Before the first game of every new season, Neil Blankenship leads his team on the short hike up the grassy hill at the northeast corner of Swain County Memorial Stadium. The team gathers at the top to look out at Boyce Deitz Field and the mountains beyond.
“Many of you boys grew up coming to games here on Friday nights,” Blankenship begins, turning his back to the field to face the mass of sweaty teenagers.
“You played touch football on the outside of the fence and dreamed of one day suiting up for Swain County and playing on the inside. You watched your heroes play here and now wear the same numbers they did. Take it all in boys. You’re here.”
If anybody knows this to be true, it’s the coach himself. Blankenship grew up in Cherokee playing any and every sport he could. He attended Swain County High School and made the basketball and track teams, but was kept out of football due to a history of seizures. Determined to find a way inside the fence on Friday nights, he joined the team as a student manager and realized early on that he had found his passion.
“I knew I wanted to be a coach,” Blankenship said in a phone interview. “I had great mentors here in Coach Maennle and Coach Deitz, Coach Wyatt, Coach Pattillo, Coach Bob Marr, and Coach Jenkins.”
While he learned executional practices from his mentors on the field and court, it was the example his parents set at home that was most critical to the influencer he would become. Both parents worked on top of running their own craft shops in Cherokee, and his father served on several local boards. Expectations in the Blankenship household were clear: if you wanted something, you had to work for it.
“My parents did not complain about playing time,” said Blankenship. “They felt that if you wanted to play, you need to beat the person out who is in front of you, and my dad was pretty frank about the fact that I was not better than the person in front of me in basketball.”
His early fortitude allowed him to continue his coaching education on a scholarship at Mars Hill University as a football manager. He also ran cross country his senior year (the inaugural season for the sport at Mars Hill) and earned a berth in the National Championships in Wisconsin in his first and only season as a collegiate runner.
Blankenship returned home to Swain County upon graduating in 1993 and has remained here ever since, working all over the school district and coaching a variety of sports along the way.
“Any time you have a one school county like Swain, sports and other extracurricular activities like band mean more because that’s all there is in the county, everyone is in the same boat,” said Blankenship. “That tradition of how we play, the grittiness, how we compete, there is a lot of tradition in our sports in general.”
Blankenship currently balances the two heavy titles of Athletic Director and Head Football Coach at the high school. Days are long, particularly in the fall when, as Sonya, the Principal at the high school, put it, “It’s seven days a week for the entire season.” He generally arrives at school around 6 a.m. and often won’t leave until 9 p.m. on weekdays and 1 or 2 a.m. on Friday nights.
“Saturdays, depending on how the game went the night before, are the day he will pull back a little and relax, but as soon as he gets the film for next week he starts watching that and then all the coaches will meet before church on Sunday,” added Sonya.
All of this occurs in addition to parenting three kids and serving on both the North Carolina Athletic Association Board and the North Carolina Football Coaches Association Board.
“Unlike a lot of coaches’ wives, I get it and understand the time that it takes because I have given that same time to a program myself,” said Sonya, a longtime volleyball coach. “When we started having children, we chose to stay in the business together as long as we had a support system. His mother and my sister really helped us to enable us to be able to do that.”
The result has been a run of vintage success for the gridiron Devils. Blankenship has accumulated a 77-33 overall record at the helm for the Maroon Devils and the 2019 team finished 11-3, advancing to the third round of the state playoffs. It was a season of redemption for the senior-heavy team. Before the season, the group made a list of goals for the year, including avenging a 50-point loss in 2018 to Smoky Mountain, improving their overall record, and advancing even further in the state playoffs. Check, check, and check.
“We had a lot of seniors who had been playing a long time and had started a lot of ball games,” said Blankenship. “I always tell people that in 1A football, you need to have a good group of seniors.”
Scotty McMahan played football at Swain when Blankenship was an assistant coach. He now coaches under him as his offensive coordinator, while also serving as head boys’ basketball coach in the winter. McMahan says there is nobody better to successfully execute both roles.
“It’s obviously a lot of work balancing them, but he does a great job,” said McMahan. “I couldn’t ask for anybody better to work for. Everything he does is about making the football team and the kids better. It’s never for personal glory or gain. I take a lot of what he does in football and try to apply it to basketball. He will tell you he doesn’t always have the right answer, but from our standpoint he does.”
Come August, the Maroon Devils will start their season as they always do, following their coach out the back gate behind the end zone and climbing up the steep grassy hill. Coach Blankenship will swivel around towards them as they pool around him. His eyes will pan around the horseshoe of padded boys, the sun setting behind him, and he will begin.
“Many of you boys grew up coming to games here on Friday nights…”