De La Salle Institute proudly announces that Harold Blackmon has been chosen as its new varsity head football coach.
“De La Salle is excited to welcome Coach Blackmon to our school,” Meteors athletic director Tom White said. “We believe strongly that with his impressive resume and background, he will do an excellent job leading the football program at the Institute and will help our student-athletes achieve all of their goals both in the classroom and on the field of competition.”
“Coach Blackmon not only brings a vast knowledge of the game with him but he’s also someone of the highest character, class and integrity and those were the traits that were the most important to us in making this decision. We are very confident Coach Blackmon will have the best interests of the young men and women of De La Salle at heart and will be an outstanding Meteor.”
Blackmon graduated from Northwestern University in 2000 and was a four-year starter at defensive back for the Wildcats. He also played two seasons in the National Football League for the Seattle Seahawks in 2001-02 and was taken by Seattle in the seventh round of the 2001 NFL Draft.
“One of my core statements when I first became a head coach was ‘If you give me four years of work, I’ll give you 40 years of work,”’ Blackmon said. “My philosophy is that when a young man or woman decides to commit to my program, it’s a four-year commitment from me to help them with whatever issues or situations arise in their lives moving forward.”
“As for the wins and losses, the X’s and O’s, I’m a firm believer that those will take care of themselves; it’s a byproduct of doing the right thing. As a coach, I believe you need to put young men and women in the right positions to succeed but also prepare them on and off the field to be humble when success comes.”
The Meteors will begin the 2024 season on August 30 as they welcome Argo High School to Joseph Parente Field.
“We’ll be a spread team, we’ll be aggressive, we’ll be really up-tempo and we’ll play hard,” Blackmon said. “When my wife has watched the teams I’ve coached play, she said, ‘Win, lose or draw, I know you are going to play until the final whistle.’ So we’re going to play hard and we’re going to be humble in what we do.”
“We are going to win humbly and we’ll lose graciously. I think it’s all about building the three pillars of character, academics and athletics. Those are the three things that we’re going to develop and we have to see that on and off the field.”
