“Where so many of us are known for singular achievements or job titles, Russ was known for being Russ Reilly.”
— Erin Quinn, Middlebury College Athletic Director
Russ Reilly and I first met in 1962. Russ was an 18 year-old freshman at Bates College, playing on the jayvee basketball team, and I was a senior at Lewiston High School, right around the corner from Bates, playing on the basketball team there.
The two teams always played an early season game, so Russ and I calculated, after the fact, that’s how our friendship began, with a perfunctory post game handshake:
“Nice game.”
“Thanks.”
I think my dad really knew Russ before I did. My dad was the Dean of Admissions at Bates and he took a special interest in Russ. He likely knew through the admissions process of some of the special challenges Russ faced growing up. They developed early what became a lifelong relationship of keen mutual regard.
If you knew Russ in his Bates years, you undoubtedly knew Jane too. Russ met Jane Hippe on her first day at Bates, when Russ, a senior and an RA, brought his freshmen boys for a mixer with the girls in Jane’s dorm. The students were not “mixing,” so Russ asked a frosh girl to dance, Jane, to break the ice. They then went out for an ice cream cone.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Russ went off to Boston University to earn an M.Ed.; Jane finished Bates in three years and they were married as soon as she graduated in 1968. She was 21, his “child bride,” as they both liked to say. Russ was all of 24, the assistant varsity basketball coach (and coach of the jayvees) and the head athletic trainer, the first in such a role at Bates.
“We were the youngest members of the athletic department,” Jane recalled recently, “but we were accepted and embraced.” Russ joined a department of established coaches, all men, as the enormous changes brought about by Title IX were yet to be seen, but soon to come.
These coaches were role models and mentors to Russ. They were men of integrity, vitality, warmth, and humor. They loved their work and Russ shared their values. Those colleagues of Russ were my heroes growing up.
Russ played for George Wigton, who joined the Bates athletic department in 1965 to coach basketball and tennis. Russ was a team member for George, then was his assistant, and after that a rival coach for many years. Jane describes the Wigtons, George and Eleanor, now in their late 80s, as “dear friends: George was best man at our wedding.”
In 1976, Middlebury College basketball coach Tom Lawson was appointed Director of Athletics. He knew he would have to give up his basketball duties. His plan was to hire someone to apprentice for a year, who would then take over the program.
“When I was traveling for games, I would evaluate assistant coaches at other schools,” Tom Lawson said recently. “I knew George Wigton well. I liked the great pride Russ took in the Bates program and his loyalty to the people he worked with.”
As a part of this process, Tom invited Russ and Jane to come to Middlebury to meet with him and Tom’s wife, Phyllis. “Before we went out to dinner, we met at our home,” Tom recalled. “I mentioned just in passing that we were troubled by a leaky faucet. So handyman Russ got up and fixed it.
“I said to myself, ‘this guy can do anything!’”
As a young man, Russ struggled with an explosive temper. His outbursts were never directed outwardly, only at himself for perceived shortcomings (or a poorly executed shot on the golf course). Basketball coaching is not a best line of work for a person with a short fuse.
In his first season at Middlebury, Russ took over the team for a game when Tom, still the head coach, was away at athletic director meetings. The game was marked by an egregiously bad referee’s call, costing Middlebury the game. After arguing the point with officials, Russ took a swipe at his empty chair with his foot. 
It was not an especially violent kick, but it was very well placed. The chair, of the flimsy orange plastic variety, flew up into the first rows of the stands, coming to rest at the feet of Professor Henry Prickitt, chair of the Faculty Athletics Policy Committee.
“We came home that night and started work on our résumés,” Jane recalls with a laugh. Luckily, nothing came of it. The word was out: Russ was a good person. A lesson learned.
I mentioned to Jane in that I couldn’t remember “a Russ Reilly technical.” She said, “Oh, there were a few.” But Russ’s court behavior, in this very intense enterprise, was exemplary.
Though his professional world was a largely a masculine one, men’s sports, Russ never betrayed any misogyny. That would not have gone over well in his own home. Jane herself pursued a parallel career in early education, and she and Russ raised three strong independent girls into women.
At Russ’s memorial service, his Middlebury coaching associates were represented by Missy Foote, his colleague and friend for more than 40 years. “Russ often talked about his co-workers as a family,” she said. “He lived the ethos that families appreciate each other. His role in women’s athletics I will remember most. He was even-handed, without a trace of bias.”
Erin Quinn is right: Russ Reilly’s greatest achievement was becoming Russ Reilly.