Father’s Day is Sunday, and LaVar Arrington’s 44th birthday is 11 days later. But Arrington doesn’t need a present for either occasion.
He already has what he considers his greatest gift: His oldest son is with him and back in his life.
One of the greatest high school football players to ever come out of Western Pennsylvania (North Hills High School), Arrington lives these days with his family in Glendora, Calif., about 30 miles from Hollywood. It’s an appropriate place because the story of LaVar and Keeno Arrington surely would make for one interesting script, involving a most unusual change of sports, some heartache between a father and son, and a rekindling of love between the two.
The story might seem a little fictitious, because who goes from being a high school basketball standout in the WPIAL to playing college basketball, only to decide he’d like to completely change course and try football, a sport he hasn’t played since sixth grade? But that’s the real story of Keeno Arrington, who now plays football at a junior college and has transformed himself into a probable future major-college player. But that transformation didn’t occur before he repaired his relationship with his dad, a Penn State great and former NFL Pro Bowler.
The 22-year-old Keeno Arrington moved across the country last summer to live and train with his father, whom he hadn’t spoken to since Keeno’s middle school days. And sports was one of the primary reasons for the reunion.
Hollywood, are you listening?
“It’s been a really, really tremendous ride ever since we re-connected,” LaVar Arrington said. “There has been tremendous emotion, tears of joy, tears of anger, tears of frustration along the way. But the entirety of all the emotions is just from being able to have him back.
“What he brings to the table and what he represents, and as this story continues to be written, I’m telling you it’s a movie. I’m thinking definitely Netflix.”
LaVar Arrington had his tongue in his cheek when he uttered the Netflix line. But he was partly serious, too. And the man who coaches Keeno Arrington on the Lackawanna College football team also believes the story borders on surreal. Lackawanna, located in Scranton, Pa., has a junior-college football program that has sent many players to major colleges.
“I call Keeno the ‘glorious experiment,’ because who takes a chance like this, doing something completely different like playing football and will probably end up playing at a Division I college?” Lackawanna coach Mark Duda said in an interview with the Post-Gazette earlier this week. “I think it’s a fascinating story. You’re never going to write another one like this because it ain’t ever happening again. So, enjoy it.”
Keeno Arrington played last season at Lackawanna, but mostly on special teams as he learned the game of football. He’s now a 6-foot-2, 200-pound safety who was a standout in spring practice at Lackawanna and will be a starting safety and one of the leaders of the Lackawanna secondary this year. Lackawanna has produced some outstanding safeties in recent years, including Jaquan Brisker, who attended Gateway High School in the WPIAL, played at Penn State after Lackawanna and was taken in the second round of this year’s NFL draft. Duda believes Arrington most likely will be Lackawanna’s next standout safety.
But to fully appreciate the story of where Keeno Arrington is now, you have to know how he got here.
Changing names — and sports
Although he had a tremendous high school basketball career at Lincoln Park, a charter school in Beaver County, the name Keeno Arrington isn’t known in WPIAL basketball circles. That’s because he was Keeno Holmes when he played at Lincoln Park. He was a four-year starter and the first player in WPIAL history to start in four consecutive WPIAL championships. He scored 1,658 career points, won two WPIAL titles, one PIAA title and was the Post-Gazette WPIAL Class 3A Player of the Year in 2019.
Keeno was born in May 2000, a little more than a month after the Washington Redskins made his father the No. 2 pick in the NFL draft (Washington). LaVar Arrington and Keeno’s mother (Kasey Holmes) started dating when they were in high school (Kasey attended Derry Area). LaVar lived with his son and Keeno’s mother during his NFL rookie season, “but we kind of went our separate ways after that,” LaVar said of Keeno’s mother.
Kasey Holmes moved back to Western Pennsylvania with Keeno. LaVar said he continued to financially support Keeno and his mother, and LaVar had visitation rights with his son for years. LaVar eventually married his wife, Trish, and the couple moved to California, where they now have four other children who range from ages 6 to 16.
When Keeno was a child, his mother married a man with a first name similar to her son. Kasey and Keenan Holmes moved to Peters Township, and when young Keeno was 14, his last name was changed to Holmes. This was about the time that LaVar’s relationship with his son stopped.
Kasey Holmes did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story, but LaVar said, “When I was in California, they wanted to hyphenate his last name. No way did I want to have that. ... My son wasn’t even talking to me because they didn’t want me to be part of his life. I signed my rights away to him because I wasn’t going to be a piñata for them so they could continually beat on me. I wasn’t an absentee father. The circumstances I was put in, I was not welcome to be part of his life.”
