Only a couple weeks before the start of the season, the Northeast High boys lacrosse team had yet to hear from their coach. That’s because they didn’t have one.

“I was nervous when it was coming down,” senior midfielder Kenny Kerr said. “I was thinking, ‘Man, what are we gonna do?’”

Former coach Larry Kramer left the Anne Arundel County team in mid-February for county powerhouse Severna Park — a team with two state championships in the last three years — and Northeast had trouble finding the opening for the vacancy. The situation turned critical when the coaching position remained open just days before the start of preseason practice.

Enter Walt Blahut.

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Call it clutch, call it sympathy, call it whatever. The Eagles simply call it perfect timing.

“I wasn’t out there, like I wasn’t looking for a job,” Blahut said. “But at the last minute, there was nobody.”

Acting as an emergency coach is nothing new to Blahut, who originally made his career as a long-term coach, winning three Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association B Conference titles with Archbishop Spalding from 1995 to 2003. After stepping down, he unintentionally got called for emergency coaching positions. He coached North County in 2004 and then did it again in 2005 as a defensive coordinator at Annapolis Area Christian to help a friend fill a coaching hole.

So it made sense for him to be the go-to emergency coach at Northeast.

“The bottom line is I knew a lot of these kids, and they started calling me,” Blahut said. “I knew they had some kids with talent, and if someone brought them together, I knew they could win a few ball games.”

Blahut knew some of the players from camps and club teams, so there wasn’t a lot of unfamiliarity when he came aboard. The team is now 4-4 after going 7-8 last year and has three athletes who will play at Division I colleges next year. Today, the Eagles will attempt to peek above .500 against Glen Burnie.

After almost starting the season without a coach, the players said they are satisfied by the way things turned out.

“We’ve actually played better this year than last year,” senior defender Steve Sauser said. “Everybody was just kind of hesitant because we didn’t know what was going to happen, but everybody stuck with it and nobody has given up.”