After a quarter-century building one of Pinellas County’s most consistent basketball programs, Chris Blackwell is starting over.<\/p>\n
Blackwell, 60, is leaving St. Petersburg High to become the boys basketball coach at St. Petersburg Catholic. He accepted the job April 27 and informed his players Thursday.<\/p>\n
“They were really persistent and wanted me there,” Blackwell said of SPC. “They want to build a program, and it’s exciting to see if I can replicate what I did at St. Petersburg over there.”<\/p>\n
Three Green Devils players \u2014 Nijaun Harris, Zak Mellouki and Kayden Calhoun \u2014 are touring SPC and plan to enroll, Blackwell said.<\/p>\n
Blackwell won more than 600 games at St. Petersburg, taking the Green Devils to seven state semifinals and two championship games. He will keep his day job as a recruiter at Pinellas Technical College.<\/p>\n
“I’ll just be a basketball coach at SPC,” he said.<\/p>\n
Before deciding, Blackwell called Dan Wright, his former coach at Lakewood and the winningest boys basketball coach in Pinellas County history.<\/p>\n
“He was excited for me,” Blackwell said. “I never thought I would be in the same spot for as long as I was at St. Petersburg. But the time has come. My journey is done. Now it’s time to start a new chapter.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a quarter-century building one of Pinellas County’s most consistent basketball programs, Chris Blackwell is starting over. Blackwell,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[110,110791,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-254442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-sports","tag-st_petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}