Top Tiger steps down: After 15 years, five FHSAA final four trips, James Collins moves on
James Collins, winner of five of the last six regional championships as Jackson head boys basketball coach, resigned Sunday after 15 years in charge on the Northside.
The move was first reported by First Coast News, and subsequently confirmed in a social media post by the school athletic department.
In a phone interview Sunday night with the Times-Union, Collins said he had considered the decision for the past five years, amid the turbulent landscape — low coach pay, transfers and outside pressures among them — of basketball in the 2020s.
"There were some of these kids that I really wanted to see graduate, so I pushed on probably longer than I should have... It was just time for a change, and I'm ready to do something different," he said.
Collins helped build Jackson into Jacksonville's most consistent public school program of the past decade, finishing as state runner-up four times. Collins' departure comes only one week after the Tigers played the Florida High School Athletic Association Class 4A final, going down 49-43 to a fourth-quarter rally by St. Petersburg Gibbs at the RP Funding Center in Lakeland.
While the FHSAA championship trophy remained elusive, Collins won nearly everything else during a tenure marked by effort, energy, intensity and tenacious team defense, keeping Jackson in the state hunt year after year — even though, by his own admission, he didn't envision himself coaching high school when he took the job before the 2009-10 season.
"I didn't really want to coach," he said. "But I wanted to help my community, help the kids at my school, and the coaching grew from there."
A Tigers legend as player and coach, Collins led Jackson to its fifth and most recent state title while playing in 1993, when he won the Florida Dairy Farmers Mr. Basketball award. He remains one of just three Northeast Florida Mr. Basketball winners, alongside Paxon's Isaiah Adams in 2020 and West Nassau's Deebo Coleman in 2021, and scored 2,212 points in his Tigers career to rank in Jacksonville's all-time top five.
Collins played four seasons at Florida State, and lined up in the 1997-98 NBA season with the Los Angeles Clippers after the Philadelphia 76ers had selected him at No. 37 in that summer's draft.
He compiled a 298-130 record at the helm of the Tigers, finishing above .500 in 14 of his 15 seasons while qualifying for 13 FHSAA regionals and reaching the final four in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024. That run made Jackson the city's most consistent final four participant since the mid-1990s Ribault, which qualified for the state semifinals in six consecutive years from 1993 to 1998 under the late Bernard Wilkes.
Collins also led Jackson to five Gateway Conference titles for Duval County public schools, the most recent in January against Raines.
"I don't really care about the wins and losses," he said. "What I care about is the impact that I've been able to make on these kids, to help them better themselves."
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: James Collins: Andrew Jackson High School basketball coach resigns
