Magnolia defensive coordinator Blackshire ready to take over at Oak Ridge

Tyler Blackshire knew at a young age that he wanted to be a football coach in the future.

Admittedly, the Brenham native wasn’t the best on the field in his playing days.

“I wasn’t worth a flip,” Blackshire said with a big laugh during a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “I was not a good football player. But what I did know is I wanted to coach the game of football and I wanted to understand the game of football. I pride myself on being a really good teacher of the game. I want to help the kids who are underdeveloped and are trying to figure out the game…those are the kids I tend to make better.”

Blackshire has had a cosmic rise in the Texas high school football coaching world.

Off a solid three-year stint as the defensive coordinator at Magnolia High School, a position he earned at the ripe age of 27, Blackshire is now a head coach of a Class 6A program in Conroe ISD that consistently pumps out elite athletes.

Blackshire was named the eighth head football coach in the history of Oak Ridge High School, a program that just celebrated its 40th anniversary last fall.

“I’m excited,” Blackshire said. “They are phenomenal kids. They were ready for me when I got here and ready to latch on and get going. We’ve been working our tails off for the last four days. I’m slowly and surely trying to change a few things to get us ready for spring ball. I’ve been telling the kids day in and day out that it’ll be a little bit harder than yesterday. All I’m trying to do is prepare them so when we get to spring ball, we can hit the ground running.”

Blackshire takes over for a legend in Mark Schmid, who retired after his 20th season as a head coach. Schmid totaled 154 varsity wins between The Woodlands and Oak Ridge, including a Highlanders trip to the state championship in 2016.

“It’s something that he’s always wanted,” Magnolia head coach Craig Martin said of that head coaching job at a respectable program. “It was a long term goal of his to have this opportunity.”

Blackshire, with his resume, networking and on-the-field results, could afford to be selective in finding his first head coaching job.

“When that job came open, he came in and asked what I thought,” Martin said. “I said, ‘go for it’. They always have good football players, it’s close and a good school district. Throw your name in the hat.”

A network of quality people and coaches

Blackshire has been surrounded by quality coaches from his young adult life into his professional career.

It started at Brenham, where he graduated in 2012.

“I played under coach Glen West, who’s now the assistant director of the Texas High School Coaches Association,” Blackshire said. “We were one of the last few classes before he decided to get out of coaching altogether. Coach West is special to me. He called me the day after I got the job. He congratulated me and he’s still very special in my life, as well as a bunch of other coaches.”

After graduating from Brenham, Blackshire squeezed every possible opportunity out of becoming a Texas Longhorn.

“I wanted to get involved with the football team,” Blackshire said. “When I got there, I was a student manager and I worked for a guy named Chip Robertson. Everybody in the equipment world knows Chip. He worked at Ole Miss, SMU and then the University of Texas. While I was working for Chip, I got a chance to really kind of connect with the graduate assistants on staff. They pointed me in the right direction.”

One of those graduate assistants opened another door for Blackshire down the road.

“One of those GAs on staff was Riley Dodge (who’s now the head coach at Southlake Carroll) and he was working with the quarterbacks at the time,” Blackshire said. “Coach (Riley) Dodge introduced me to his dad Coach (Todd) Dodge and that’s what kind of got my high school coaching career started. Coach Dodge was at Austin Westlake at the time and he was like, ‘Coach Blackshire, come on!’ He knew I wanted to be a coach and he wanted to teach me the right way. That’s how it all started.”

It was with the Chaps where Blackshire served on a defensivestaff with Chase Hargis (now at Allen), Lee Munn (Southlake Carroll) and Jason Jones (Westlake).

“I was just a young guy trying to learn how to coach ball,” Blackshire said. “Those are my guys. We bounce ideas off each other all the time on how to defend things, how to stop things. We were all under that staff coaching staff with Coach (Tony) Salazar and Coach Dodge. Tony is kind of the guy that led us that way. It’s been special.”

Blackshire spent three seasons there and then got his first defensive coordinator job at Cameron, where he spent the 2021.

In 2022, Blackshire made the move to Magnolia, where he had some familiar shoes to fill.

Hargis had made his way to Magnolia prior to that and then left the job to go to New Caney.

“Salazar and Hargis both said, ‘This is the guy you need to go get’,” Martin said of Blackshire. “He’s the next one. That’s how it all came about.”

Growth as a Bulldog

Blackshire didn’t have an easy start as the Bulldogs defense was depleted coming out of the 2021 season.

“He filled an enormous void when Chase left,” Martin said. “Chase is a phenomenal coach and a phenomenal defensive coordinator. He’s continuing to do great things (at Allen High School). Tyler had a tough job and big shoes to fill.”

Magnolia struggled that first season as it went 3-7 and used quite a few freshmen on the varsity defense.

“He came in at a time when we were in a bit of a rebuild defensively,” Martin said. “He had to step in and struggle through a 3-7 year when we didn’t play well defensively. I think in the long run for him, that was great. I’m sure he didn’t think that at the time. As you come in as the new guy and you played really great defense before, you might not feel like you’ve done a good job. To me, he was able to come in and he’s a great relationship builder. The kids love him. He was able to stabilize us there.”

Magnolia bounced back in 2023 with a 9-3 record where the defense allowed 22 points per game. In 2024, Bulldogs were 5-5, just missing the playoffs in the final week. The defense allowed 28.3 points per game with nearly 10 takeaways.

“At Magnolia, I didn’t change too much of what Coach Hargis did,” Blackshire said. “A little bit of terminology and a little bit of flair to it.”

Tyler Blackshire speaks to the Magnolia defense during a game last season. (Noah Mabry/SportCast Media)

Blackshire also took in and considered many of the ideas of the Bulldogs staff. He took to heart what the more experienced coaches on staff said.

“Those guys all have great ideas,” Blackshire said. “But at the end of the day what I learned to do, I just tried to take those ideas, digest them, and kind of spit them back out so everyone had the opportunity to be productive and happy.”

An especially neat thing for Blackshire about being at Magnolia was his connection to home.

The oldest of six, Blackshire got to go see his younger siblings compete often – against Magnolia at times – while at Brenham.

“I got the opportunity to watch my siblings compete, which had never happened at any other spot in my career,” Blackshire said. “It’s been special for me to be able to watch them grow up over the past few years and turn into young adults.”

War Eagle time

Getting to Oak Ridge was a combination of networking and an impressive resume for a young coach.

“The coaching profession really is a small world,” Blackshire said. “It’s no different when I was ready to take the job at Oak Ridge.”

Blackshire worked with current boys varsity basketball head coach Garrick Gonzalez at Westlake. He had many connections to staff members already at Oak Ridge as well.

“I was going to use the resources I had in order to get the position,” Blackshire said. “I wanted to show them what my vision of the program looked like and what I want to do to build up this War Eagle athletic program.”

Oak Ridge went 3-7 last season and missed the playoffs for the first time since 2021. The 2023 War Eagles went two rounds deep into the playoffs, earning just their second playoff win since reaching the third round in 2002.

Oak Ridge has two current NFL players (Joseph Ossai in CIncinnati and Grant Stuard in Detroit) and has numerous collegiate prospects, including the highly-regarded Georgia linebacker Justin Williams, a 2024 graduate.

On the offensive side, Blackshire has quite the talent in junior James Scott, a 6-foot-4 receiver with 27 major offers.

On May 15, the War Eagles will put on display a sampling of Blackshire’s version of the program in the spring game.

“We haven’t started teaching any schematics yet,” Blackshire said. “But what I want is for them to play fast and to play physical when we get into spring ball. That way they have the opportunity to be successful when we get to the fall season.”