Matt Coldren thrilled to share milestone moment with Reggie Weiss
Matt Coldren didn’t need to look far for a role model. He saw Reggie Weiss drive through West Lawn in his convertible on summer days — tanned, cool, self-assured — and knew.
“That’s who I wanted to be when I grew up,” Coldren said of the man he played basketball for at Wilson.
Coldren later coached for Weiss for six seasons, then succeeded him as Bulldogs’ head coach in 2001. Tuesday he passed him as the Bulldogs’ winningest coach when his team held on for a 51-48 win over visiting Berks Catholic.
The two men got to share a few moments together after the game, during a brief on-court ceremony to recognize Coldren’s 363rd win. Weiss was there to hand him a commemorative basketball and to revel in the moment.
It was special for both. They have remained close over the years. Coldren has modeled the program after the one he inherited, building it around the same devotion to fundamentals and rigid man-to-man defensive principles that he learned from Weiss as a kid growing up in the district.
“I became a coach and a teacher because I wanted to be him,” said the 49-year-old Coldren, who teaches fourth grade at C.E. Cole Intermediate School in the Muhlenberg School District. “I owe everything that I’m doing, coaching-wise, to him.”
Coldren’s done a lot, coaching-wise. This is his 21st season as head coach. He coached more basketball games than anyone at Wilson. He ranks sixth among Berks coaches in all-time wins.
He’s long been considered one of the best coaches around. Until Stevie Mitchell arrived five years ago he never had the kind of player to build a championship around.
He always put things together with athletes — guys from the football and soccer teams, and occasionally a basketball-only player like himself.
He was the only basketball-first guy on his senior team at Wilson, in 1989-90. He shared the starting lineup with Kerry Collins, who went onto NFL stardom as a quarterback, and Chris Adams, Brian McCarty and Todd Bradburn, each of whom went on to play college football.
They were denied a Berks championship his senior season because Reading High happened to have a guy named Donyell Marshall, a 6-9 shot-blocking machine who went on to a lengthy career in the NBA.
Coldren played at Kutztown University, where he set career records for free throw shooting percentage and 3-point shooting percentage.
| Berks’ winningest coaches | School(s) | Seasons | Wins |
| Snip Esterly | Central/Berks Catholic | 33 | 754 |
| Lloyd Wolf | Holy Name | 40 | 626 |
| John Silan | Kutztown/Wilson | 26 | 527 |
| Reggie Weiss | Wilson/Central/Muhl. | 28 | 457 |
| Dick Sherry | W. Reading/Wyomissing | 23 | 369 |
| Matt Coldren | Wilson | 21 | 363 |
| Joey Schaaf | Central Catholic | 24 | 335 |
| Bob Millard | Brandywine/Muhlenberg | 27 | 323 |
He was thrilled when Weiss reached out after graduation and offered him a chance to join the Wilson staff.
“He played with a lot of intensity,” Weiss recalled. “He really played hard, and we had some great years with him. He could make shots from the outside.
“The last half of his senior year he started going to the basket, big-time. It complimented his whole game.”
After six years coaching with Weiss, Coldren named head coach. It was a dream come true for him and he had immediate success, taking the Bulldogs to the PIAA Tournament in his first season. Five years later they won 29 games, matching the program record set in 1987, when Weiss had his finest team, built around Chris Finch (the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves.)
Coldren has remained faithful to the Wilson blueprint Weiss designed, playing a deliberate, controlled style. But he’s adapted to changes in the game, too. When he’s had the horses, he’s let them get out and run.
His 2013-14 team featured Travaun Coad, who had an electric floor game, and a bunch of 3-point snipers, including Jaylin Calloway and Sam Smith. He opened things up and they thrived, beating Reading High four times and Berks Catholic for the league championship.
With Mitchell out front the past few seasons he had a team that could play end-to-end and he let them go.
“(When I first became coach), I was more worried about continuing what Reggie was doing than being myself,” Coldren said a few years ago in a story in the Reading Eagle. “I take a lot of what I do as a coach from what he taught me, but the game has evolved and we’re a lot different today than when I (played and) coached with him.”
Coldren has been butting heads with the Red Knights for four decades, and has scored a few victories in those yearly battles. Twenty to be exact, including four in the same season, 2019-20, which had never been done before.
With Mitchell in tow and talented players around him the past two seasons Coldren was able win back-to-back league championships, as well as something that had always eluded the Bulldogs — a District 3 championship.
That finally came in 2020 when Wilson was as good as any team in the state. It went 28-1, beat Reading High three times — including a thriller at Giant Center for the district title — and knocked off the state’s top-ranked team, Methacton, on its home court. The Bulldogs reeled off 22 straight wins before being stopped by COVID-19, which halted the PIAA Tournament in midstream.
If not for the pandemic Coldren and the Bulldogs might’ve won a state championship, too. He was named Pennsylvania Sportswriters Class 6A Coach of the Year. No team in the state had a better record than the Bulldogs’ 28-1.
“It’s nice to see somebody who took over for me has that kind of dedication and drive,” Weiss said. “He’s worked so hard with this program. He’s done a great job over all those years, works at it all year round, and he’s had great success.
“As soon as he graduated from college we got him on the staff, and the rest is history. He has done an absolutely wonderful job. Unbelievable.”
