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+---- Thread: *A Chat with an NSFL HoFer turned Assistant Coach (/showthread.php?tid=22183)
*A Chat with an NSFL HoFer turned Assistant Coach - 37thchamber - 05-18-2020
For ten years, Antoine Delacour was a mainstay in the Baltimore Hawks secondary, facing off against some of the league's greatest ever players. His last ever game was an Ultimus win, back in 2025 -- the first in Hawks franchise history. "It was the right time," he says, of his retirement. "I didn't have it in me to keep going. I'm not like guys like Dermot [Lavelle Sr.] or [Vladimir] Fyodo[rovich] who played until they just couldn't keep up anymore. Not even like Turk [Turkleton], he probably could have gone on longer if we're honest, but he knew he was on the downturn. I knew sooner, so I stopped. Nothing hurts more than knowing you can't affect the game."
It's particularly interesting that he has now turned an eye to coaching, then. If knowing you can't affect the game is the most painful part, surely that's at least half the job, as a coach? "Kind of," he admits. "But it's not the same, you go into that role without the expectation that you will affect the game, really. Your role is to prepare the players to affect the game, you know?"
Delacour is currently serving as an assistant defensive backs coach in Baltimore, having started out last year in an unpaid role. "I used to pass by training sessions from time to time, catch up with the guys, speak to staff. I know these guys, right?" He explains. "One day, I'm giving a few pointers to a rookie, and [Baltimore Hawks head coach] Leon [Ardo] asks me if I wanna get involved for real." Antoine had his son, Raphael -- then a high school senior -- with him, the younger Delacour excitedly chatting with Errol Maddox, one of his favourite players. "I see Raph over there with Errol and I start reflecting on things," Antoine continues. "For years, I'd kind of dreamed of coaching my son, right? But he wanted to be a receiver. I can only give him pointers on how to make it as a 'little guy' really. So I have all this experience, and nobody to pass it on to."
Leon Ardo pressed the issue, calling over Winston Zeddemore, the Hawks' cornerbacks coach. "So Leon calls over Winston, a guy who coached me, so now I gotta tell two guys who helped me have the career I had, that I don't want to help them out? Felt wrong. Besides, I believe in signs, providence, all that... so having prepared myself to coach, an opportunity had to present itself at some point. Here it was." Antoine shrugs. "That's the wisdom of Lucille, right there." He chuckles at the reference to his grandmother. "She would have smacked me with a spoon if I went home and said 'yeah granny they offered me a coaching role and I said no', even though I have like... three jobs anyway."
Since retiring, Antoine has in fact, been heavily involved in his business pursuits. He worked as an agent for a while, representing several clients including first overall draft pick Lennox Garnett, as well as helping his wife Jasmine run their non-profit projects. On top of that, as a majority shareholder in Flying Thunder Studios -- a film and television production company formed from the merger of 187 Pictures and Fantastic Egusi Media -- and Third Eye Gaming, he's been pretty hands-on with both. "Yeah so I had a part in the development of the latest instalment in the Sim League League Simulator series with Third Eye, and I don't really get too involved with the film studio stuff because Tobias [Akinbobo] is so much better than I am, but I wanted Raph to get a better look at it all, since this is what he wants to do for a living. So I had to speak to the guys over there and see which projects they had that he could get involved in without getting in the way." He explains.
Now back with football, he admits that he feels a lot more energised. "I think maybe after the whole agent thing fell down, I needed to take a step back," he says. "After basically living, breathing, eating football for what? Nearly twenty years by that point? I think I just needed a break. But the past year has been amazing for me, and it's great to have this new chapter opening up." With his youngest child, Raphael, now attending Harvard University (along with his middle child, Elaine), Antoine noted that the free time is part of what made this possible. "It's difficult to really commit to running multiple businesses and holding down a coaching role when you have kids at home." He laughs. "But with all of them off doing their own thing, I worry less about that."
Additionally, there has been talk of his son entering the NSFL at some point. Making for a potential team up. "I wouldn't bet on it," Antoine laughs. "Raph's whole thing is that he wants to beat me, he wants to do better than I did. I'd be surprised if he expressed any desire to play for a team I coach at." The elder Delacour was quick to clarify, though. "This doesn't mean he wouldn't sign if they drafted him, but the only way he'd really want to come here is to break any records I might hold... and there aren't any that he could break really." Does this mean the father would step aside if the son did want to play for his old team? "In a heartbeat," he says, without hesitation. "This is still my team. I'm a Hawks fan, why would I not want them to pick up another great player?"
