La Salle’s Gavin Sidwar is on the verge of breaking school records held by his head coach

Gavin Sidwar and Brett Gordon have an inside joke. It’s been going on for the last month.

“The closer he gets, we might start running the ball more,” Gordon said. “To hold on as long as we possibly can.”

Sidwar, sitting in an office at La Salle College High School on Thursday morning, shot his coach an incredulous look.

“I’ll just check out of it,” he replied with a grin.

Sidwar, 18, is just 48 yards and six touchdowns shy of setting a school record. The current benchmarks — 6,837 yards, 84 touchdowns — were set nearly 30 years ago by Gordon, who was the team’s starting quarterback in the mid-1990s.

This has led to some good-natured ribbing (all of it in jest). If anything, Gordon sees his overlap with Sidwar as serendipitous. He feels lucky not just to be at La Salle to witness his pupil make history, but also to help him get there.

And, barring injury, he will get there. Gordon has no doubt about that.

He’s been following Sidwar’s rise through La Salle’s record books for years, long before he was hired as the school’s head coach.

Gordon watched from the stands, as a supportive alumnus, and was struck by how physically gifted Sidwar was as a passer.

But he also could tell something was off. There was one game, that stood out to him: Sept. 1, 2023, when La Salle was hosting Malvern Prep. Sidwar looked lost. He wasn’t reading coverages and was taking sacks. It didn’t make sense to Gordon, given the quarterback’s skill set.

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So shortly after Gordon was hired as head coach in January 2024, he called Sidwar into his office.

He turned on a projector and played footage of the Malvern Prep game. The coach asked Sidwar to talk through each play; to explain what he saw on the field and what he had been thinking.

Sidwar didn’t have many answers.

“We didn’t really have a plan,” he said. “We just rolled up.”

After the film session ended, the coach made a pledge to his pupil.

“We’re going to fix this,” he told him. “You’ll never feel this way on a football field again.”

Sidwar’s first two years at La Salle were difficult. He was the starting quarterback from his freshman year on, which presented a lot of opportunities, but the program wasn’t the best fit. The processes in place — how the Explorers practiced, their offseason routine, their culture — weren’t resonating. So after his sophomore year, the quarterback began exploring other options.

Until Gordon was hired.

Sidwar’s father, Bryan, heard about the head coach through La Salle alumni. As a player, Gordon led La Salle to Catholic League championships in 1995 and 1996. The team won 32 straight games over his tenure there. For years, Gordon’s mark of 84 career touchdowns was a state record.

Gordon’s late father, Drew, was a longtime head coach at La Salle and guided his team to six Catholic League championships from 2006 to 2014. Brett worked as a quarterbacks coach at Villanova in 2003, a wide receivers coach at Lafayette in the spring of 2004, and was a defensive graduate assistant at Ole Miss for the 2004-05 season.

He was an assistant coach under his father from 2005 to 2014 before returning as head coach in 2024.

“Many alumni throughout Gavin’s tenure always said that he needed Brett,” Bryan said. “And they were right. He did need Brett.”

There is an irony to all of this. Sidwar decided to stay at La Salle because of Gordon. Over the past two years, the coach has unlocked a new gear in his quarterback, allowing him to inch closer to those 6,837 yards and 84 touchdowns.

But if Gordon hadn’t been hired, Sidwar would have gone elsewhere — and the coach’s records would have been preserved.

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The coach isn’t losing sleep over it. He didn’t know the record by heart (“6,800 and something,” he said) and wasn’t sure of exactly how far his quarterback was.

He’s more proud of the progress they’ve made on the mental side of the game. Sidwar always had athleticism, arm strength, and accuracy, but lacked a deep understanding of football strategy.

Gordon was uniquely qualified to help him with this. When he was a quarterback at La Salle, then Villanova from 1999-2002, the future head coach was seen by Division I programs as undersized. He didn’t have the same height and build that Sidwar has, so he worked twice as hard as everybody else — physically and mentally.

He knew Sidwar — a Missouri pledge — would need more than physicality to thrive at the collegiate level.

“My thought was to take his physical attributes and teach him the mental pieces that made me successful,” Gordon said. “The sky is the limit from there.”

Shortly after the coach was hired, Gordon and Sidwar began to have one-on-one meetings. They would meet two or three times a week to break down film and go through different progressions, concepts, and coverages.

Gordon tried to make it as simple as possible for the quarterback. Rather than just explaining what the concepts were, he delineated why they were important. He didn’t want Sidwar to just memorize words — he wanted him to comprehend them thoroughly.

The coach went beyond that. During practice, he’d ask his quarterback what coverage they were in. Last winter, he had Sidwar take a pop quiz, of sorts. He walked into Gordon’s office, expecting a film session, and found four coaches sitting in front of the projector screen.

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“He made me teach it,” Sidwar said. “That was tough, for sure. The routes and stuff. He would tell me a formation or a play, and I had to go up there and draw it and tell them why and what we would do.”

Added Gordon: “I was always taught that until you can teach something, you haven’t mastered it. It’s one thing to be able to regurgitate. But then, one day he walked in, and I said, ‘All right, jump up on the board.’”

The results speak for themselves. Sidwar threw for a career-high 31 touchdowns in 2024. He also posted career highs in completions (220) and passing yards (2,747).

Sidwar’s completion percentage has stood at 70.4% since Gordon became his coach, compared to 64.6% during his first two seasons at La Salle.

But to Gordon, the better indicator of Sidwar’s progress is in the feedback he’s gotten from college programs.

“The best compliment I ever got was from the Missouri staff,” Gordon said, “They called me after they had a 60-minute call with him in the spring or the summer and said it was the most impressive high school player they’ve ever spoken to about football in general.

“To hear them say that, and to see it come to fruition on the field … he’s a complete player.”

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Sidwar has thrown for 6,789 yards and 78 touchdowns in his high school career. He could break his coach’s record as early as Friday, when La Salle (4-0) plays Roman Catholic (2-2).

Regardless of when it happens, Gordon will be proud of his pupil for what he’s accomplished and what’s to come.

“The fact that I’m here, and in certain ways, experiencing it with him, is exciting,” Gordon said. “Getting to know him the way I have and getting as close as we have over the last couple of years, if there’s anybody that could break it up to this point, I would want it to be him.”