Ossie Blaize Decides to retire after 52 years in education

Ossie Blaize coached at schools from Mississippi to New Orleans and southwest Louisiana in a career that spanned more than five decades.
Blaize and wife Debbie, who will celebrate their 25th anniversary in February, plan to stay in Abbeville after the longtime coach and teacher retired last month at the end of the school year. With knee and heart issues he’s dealing with, it was just time to retire, he felt.
“I started in 1970, so it’s been a long time,” Blaize said. “Sooner or later your body and your mind say, ‘It’s enough.’
“I can still do pretty much what I’ve always done, I just can’t do it as long, and I’ve got this little voice in the back of my head that says, ‘Okay, time out.’ You’ve got to learn to listen to that voice.”
Blaize, 73, coached nearly half of his career here — 16 years at Vermilion Catholic, from 1991-2001 and then from 2015-22, as well as from 2008-15 at Abbeville High. Abbeville is also where his three children and his two stepsons were raised, and he’s got five grandkids here, ranging in age from 1 to 19 years old.
“My kids grew up here, her kids grew up here — nobody’s going anywhere,” Blaize said. “I told my wife the next time I move it will be feet first.”
Blaize began his career in 1970 in his home state of Mississippi before moving to Louisiana after five years as coach at Jesuit High School in New Orleans. After four years at Jesuit, Blaize was named head football coach and head track coach at Vandebilt Catholic in Houma, returning to the New Orleans area to coach at Chalmette High.
“I had young kids, plus, I was tired of the city, and this seemed like an ideal spot, so I came here in ’91 and I haven’t left yet,” Blaize said.
Blaize said he had the good fortune to coach a lot of good players and good kids in his career. His high school coach, Billy Murphy, taught him determination and drive, he said. He still talks to Murphy, who brought Blaize to Louisiana when he was named head coach there in 1975.
“He wouldn’t accept second best,” Blaize said of what he learned from his mentor.
He’s got plenty of good memories from his time at various schools, though he said it’s not easy to single out teams and players because he’s coached so many.
“That’s a lot of teams and a lot of years and a lot of games,” Blaize said.
He began as an offensive coach at Jesuit, but moved to defense because the team had struggled there so much.
“I took over a defense that had given up 390 points over 10 games,” he said. “We ended up the next season giving up 78 (points) in 15 games. At that level of competition, I thought that was a pretty good accomplishment. There was no Dome Classic back then, but we got to the finals and played St. Augustine in the Dome and got beat, unfortunately.
“At Vermilion Catholic we had some pretty good football teams. When we lost to Evangel in the semifinals in ’93, that was a heck of a game. Sometimes whether you win or lose a game you still remember it. I had the good fortune to coach a lot of good players, a lot of good kids.”
Blaize spent most of his career coaching football and track and field. At the rural consolidated high school he worked at in Mississippi he was head baseball coach and head track coach, which run simultaneously in the spring.
He was able to handle that because track practice was the last period of the school day, with baseball practice after school. Baseball games were Tuesdays and Saturdays, while track meets were on Fridays, and he had assistant coaches to help out in practice at one sport while he was at another, which made things manageable.
And he got different things out of coaching different sports, Blaize said.
“Football’s a team thing and a strategy thing, but track’s a ‘see kids grow and improve thing,’” he said. “It’s different.”
Athletes have changed since his first days in coaching, he noted, but not in the way many people think. He often hears that kids today are not as dedicated or as tough as they used to be, but he doesn’t find that’s true.
“Today kids are asked to do more than ever before, and they’re still there and they still get it done,” he said. “Like in football, these days everyone has in-season weightlifting, off-season weightlifting, seven-on-seven — it’s on and on and on. People talk about kids not being as dedicated — they are. They’re different. You may have to go about motivating them a different way.”
One way they are different is that today’s young athletes are much more knowledgeable about their sports, in large part because of the internet and social media.
“You can learn how to do anything on the internet,” he said.
When he first started coaching in Louisiana, he said, there was no javelin or triple jump competition in Mississippi, so he had never coached those events.
“So to learn how to do those two events, after football season was over, I drove to either Southeastern (Louisiana University) or LSU every day, and worked with those coaches and learned how to do the events. Today all you’ve got to do is click a video, and they start with ‘this is a javelin,’ and you can learn how to do anything.
“But the facts and the knowledge kids have about games, all of the sites they can go to about plays, it’s mind boggling.”
Blaize adapted to the modern technology used today because he had to, he said. Though he may not be a computer expert, he learned enough to do what he had to do.
“Like Billy Murphy used to say, adaptation or extinction,” he said.
Blaize said it would be tough to pick out who the best athlete he ever coached was. Among those who come to mind are Tommy Killen, a Nike national champion discus thrower at Catholic High in New Iberia, and Morgann LeLeux, who was at CHS as well, though he didn’t coach her directly. LeLeux was an NCAA All-American at both the University of Georgia and UL Lafayette, and competed in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
For pure athleticism, the three he’d probably put in the finals from among those he coached would be Ben Rogers and Sheldon DeHart, who competed as decathletes at UL Lafayette, and Ryan St. Julien, who played football at LSU but was a great track athlete with a 6-foot-10 high jump and a sub-13 second hurdles time.
“Speed, agility, that type of thing,” Blaize said. “I could probably throw 10 other names in there, but to me that would be my finals.”
As a coach, he was never able to look at sports or athletes through the eyes of a parent or grandparent, even with son Travis, who signed with UL Lafayette as a decathlete. In April, Travis Blaize was named head football coach at Westminster Christian in Opelousas after serving as VC’s offensive coordinator. Blaize said he will help his son coach track athletes at Westminster a couple of days a week. He’ll also coach a couple of track athletes who’ve asked him for help, but will spend most of his time with his wife and grandkids, taking it easy for a while.
He’ll miss being around kids, he said, because they keep coaches young.
“As far as missing things, I guess it would be the look on a kid’s face when they do something they didn’t think they could do,” Blaize said. “That’s why you teach. Teaching and coaching go hand-in-hand.
“I think unfortunately, coaches get a bad rap as teachers, but the majority of times that’s really not the case, because if you’re not a good teacher, you can’t coach.”
Blaize taught English, psychology, social studies and similar subjects in his career. The skills to teach and to coach are intertwined, he said. Teaching the skills of how to make a block in football is similar to teaching how to solve an algebra problem.
“It’s a skill you have to teach, it’s a strategy. You have to be a good teacher. And you have to be versatile. What works with one kid doesn’t work with another.”
He also had to mention his wife, and anyone else who’s been a coach’s wife.
“They have to make as many sacrifices as you do (as a coach), believe me,” he said. “They’ve got to put up with the time you spend, and take up the slack.
“During football season you get to school at 7 o’clock. By the time you finish football practice and do what you’ve got to do, you get home at 7 o’clock, if you’re lucky. Friday nights you don’t get home till 10 or midnight, (depending on) whether it’s home or away. That’s 10 plus weeks every year, so that’s tough. Your wife’s got to be really understanding and supportive, otherwise it’s not going to work.”
Blaize said he doesn’t think he’ll be bored, though being retired hasn’t fully hit him yet.
“Right now it just feels like summer,” Blaize said. “I don’t guess I’ll feel retired until Septemberish.”