US PRESSWIRE- Steve Mitchell
58 year old De La Salle Head Coach Bob Ladouceur retired over the weekend and high school football is losing one of its best ever.
Ladouceur retires after 34 years, in which he set a national record 151-game winning streak from 1992 to 2003 and had 20 unbeaten seasons. The record stand to this day.
He has a replacement that he truly trusts in Justin Alumbaugh, the team’s offensive line coach and a former De La Salle player, who goes back with Ladouceur 15 years.
“I would probably still be coaching if I didn’t have the perfect guy to take over,” Ladouceur said. “It was more important for me that the program stay strong than for me to hang on a few more years to coach.”
Alumbaugh has apparently been shouldering a lot of the load for coach over the last few years.
Alumbaugh “does a lot of the heavy lifting already,” Ladouceur said. “He’s taken a tremendous responsibility off my shoulders and just grown tremendously as a coach.”
Ladouceur played football and baseball at De La Salle and eventually continued his baseball career at UCLA before thinking about coaching when Ladouceur told him he told him he had a future as a coach and teacher.
“I thought about it more and more,” Alumbaugh said. “We have educators in our family. Lad told me it was a noble profession, and I knew that it was. I finally realized this is what I wanted.”
God speed to Coach Ladouceur, who has been on the best competitors and highest character high school football coaches we have seen in some time. Alumbaugh will have a tough time surpassing his old coach, but he now has the reins of a program that just won its fourth consecutive California Interscholastic Federation Open Division state title this December.
