Columbus Valley - In The Game High School Sports Magazine

In 1995, Brian Blackmon thought he had life pretty much planned out. He was 20 hours from graduating from Troy University with an accounting degree and was planning to attend Auburn University to work on an MBA.  

Then life took an unexpected turn for the Montgomery, Alabama, native.

“I played for Coach Spence McCracken at Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery. He had become the coach at Opelika and had just finished his first season there,” Blackmon says. “He found out I was coming to Auburn and called me and wanted me to come and coach with him while I went to school. I told him no three times. Then he just asked me if I would come have lunch with him. I did and he showed me around and introduced me to the principal and the superintendant and we talked. I guess I just did what any good player would do and I said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and agreed to come and coach. I started that first year and fell in love with it and have been here ever since.”

Blackmon changed his major to business education and started his coaching career.  He began as an aide at Opelika and eventually became a full-time staff member.  

“I thought I was done with football and had no idea I would become a coach,” says Blackmon, who received a scholarship to the University of North Alabama and played one season for Bobby Wallace and the Lions before homesickness brought him to Troy.  “I guess this was the Lord’s way of calling me back into coaching,” he adds.

Coaching at Opelika is the only job Blackmon has had for the past 16 years, and he became head coach three years ago, after McCracken retired.  He served as offensive coordinator for 12 years and then called the offensive signals for the first two years as head coach. When Blackmon spoke with In the Game, the Bulldogs were 6-2 on the season with one regular-season game left and were to enter the Alabama 6A playoffs as the third-seed from their region.

Blackmon is a self-professed “football junkie” and tries to learn as much as he can by watching games and attending clinics as often as possible. His coaching philosophy changed forever at a clinic. “Coach McCracken and I went to a conference in Orange Beach, Alabama, after the 2004 season, and I met a man by the name of Dennis Parker. Coach Parker was a long-time coach in Texas and is now in Arizona and has written a character education curriculum for coaches. His presentation on Coaching to Change Lives had a huge impact on me. I was able to spend some time talking to him and really bought into what he was saying. It made a huge difference in the way I approached things,” Blackmon says. “I wanted to start developing these boys into good husbands and fathers instead of just good football players.”

Blackmon says Parker’s presentation could not have come at a better time.  “We had come off a miserable season in 2004 where we really underachieved and had a lot of discipline issues with our players off the field that we had to deal with, and we were looking for something to help us avoid that again,” says Blackmon. “After seeing this program and talking with Coach Parker, we brought it back here to Opelika. In that next season of 2005, we implemented the character program and we went from a team that was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in ’04 to making it to the state semifinals in ’05. We had a bunch of young kids and beat Prattville in the third round and led Daphne in the semifinals before they scored with 22 seconds left in the game to keep us from going to the state championship game. We took time, the first 15 minutes of every practice, every day that year - and have done it every day since then - to teach character education, and it worked.”

Blackmon says the program not only helped solve the issues off the field, but made the Bulldogs a better team on the field because it taught each player accountability for his actions, about discipline and responsibility. After that first year, the coaching staff made the decision to stay with it. “We found out that we were teaching things to these boys that were formerly taught at home, but for whatever reason, they were not getting it there,” Blackmon says. “We decided instead of sitting around and fussing about how they didn’t have it and were not getting it, we could take the time and teach it ourselves.”

The Bulldogs returned to the Alabama semifinals in 2006, again narrowly missing an opportunity to play in the state championship game. “This program made a huge difference in our kids and made us better both on the field, and - most importantly - off the field. It doesn’t sound like a lot with it only being 15 minutes a day, but when you spend as much time as we do with these kids over the course of their high school career, they have been exposed to it enough and they know what they need to do to be a good husband and father.  We are not going to save every kid that comes through, and unfortunately we are going to lose some kids like we lose some ballgames, but we are going to do the best we can with every kid in our program,” Blackmon says.

Blackmon’s faith is another factor in the way he handles himself and his program. “I will be honest, it wasn’t always that way with me,” he says. “When I first got into coaching, I was all about winning and getting the win and being the best. Pretty much anything else was not important. But I became a Christian at age 23 and that changed. I realized that coaching is a calling and a mission. It is a vehicle that God has allowed me to use to change lives. That is not why I got into coaching, but through coaching I have changed. I don’t know how many lives I have changed, but I do know that the kids I have coached have changed mine. If it were not for my faith, I would be judging myself on wins and losses and nothing else, and that is not what is most important.

“I always tell our kids that if there is hope in the future, then there is power in the present.  That means you do things today because you have a hope for what is to come. I try to live that out in how I do my job everyday and the example I try to set for everyone around me.” ITG