Football wasn’t Jim Algeo’s life. His Catholic faith was. The sport was simply the most visible place where he lived that faith through the young men whose lives he touched, whom he helped make a “rare breed.”
Bridget Algeo, a daughter of the late and legendary Lansdale Catholic High School football coach, has documented the impact of that faith, family and football life. She shared it in a film released earlier this year, “Rare Breed: No Ordinary Joes.”
“Both my parents lived their life really trying to know that their time on the planet is limited, and seeking each and every day to do what God wanted from them,” Algeo said about Jim, who died in January 2020, and Mickey Algeo, his wife of 60 years who passed away in November 2019.
“That was really what drove the decisions that they made. They obviously weren’t perfect. But at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, that’s where they landed.”
Algeo, who previously authored “Football Family: The Story of Jim Algeo and the Rare Breed of Lansdale Catholic,” infused the documentary with more than a dozen interviews, countless family photos and copious footage from her father’s 44-year tenure as head coach at LCHS from 1968 to 2011.
He won 294 games, more than a dozen conference and district titles, and the 2004 PIAA Class 2A football state championship. But the story is more about the countless lives he affected as a coach.
His three-word mantra, “faith, family and football,” nearly mirrored the philosophy of Vince Lombardi, the Catholic seminarian-turned-football coach whose Green Bay Packers fell to the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1960 NFL Championship Game before winning nine straight postseason games and five NFL titles including an unsurpassed three-peat in 1967, the year before Algeo landed at LCHS.
Algeo, who grew up in Sharon Hill, Delaware County, took an almost-identical path to Lombardi.
He studied for the priesthood at Holy Cross Seminary High School in Indiana, within walking distance of the perennial college football powerhouse, the University of Notre Dame.
“As he really did have such a strong faith, he knew that he wanted to be a high school football teacher and a coach,” Bridget Algeo said.
Cardinal Dougherty High School hired Jim in 1958 as an assistant coach before he landed at Lansdale Catholic, where Bridget said her father collaborated with the school’s guidance department on a saying to help structure players’ minds on the right priorities and what matters more on and off the football field.
“We can get distracted from what God wants for us by the artifices of the world. Things can seem very attractive and pull us away from what God intends for us,” Algeo said. “That’s where ‘Rare Breed’ came from.”
She said that the hundreds of players her father coached over nearly half a century developed a sense of pride in that phrase, and in the priorities he espoused.
“You try to ask them what ‘Rare Breed’ is, you get a bunch of different answers, but they do understand the experience of being part of the ‘Rare Breed.’ They continue that mindset that really is bigger than the game.”
Algeo shared how deeply her father reflected upon and encouraged the example of St. Joseph and what she called his quiet devotion, the kind that he tried to impart on his players.
He helped his players to be inspired by St. Joseph the Worker, as hard work became another credo of his teams.
“For over 40 years, it was hard work that transformed young men, many of whom had never so much as worn a football helmet or put on pads, and molded them into invaluable members of perennially competitive teams, no matter the opponent,” Algeo said in her narration of the film.
“When our faith was really challenged, my parents were just like St. Joseph,” she added. “They didn’t lose faith. They really pulled in, leaned into their faith and embraced it.”
Those challenges include what Bridget called the heaviest cross their family ever carried, the death of her brother Daniel in 2014. He coached football at both Roman Catholic and Cardinal O’Hara high schools before his passing at 49 years old.
“Mom and Dad never wavered in their trust in God the Father and his often-difficult plan for us. Like St. Joseph standing in the front of the church where love overflowed as we said goodbye to Danny, they stood on the rock of an unbeatable, unbreakable faith.”
That faith shines clear through the documentary that took years to curate, hold interviews and create, one that illuminates her father’s continual effect upon thousands of lives touched on the field, and countless more off it who live their lives as a “Rare Breed.”
“There’s still a legacy. It could be anything from a hard-work ethic to respect, to having faith in God and trying to do his will,” Algeo said.
“They set such an example that it was carried forward.”
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