Keeno played football through sixth grade but gave up the sport because he said his mom and stepfather encouraged him to concentrate on basketball.
LaVar and his son didn’t speak once during Keeno’s high school days, and it pained LaVar.
“I don’t have school pictures of him, I wasn’t there for his high school commencement, I didn’t see him play basketball in high school. Those are some things I still struggle with today,” LaVar said.
Keeno had hoped to be a Division I basketball player, but was never recruited by Division I schools. Only a couple Division II schools showed interest. He eventually signed with Allegheny College, an NCAA Division III school in Meadville.
“Football came natural to me when I was younger,” said Keeno Arrington, who had close to a 4.0 grade-point average in high school. “I was better at football when I was younger. People would say I looked too stiff in basketball. They’d say I always looked like a football player who was playing basketball. ... Going to Allegheny, I never looked at it like falling short. It’s just where decisions took me.”
As a freshman at Allegheny, Keeno showed promise, starting 24 of 26 games and averaging nine points. Then COVID-19 hit and Keeno found himself at home in Peters Township, with months to ponder his future — and life.
“I took the YOLO [you only live once] approach and wanted to try football,” Keeno said. “If it worked, it worked.”
He got in touch with Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s football coaches and they agreed to take him on the team. But Keeno’s longtime girlfriend, Riley Arrigo, convinced him that he should maybe try to speak with his father about his move to football.
“It’s funny,” Keeno said. “I had this dream on consecutive nights that I saw him and we talked like nothing was ever wrong. So I [direct messaged] him the next day on Twitter. He reached right back.”
That was in May 2021. For the next month, LaVar and his son spoke on the phone almost daily. They cried together, they laughed together. But mostly they talked — and healed.
Keeno spent the summer of 2021 in California and trained with his father and LaVar’s oldest son, LaVar II, who is a 6-foot-3 sophomore and promising football and track athlete at Charter Oak High School. The elder LaVar is the defensive coordinator at Charter Oak.
Keeno is back at LaVar’s home for the rest of this summer, training with LaVar II, under their father’s watchful eye. Included in their training is running up and down part of the mountain they live near almost daily.
“The big thing about all of the past is it was just a big miscommunication issue with my dad and my mom. They had a bad relationship and everything went on over my head,” Keeno said. “A lot of what happened in the past was because of misinformation I was fed. Things changed because I found out he wasn’t the person I was told.
“I still have a really deep connection with my mom and my brother and sister. She definitely does not love this situation, but in the future, I think she’ll come to understand it.”
Late last month, Keeno Holmes had his name officially changed back to Keeno Arrington.
Keeno’s future
In California, LaVar Arrington is heavily involved in sports media. He’s on the daily Fox Sports Radio show “2 Pros and a Cup of Joe,” does some national television work and is co-host of a national weekend show and podcast “Up On Game” with former NFL players T.J. Houshmandzadeh and Plaxico Burress.
But he also is helping run a media company “Up On Game Presents,” which will present name, image and likeness deals for college athletes. He has served as a mentor for some college players, including a few at Penn State.
When Keeno told his father that he was going to play football at IUP, LaVar thought it might be better for his son to play at Lackawanna, where he could spend more time just learning the game. Lackawanna has sent players to Penn State, and LaVar knew coach Duda.
“LaVar just e-mailed me and said he had a son playing basketball, but we’d like to give him an opportunity to play football,” Duda said. “We decided to give him a shot and see how he progresses. He’s gone from 0 to 60 pretty quickly.
“He is kind of an exquisite athlete. If you took him to a college camp, he’d probably lift 225 pounds 25 times, have a vertical jump probably in the mid-30s, and I swear he has close to 0% body fat. ... We play some of the best junior colleges in America. He’ll get some film early in our season. With what he has physically, and if he plays like he should, then he should get recruited all over the country.”
In one way, Keeno Arrington already has been through quite a journey with sports, his life and the relationship with his father. In another way, he’s only a few steps into another journey — and his dad is right alongside for this one.
“I’m taken aback by the whole thing at certain moments. Sometimes, it seems surreal,” Keeno said. “But my love for my dad now is super. I don’t know if I ever thought it would get to this point.
“But the biggest thing I’ve learned is that love is unconditional and shown in different ways. When I was 14 years old and if there was a custody battle and I would’ve had to come out here [to California], would I have been happy and wanted that? No. But my dad loved me enough where he let me go because he knew I would be taken care of and maybe someday I would come around. But it would take time. If that’s not love, what is?”
Mike White: mwhite@post-gazette.com and Twitter @mwhiteburgh
First Published: June 19, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: June 20, 2022, 12:24 p.m.
