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WEIRTON, W.Va. -- When Shawn McKinnon got his first head coaching job at Weirton Madonna in March, the Oct. 16 football game at Lisbon caught his eye.
“It’s something I noticed, obviously,” he said. “It’s my alma mater.”
McKinnon, a 2014 graduate of Lisbon High School where he was a two-way starter, returns tonight to Bud Bucher Field.
“I’m excited and happy to be up there and compete,” he said.
The Blue Dons (1-5) and Blue Devils (5-3) will kick off at 7 p.m. today.
“If you asked me in high school if I was going to be a football coach, I would have laughed at you,” McKinnon said. “I never saw myself coaching high school football.”
He started as an assistant coach at East Liverpool in 2022 under Don Phillips and Jason Duke and was the Wellsville defensive coordinator in 2025 under Jim Tsilimos, who was his coach at Lisbon.
“I planned on staying on staff and then Jim retired,” McKinnon said.
That led him to Weirton Madonna and his first full-time teaching job in high school personal finance classes.
“Coaching and teaching kind of go hand and hand,” McKinnon said. “I want to help them in their journey and find what they want to do. It’s part of the journey to make them young men.”
Madonna had a bye week last Friday, so McKinnon attended the Southern Local at Lisbon game that Lisbon won 38-0.
There he talked with Lisbon assistants and former Lisbon teammates Danny Donohue, David Toot and Seth Davis and Lisbon head coach Bill Meek, who was an assistant during McKinnon’s playing days.
It will be all business tonight.
“It’ll be a great opportunity to go back there, see a lot of familiar faces in the stands, and hopefully we can put a win on the board,” McKinnon said.
Wins have been hard to come by for the Blue Dons, who did not field a team last season due to a lack of players.
“Down here trying to build a program,” McKinnon said. “It’s been pretty challenging.
“In the 2013 season they won a state championship and have been pretty competitive into the 2020s.”
Madonna has a proud football history with six West Virginia Class A state championships through 2013.
McKinnon said Madonna has 135 students in junior high and high school and that up from last school year.
“There is a lot of good alumni who want to see (the football program) go on,” McKinnon said. “You see that parents have a lot of pride in the school. People are still happy to have football.”
Next Friday, Madonna will be hosting Leetonia as McKinnon will be able to pull on his local knowledge again.
“It will be cool to play them, too,” he said. “I kind of know what they do. It will be good playing Columbiana County teams two weeks in row.”
NAME GAME
McKinnon lives in East Liverpool with his fiancé, Sydney Pritchard, and five sons.
Unfortunately, there is another Shawn McKinnon in East Liverpool near the same age. That one was indicted last fall for gross sexual imposition involving a child and sentenced in August to 36 months in prison.
“Unfortunately I know everything that happened,” Coach McKinnon said.
He was coaching and substitute teaching in Wellsville at the time and said some were jumping to the wrong conclusion.
“Obviously it wasn’t me,” he said. “I was working in a school system where people are pretty quick to judge when kids are involved.”
Coach McKinnon said he tried to get word out it was a different man with the same name.
“It was a disaster,” he said. “I got ahold of all the newspapers and TV stations and asked them to include the middle name.
“I immediately put in on my Facebook it wasn’t me. I was receiving death threats at the time.”
He said he didn’t take the threats too seriously.
“After they realized I wasn’t the person, they were quick to apologize,” he said.
He understood why people reacted like they did.
“If something happened to my kids, I would be pretty quick to judge,” he said.
GAME NOTES
• McKinnon ran for East Liverpool mayor in 2023 as an independent.
“I took second place out of three. It was a good learning experience,” he said. “My whole goal is I want to be part of the community and help people out.”
He has no plans to try again in the near future.
“Maybe down the road,” he said.
• Madonna’s lone win came against the Van Bulldogs, 41-0, on Sept. 4. Van canceled the season after the next game due to lack of players.
The Boone County Board of Education approved a plan last week to close the Van school district at the end of this school year.
• Madonna lost to Southern Garrett, Maryland, 54-0 on Sept. 11.
“They are a pretty big school in Maryland” McKinnon said. “They are in single A there (for the smallest enrollments) and they have 600-plus kids in their high school. We didn’t realize that when we made the schedule.”
Southern Garrett will play at Oak Glen next Friday.