Jamie Coggins retires after 12 years as Sparkman boys’ basketball coach

Jamie Coggins has retired as boys’ head basketball coach at Sparkman High School after 12 seasons leading the program.

The 52-year-old is leaving the state after 29 years as a teacher and coach and has accepted a teaching and assistant coaching job just over the Tennessee state line at Fayetteville High School.

“I could have retired at 25 years, and I’ve been looking at this for the past few years,” said Coggins, who said his squad averaged 20 wins a year. “I am blessed to be able to do that and very blessed to find another position up in Tennessee and to be able to continue to try to impact the lives of young people whether in the classroom or on the court.

“Back in the springtime, I thought long and hard and prayed about it. I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to step down at Sparkman and look for something else.’ I started looking and contacting people I knew and networking. I looked at three of four school systems right across the state line that would be within driving distance where I could still commute from home. Everything kind of fell into place.”

Coggins, an Austin High graduate in Decatur who got his degree from Athens State and a master’s from Alabama A&M, spent 17 years at Sparkman and was an assistant coach and teacher at Bob Jones for nine years and at Buckhorn for three. He will teach social studies at Fayetteville, he said, along with working on Fitzgerald Hopkins’ staff with the Tigers.

“The No. 1 thing was that a teaching position was open,” Coggins said. “I’d been a PE teacher last year, but before that I’d been in the classroom for 28 years. I enjoyed the classroom, teaching kids and getting to know them and developing those relationships. I wanted to get back in the classroom. I’d missed that last year.”

In 12 years as head coach, Coggins led the Senators to the Sweet 16 10 times. Sparkman made the Elite 8 four times and the final four twice. His 2013 team lost the Class 6A – then the largest classification in the Alabama High School Athletic Association – state title to Mountain Brook.

“When you look back and reminisce, it’s all the relationships that I had with my coaching staff, my players that I will take the most with me,” he said. “When I talk about being at Sparkman, my relationship with my colleagues and the administration and it’s been a blessing to have people who supported me and worked behind me in my years there.”

He also praised his wife, Erin, for her years as a coach’s wife.

“She has been my rock all these years as a coach,” he said. “She’s been through the thick and thin of it. She has been right there behind me supporting me throughout my career.”

Erin Coggins is also moving into a new job after 22 years teaching at Sparkman, where she taught journalism and directed the newspaper and yearbook staffs. She also developed a class at the school, The Great Wars, primarily focused on World War II. As a WWII historian, she and Coggins have traveled across Europe and the U.S. to sites connected to the war.

“She’s quite a teacher herself,” the coach said. “She has won all kinds of awards and accolades, not just in the state, but in the Southeast and across the country. Her career is nothing but phenomenal.”

Erin Coggins has started in a position at the Huntsville City Schools system, working with the new Artemis Virtual Academy.