BOB SHANNON

“Metro Legends Award”

He has been dubbed one of the St. Louis area’s best-ever high school football coaches for turning out some of the area’s greatest football teams.

Three times Bob Shannon was selected National Coach of the Year by The Sporting News (1979, 1983, 1985) while coaching at East St. Louis High School. And over 23 years of coaching football with the East St. Louis, Alton and CBC high schools, the hard-nosed coach compiled an amazing record of 259-91. At East St. Louis alone, he posted a 195-31 mark.

In one dominant three-year span in the mid-1980s, Shannon’s Flyers were 40-0 with three consecutive state championships. It was a run of success matched by few teams in the annals of Illinois state history. In Shannon’s 15 seasons as East St. Louis High’s head football coach, the East St. Louis Flyers brought home the state championship six times.

In the 1992 book “The Right Kind of Heroes,” written by Kevin Horrigan, about his 23 years as East St. Louis coach, Shannon is profiled as “a high school football coach who fought for twenty-three years to instill pride in his players who have grown up in East St. Louis – a city where many young men wind up on the streets, in jail, or dead.” Horrigan said: “He is everything a high school football coach should be: Someone who challenges his players to rise above an environment in which it is easy to fail.”

In 1992, Shannon was named one of 53 “Faces of Hope” in the U.S. by President Bill Clinton for “touching the lives of others in a positive way through their work in their communities.”