finale

Colts lineman, former HSE star Joe Reitz’s long road to the NFL
By Zak Keefer
Indianapolis Star Tribune
August 8, 2012
Lionel Vital’s eyes stayed fixed on the center from Western Michigan, the kid who was too slow, fouled too often and couldn’t get a
basket to drop.
But man, Vital thought, does he play hard.
The good news for the center: Vital was not scouring the Mid-American Conference basketball tournament for a future NBA lottery
pick. A scout for the Baltimore Ravens, he was in town on vacation simply wanting to watch some basketball.
He left captivated by a new prospect, a Fishers, Ind., native named Joe Reitz.
A year later, after watching Reitz play again, Vital called his head coach, Steve Hawkins.
“You have a kid playing the wrong sport,” Vital told him. “I think your center has a future in the NFL.”
The road since has hardened Reitz, now an offensive lineman for the Indianapolis Colts, into an NFL anomaly: He doesn’t have
college football on his resume.
He graduated from Western Michigan as the program's third-leading career scorer and rebounder. But for a 6-foot-7 center who had to
play under the basket, the NBA was not an option. Playing professionally overseas, however, was virtually assured.
Reitz went for the NFL.
“I figured I had nothing to lose,” he says now. “Maybe I could make a career out of it, maybe I could play a year, maybe I get cut the
first week.
“But I didn’t want to be 40 years old wondering to myself, ‘Could I have made it in the NFL?’”
One way to play
Reitz, 26, retraced his story at his Zionsville home a few weeks before training camp. He glanced at his wife, Jill, and their one-yearold
daughter, Juliana. It took more than three years for him to see playing time in the NFL.
“There were definitely some hard days and long nights,” he says. “But I’m a big believer in God’s plan, and I know this is exactly
where I’m supposed to be right now.”
His words are tinged with humility. He knows life in the NFL is fragile.
“I’m still chasing the dream,” he says. “It’s the toughest job market in the world. You have to go out and win a job and keep a job
every day.”
It’s a lifetime, it seems, from his days at Hamilton Southeastern High School, where he was a two-way star in football and a hulking
center in basketball. College coaches recruited him in both sports, but he settled on hoops, never figuring he could earn a living one
day playing either one.
He started 126 games in four years at Western Michigan, branding his game with a brute physicality.
"Joe fouls people getting off the bus,” Hawkins joked. “He cannot play anything without being physical. He could probably breathe on
a kid and move him three or four feet. It just so happened that was our brand of basketball, so he fit right in.”
Hawkins loves to retell the story of Reitz diving into the bleachers in a futile attempt to save a loose ball. Opposing coaches, Hawkins
said, later used video of that play to motivate their players.
Reitz carried that mentality into his first NFL training camp, in 2008 with the Ravens. He needed it to survive while playing football
for the first time since high school, studying a 100-page playbook, seeing fearsome linebacker Ray Lewis across the line of
scrimmage.