Brett Gordon, the Philadelphia Eagles High School Coach of the Week, and La Salle College High School football have a history.
Playing quarterback, he led La Salle, a prep school for boys in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, to two Philadelphia Catholic League Championships before graduating in 1998 and going on to Villanova, where he was teammates with Eagles Hall of Famer Brian Westbrook and the 2002 Atlantic 10 Offensive Player of the Year.
Returning to his alma mater in 2005, Gordon was an assistant coach for 14 of the next 15 seasons on both his dad's, Drew, and John Steinmetz's staffs, helping guide the Explorers to the PIAA Class 4A State Championship in 2009.
And then, while he was taking a four-year break from the game, Gordon waited for the time to be right to see if he wanted to possibly return to the sideline and pursue becoming a head coach. That time came last year, when he took over La Salle's program.
"I had spent the previous 16 or 17 years in the corporate world, working for a few different software companies. So even through all the years where I was an assistant coach, I was not your traditional kind of teacher, administrator, coach-type," Gordon says.
"Part of the reason the timing was never quite right was because of my corporate career with travel and a lot of demands on my time. It just made it very difficult to continue coaching. At that same time, when the opportunity was presented to me at La Salle, my son, Luke, was entering his high school career at the very same time when this opportunity presented itself. He's a sophomore quarterback on the team right now.
"So when I kind of put everything into perspective and took an assessment of my professional career at that point, and then having an opportunity that most people would dream of, to go back to your alma mater to be the head football coach, and do it literally at the same time that your eighth-grade son was entering high school, I just kind of looked at it and said, 'I feel like if I don't do this, I'll regret it for the rest of my life.'"
Gordon has had opportunities to become a head coach over the years, but realistically, would he have wanted to hold that job anywhere else?
"If I was going to invest the amount of time it takes even to be an assistant coach, but certainly a head coach, it was going to be at La Salle," he says. "La Salle is near and dear to my heart. A lot of my closest friends are guys I went to school with there. The alumni support, the school community in general, it's unlike anywhere else. So that was really going to be the only opportunity that would have caused me at the age of 44 at the time, to make the decision."
Leading La Salle to the Philadelphia Catholic League Red Division title with a 10-0 regular-season record last year after going 5-6 and 6-5 the previous two years, and off to a 4-0 start this season, Gordon, who was the 2024 PCL Coach of the Year, feels his coaching style is a blend of old school and new school.
The old school approach may likely have been picked up from his dad, who was Gordon's offensive coordinator at La Salle before later becoming the head coach.
"My dad was a very kind of Type A, an almost military style-type coach of really just the premise of no excuses and figure out a way to get it done," Gordon says. "I catch myself probably once a day saying something that I probably heard him say before. And I have a certain expectation and standard that I demand our players live up to, which probably is more of the Type A.
"But I also think that in this day and age, you have to have a somewhat different approach to kids. And what I mean by that is, the old-school approach was you're just going to demand certain things and players would just have to respond to that because you have a coach or a teacher, an adult figure, and that's just what you do.
"What I've learned more recently is in order to demand certain levels of excellence and things that players might not be comfortable with, nowadays, in order to get the most out of the players, they have to know that first and foremost, you care about them besides just what they can do on a football field. So I've learned that over the years, and I've kind of tried to blend the two. That doesn't mean I've mastered it by any stretch, but I am very cognizant of you having to have both."
Old school or new school, there isn't much of a difference when the coach sees that his players get it. That they understand what he's trying to teach them.
"Outside of the competition and the chess match from a coaching standpoint and challenging your brain, really, to me, what this is all about is connecting with the players and then seeing them become better versions of themselves, both as individuals and as a team," Gordon says.
"So the satisfaction I get when I look at our team play is these kids getting to experience the euphoria of high school football at the highest level. That to me is why I do this."
Another example of why Gordon does this and how he cares about his players and their well-being is that he raised money this year to buy the team Guardian Caps, a padded soft-shell helmet cover that reduces the impact of hits, which the team wears during practice every day to help prevent concussions.
"We're very fortunate at a place like La Salle in that we have a lot of people invested in the school and alumni who are interested in ways to really help our program be the best we can," Gordon says. "So there was a topic that came up about Guardian Caps, and it was one of the things within our program that we really didn't have.
"I had a parent come forward and say, 'Listen, if this is something you guys are interested in, I'd be more than happy to cover a portion of the cost.' And it was that simple."