Great player? That's high praise for a kid who was only considered a three star recruit this past year. "They said I was a three star recruit too," he shrugs. "I've seen the kid play, I've played against him. He has the tools. I know I'm supposed to say that because I'm his dad, but I really mean it. If he keeps working hard at it, he can do great things." The younger Delacour is currently a college freshman, and there is a chance he could drop out and enter the draft as early as next year if he wanted to. "He won't." Antoine says matter-of-factly. "Not because I'll kill him," he pauses, "his mother might, but I won't. He'll finish his study because that's the kind of kid he is. He sees things through. When he told us he wanted to study film, I was a bit disappointed because I hoped he'd go into like, law or something. But he made it clear that this is what he wants to do. Said if we couldn't support him, not to expect a thank you in his Oscar acceptance speech in twenty years' time. Kid wants to be the next Bradley Westfield, then go off and be the light-skinned Spike Lee, I shit you not. And I wouldn't bet against him on either of those. You ever see me back down? That kid is ten times more stubborn than I ever was."
On the topic of his children, Antoine grins sheepishly when we bring up his eldest daughter's successes. "Yeah, took me a decade to win a championship and she managed it in what? Nine months? She loves to rub that one in." He rolls his eyes a little. "But I'm happy for her. She's earned it. I had hoped she would try and get drafted by an NSFL team at one point. Tegan Atwell, Xandra Troyski, they did just fine and Soph has the athleticism to hang with them. But she just wasn't interested. Maurice [Picard, Antoine's cousin] got her hooked on soccer when she was young and she never looked back." It should therefore, come as no surprise that Antoine started Raphael off early with football. "Yeah I used to take him to games, training sessions, all sorts. Surrounded him with football players as early as possible. And he still ended up running track!" He laughs again. "But yeah I think the turning point for Raph was when he found out his 100m time was better than mine at the same age. He started looking for other things he could beat me at, and found football." He pauses again. "Thank God."
So what is Antoine Delacour like as a coach? "I focus on footwork a lot. Footwork is the foundation, for me. Good footwork is where it all starts." He explains. "I got that from my high school coach, Phillippe Hugo, he always used to tell me that everything about football starts on the ground, and your feet are the part of you that touch the ground the most, so that's where you should focus first." It makes sense, while Delacour was known for his blistering speed as a player, he was adept at closing down even the best route runners a lot of the time. "You have to have good footwork to change direction quickly, to stop short, to get a good jump, to jam at the line... all these things require good footwork, good foot placement, strong legs, you know?" With all of this in mind, it's perhaps no surprise that his two athlete children also rely heavily on footwork; Sophia as a soccer player relies heavily on footwork, and Raphael's strongest attribute is arguably his route running. "I used to work on footwork with Soph a lot, now she's playing soccer and using those cut moves to beat defenders," Antoine says, proudly. "As for Raph, I made him practice his routes against me when he was in high school. I said 'if you can beat me, you can beat any of these kids you face'." He refuses to be drawn on whether his son did ever beat him, only smiling and raising an eyebrow.
The turnaround is remarkable for Delacour, who only a couple of years ago, looked to be done with the sport. Particularly with the NSFL, who he openly criticised for lack of player support at the time. "Yeah I was mad," he admits. "I saw what happened to Easy, remember?" He is referring to his old teammate Ezekiel Bishop, who retired from the NSFL without taking a single snap back in 2016 after sustaining a serious injury off the field. "They didn't support Easy at all. He talked to me about how medics tried to get him to take these 'supplements' too, and warned about those. We didn't listen." Those supplements are Testosterone Production Enhancers, known colloquially as "TPE". Their usage is rampant throughout the league. "That's another thing I've seen up close," Antoine adds. "Carmel [Gibson] went off the rails on that stuff." Again, he's talking about a former teammate. This time, Carmel Gibson, who was suspended by the league for abuse of TPE back in 2017. "That wasn't even his fault, but the league made an example of him, even while constantly pushing the message that players should max out their TPE doses. That stuff all started to wear on me later on down the line. I started to openly speak out against league management, even after I retired."
The turning point came when Lennox Garnett, the flagship client in Delacour's sports agency -- Wu Tang Sports Management, itself a division of Wu Tang Financial -- jumped ship, joining Sim League Management under Charlie Trout and prolific agent Iam Essellem. "Yeah that one stung," he concedes. "I thought we had an understanding, me and Lennox, you know? We clashed over that. But it was maybe the excuse I needed to step away from the game for a while. I focused on my other clients, and when they retired, I felt like maybe I was done with the sports agent thing for a while. All comes back to that decision though. Everything happens for a reason."
Does Antoine harbour ambitions of becoming a general manager at any point? "Not right now, I'm just enjoying the coaching thing," he says. "But maybe one day. Who knows?"
*A Chat with an NSFL HoFer turned Assistant Coach - YoungTB - 05-18-2020
Good stuff my man