Tupelo High School has a new head baseball coach who will be leading this year’s baseball season.
Justin Reed is THS third baseball coach since 1986. He replaced Gary Enis, who took an administrative/teaching position at THS. Reed has 11 years of experience of head coaching baseball. He played baseball at East Central Community College and graduated from Mississippi State University, where he earned a master’s degree in education.
Most recently, Reed coached the Golden Wave’s Division 2-6A rival, South Panola, for three years before he took the head coaching job for THS.

“It was really hard to tell my old team that I was going to be coaching the enemy,” Reed said. “But in the end they understood why I had to leave.”

Tupelo won Division 2-6A with a 16-9 record and defeated South Panola twice in three games.

“Tupelo was our biggest and hardest team to beat,” Reed said. “The coaches had a lot of trick plays up their sleeves and the players played like professionals. My team knew they had to play hard or Tupelo was going to win, and in the end Tupelo always won.”

He has also coached at Nanih Waiya High School and Louisville High School, where he graduated in 1999.

“Louisville is my hometown,” Reed said. “That is where I first started coaching after I was fresh out of college. Everywhere I coached I was the head coach of baseball.”

Since this is Reed’s first year coaching the Golden Wave, he had to meet all of this year’s new and old players and practice with them daily to get to know their strengths and weaknesses.

“I wouldn’t call my new players experienced because the team is mostly filled with sophomore and juniors, and they still have a lot to improve on,” Reed said. “They are prepared for any competition that we may have. We lost a lot of our best players to graduation, but we have a pretty good team this year.”

Assistant coaches for baseball this year are Levi Bishop and Shane Nichols.
Nichols graduated from Mississippi State University in 2009. He was the head baseball coach at Tremont Attendance Center for four years. This is his first year as an assistant coach for the Golden Wave.

This is Bishop’s sixth season as an assistant coach in the region. A graduate of Saltillo High School, he attended Itawamba Community College and graduated from Delta State University, where he also played baseball. Bishop was an assistant coach at Mantachie High School in 2010. His first season as an assistant coach for the Golden Wave was in 2011.

“I want to see my boys make it to the championship,” Reed said. “But I also want to see them just have fun, work hard as a team and play ball.”

The Golden Wave baseball team officially started practice Jan. 14. Their first game is a home conference against Itawamba Agricultural on Feb. 26.