Dylan Blair will leave a basketball legacy at Downingtown West and is embracing his future at Army

Dylan Blair grew up watching his older brother, Hunter, run basketball drills with their father, Damien. Eventually, Dylan asked to join in on the drills. From that point on, the Blair brothers trained together, learning from Damien, a former standout guard at West Chester University, where he now is the men’s basketball coach.

Those years of training helped Dylan when it came time to start his high school career at Downingtown West. The summer before his freshman year, he started working out with the Whippets. Hunter was entering his senior year under Downingtown West coach Stuart Ross.

Like Damien, and Dylan’s mother, Carolyn, Ross played college basketball at West Chester. Though he had some initial familiarity with Dylan through that connection, it was in those workouts that Ross started to see the younger Blair’s potential.

“I knew Dylan had a chance to be a pretty special player because of his athleticism, because of his basketball IQ, and because of how hard he competed on every possession,” Ross said. “Just seeing how he handled himself with older guys as a seventh-grader, as an eighth-grader, we knew he could be special.”

Blair earned a starting spot in the Whippets’ backcourt alongside his brother. The Whippets boasted a plethora of talented seniors that season, including current Kansas State quarterback Will Howard. Playing with seniors and with a coach he trusted helped Blair navigate the challenges of his first varsity season.

“Having my older brother there to show me the ropes meant a lot for sure, and it made my life a lot easier,” Blair said. “Coach Ross gave me all the confidence in the world. Being a freshman, it’s obviously difficult to come into a kind of point guard role and try to be a leader.”

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Throughout that first season, Blair showed flashes of that potential Ross had observed years before. That season also helped Blair embrace a role he earned entering his sophomore year: team captain.

“[Teammates] go off of how your body language and facial expressions look,” Blair said. “If things aren’t going my way, I still have to stand tall and be that role model for my teammates, even as a sophomore.

“Having that type of experience at a young age, fast forwarding to now, [makes] it kind of like second nature.”

For Blair, stepping up as a leader also forced him to learn to balance leading the Whippets and working on his own game. The 5-foot-10 guard created a system, focusing on his team while in practices and games and carving out separate times to train.

“We’ve shoveled the driveway out so that he can work on his ballhandling and take shots when it’s winter,” Damien said. “He’s just built differently when it comes to preparing for that moment.”

Dylan started playing for the Philly Pride national team as an incoming sophomore and started to hold his own against other future Division I players.

“I saw that his speed still translated; he still could make shots; he still could defend bigger guys, and I said if he keeps working hard, he can play at the Division I level,” Damien said.

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Dylan started to attract interest from several Division I programs, including Penn, Navy, and Colgate. He began considering what factors were important in his decision process. Atop that list was education and a school that would provide opportunities beyond his years there.

West Point reached out to Blair after watching him play at Philly Live II last July.

“The opportunity to play Division I basketball, the opportunity to serve my country, and the opportunity to have a great education, I felt like it kind of was a no-brainer,” he said.

“Both my grandfathers served in the Army, my mom’s and dad’s side. My mom’s brother served in the Navy, and I have a friend who’s actually up at West Point now … Having an inside scoop from a family perspective and also from a friend who is always going to keep it real, it helped a lot.”

Blair embraces his future at West Point, and first he’ll look to make it to Hershey. The Whippets play in a second-round game against New Castle in the PIAA Class 6A tournament on Wednesday.

Blair, who became Downingtown West’s all-time leading scorer this season, will leave the program as one of its most storied players.

“Leaving a legacy, it’s a big thing, and I feel like that’s kind of what I’ll be looking back on once that final buzzer sounds in my last game,” he said.