach.’ And my reticence was always that if I write Coach’s story, then your favorite characters aren’t there because they weren’t alive when Coach was a child.” [paraphrased from audio]
Once Reynolds committed to the project, the 1988 setting did something he had not planned for. Placing twelve-year-old Otie Brody inside the crack epidemic and the early AIDS crisis gave him a way to speak across time to readers living through the opioid epidemic and COVID, generations who had never been taught about the earlier catastrophe.
“They don’t know anything about the AIDS epidemic. It’s as if it never happened, which is so interesting. And so I wanted to tell the story about a young man living through that, which then influences why he loved Ghost so much when he met him 40 years later.” [paraphrased from audio]
At an MICDS school visit in St. Louis, Reynolds described the moment the personal hook came into focus. Years removed from the series, he found his way back in by asking what his own biography could lend to a story set in the decade he grew up.
“I didn’t think that was a good idea, but then I started to think about what it would be like to go back 40 years. What was it like to grow up in the 1980s? How can I use Coach’s story and use touchpoints from my own life?”
The motivation Reynolds kept returning to was a gap he sees between children and the adults raising them. He wanted young readers to understand that a parent’s confusing or hurtful behavior is not random, that it has an origin story the child has never been handed.
“It’s imperative to make sure that everyone knows that parents are people. And so even though they make mistakes, and they’re imperfect, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t love you. It just means that they’re trying to sort out the messiness of their lives while you’re trying to sort out the messiness of yours in middle school.” [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Rereading old work, rejecting outlines, and poking the industryBefore Reynolds wrote a single new sentence, he had to spend time with his old ones. Returning to all four previous Track books after years away was uncomfortable in a way he did not soften.
Best book in that series is definitely Patina, right? And then second is Lou. [paraphrased from audio]
The rereading cost him something: he found himself wishing he had made different choices, including in the book that started it all. That discomfort is part of what makes his candid ranking of Ghost land with such finality.
Glass Manor, the DC-area neighborhood where Reynolds grew up and where the Track series is set, became the tool that let him re-enter a world he had left behind. The geography carried its own memory.
“I was writing for a new audience, too. I had to think about, if I write Coach now for a reader who hasn’t read the series. So you can read Coach as the fifth book and see how the whole story comes together, or you can read Coach by itself.”
The chapter structure of Coach is a deliberate argument. In the earlier Track books, chapter titles are loose. Here, every chapter opens with the same phrase Otie’s father deploys as a disciplinary weapon when the boy makes a mistake: “The moral of the story is...” Reynolds designed that repetition to make readers notice what the phrase assumes.
“This is me basically poking at you, the reader, poking at the industry, poking at all of the people who say that our books are supposed to be teaching a thing.” [paraphrased from audio]
Reynolds does not outline. He has held to that across every book, including a five-entry series where character continuity demanded he keep track of an entire fictional world. He told the Texas Book Festival the Track series was brutal to make for exactly this reason, and he kept going anyway.
“I wanted to address how there are so many kids in America and all over this world who don’t even know what it is to breathe easy. And it’s normalized, right? Suffocation feels normal to them. And yet they still get to be kids and find joy and laughter.” [paraphrased from audio]
That image of normalized suffocation was the compass for the whole series, and writing Coach’s childhood meant showing readers the moment when one child first learned to carry that pressure without naming it.
The personal thread
Glass Manor on the page, Glass Manor underfootReynolds ran track in high school, the 800 and the 4x800 relay, before compartment syndrome moved him to shot put and discus. The sport at the center of the Track series is one he experienced from the inside, which shaped how he wrote young Otie’s relationship to running before competition ever entered the picture.
“That is where sort of where the heart was injected. Is sort of having empathy for the future version of him and writing that into the young version of him.” [paraphrased from audio]
Reynolds has described a specific realization about his own mother: once he learned enough about her childhood, habits he had found irritating or confusing stopped feeling arbitrary. That shift in perspective is the emotional engine of Coach, applied now to a fictional boy who will spend four books being the adult that someone else needs to understand.
“You have parents and teachers and coaches whose job it is to teach you. My job isn’t to do that; it’s to let you know that somebody out here knows you’re alive. I’m thinking about what you’re thinking about, things you’re feeling that you might think are wrong. I feel those things, too.”
What he wants us to sit with
Running from something, running toward somethingReynolds built Coach Otis Brody, the adult version who appears in all five Track books, around a specific kind of adult intelligence. Writing the character’s childhood in Coach is Reynolds’s way of showing readers where that intelligence came from and what it cost to develop it.
“I wanted a coach who understood the kids that he was coaching, and knew that they were running from something, or running to something, and that the track itself was just a metaphor for their lives.” [paraphrased from audio]
Reynolds is consistent across interviews about what he believes his role is not. He does not write to instruct or correct. The chapter-title structure of Coach, which announces a moral lesson at the start of every chapter and then withholds one, is the formal expression of that refusal.
“You have parents and teachers and coaches whose job it is to teach you. My job isn’t to do that; it’s to let you know that somebody out here knows you’re alive. I’m thinking about what you’re thinking about, things you’re feeling that you might think are wrong. I feel those things, too.”
The argument Reynolds wants readers to walk away with is not about track or the 1980s specifically. It is about what happens when a young person finally sees the full human being inside the adult who has been shaping their life. He tested this idea against his own experience before writing it into Otie.
“It’s imperative to make sure that everyone knows that parents are people. And so even though they make mistakes, and they’re imperfect, that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t love you. It just means that they’re trying to sort out the messiness of their lives while you’re trying to sort out the messiness of yours in middle school.” [paraphrased from audio]
Coach gives young Otie Brody a childhood full of that messiness, then asks readers to hold both versions of him at once: the twelve-year-old trying to survive his neighborhood and the man who will spend forty years knowing exactly what that survival looks like in someone else.