Coach. Teacher. Family Man. Man of Faith.
Danny Algeo was the head football coach for 14 total seasons in the Philadelphia Catholic League — four at Roman Catholic (1996-99) and ten at Cardinal O'Hara (2004-13). He was 49 years old when he passed away on July 3, 2014, several days after suffering a heart attack.
In those 14 seasons he went 95-60 in CL play. He won two Red Division titles. The first, at Roman in 1999, ended a championship drought at the school that stretched back 52 years to 1947. The second came in 2004 — his very first year at Cardinal O'Hara. But to ask the people who knew him about the wins is to miss the point. Ask them instead about prayer before practice, about the cross outside O'Hara where he stopped to pray every game day, about the time he drove a player to the hospital without being asked. Ask them what he said before every team meeting ended: Men, make me proud. I love ya.
Danny was the son of Jim Algeo Sr., the longtime head football coach at Lansdale Catholic and a Philadelphia Catholic League institution in his own right. Danny coached his first football right out of high school, as an assistant on his father's Lansdale Catholic staff. His older brother Jim Jr. — the Crusaders' quarterback in their father's era — would go on to coach at Pottsgrove High. The Algeo name in Catholic League football meant something. Danny made it mean something more.
Danny made me a better coach and a better person. There's not many people I can say had that kind of impact on me.
A 52-Year Drought, Ended
When Danny Algeo took over the Roman Catholic football program in 1996, the Cahillites had not won a Catholic League title since 1947. Within four years he ended that. The 1999 Roman team won the CL Red Division championship — Roman's first football title in 52 years — with what one of his players, Ryan Brody, would later call "a great group of players and coaching staff" rather than a roster full of D-1 talent.
Brody's account, written in the days after Danny's passing, captures what Algeo's coaching looked like from the inside:
