‘Its’ been a great run’  (2024)

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on May 18, 2024

After more than a half century of coaching, First Flight’s Jim Prince retires

By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice

Coach Jim Prince is in his element. He’s standing in the middle of the First Flight High School gym floor holding a microphone and chanting, in his trademark raspy voice, “I am, somebody.”

The first time he says it, there is cheering from the kids. The second time, the cheering is louder. The third time, they begin chanting with him, and as he repeats that mantra, the sound of the student body gets louder and louder.

It is not only the kids that are affected by the speech. Now the Superintendent of Poquoson City Schools in Virginia, Arty Tillett was the principal of First Flight High School for 10 years. “That speech…it’s something to see,” Tillett said. “It’ll make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.”

Prince is retiring at the end of the school year after 52 years in coaching in a career that included working in the college ranks and high schools in Virginia before coming to First Flight High 15 years ago. He also taught PE with an emphasis on weight training and will be replaced as First Flight football coach Jimmy Wills for the 2025 season.

For Prince, “I am somebody” is a message that personifies his belief in success and where it starts.

“The two most powerful words are ‘I am,’ because if you want to become something, the first thing you’ve got to tell yourself is that you’re that something—whether I am smart, I am fast, I am happy,” he said.

He had seen Reverend Jesse Jackson, who wrote the words, deliver the speech in the 1970s. But it was when he was coaching at James Madison University (JMU) in the 1980s, that he understood how effective it could be.

“The man that I coached with at JMU my last five years [Head Coach Joe Purzycki], he was greatest speaker I’ve ever known personally. He did [the speech] once for the team,” he recalled.

In those 52 years, he has coached future NFL players, one of them, Charles Haley, is in the Football Hall of Fame in Canton Ohio. He has touched the lives of thousands of young men and kids, and that loyalty was on display at his last First Flight varsity football home game last October.

“The last game here, my daughters [Meredith and Caitlin] called people in. We had about 400 people that had played for me in high school, and that was fantastic,” Prince said.

Not all of the players who wanted to be there were able to attend. Prince told the Voice that Braxton Hughes “was my quarterback for three years here…He’s one of the most amazing young men,” was at Ferrum College playing one of his last games of a six-year college career and completing his work for a Master’s Degree. “Coach, I want to thank you for changing my life… I want to say thank you for being a mentor of mine on and off the field,” Hughes wrote on Facebook.

A few weeks earlier, there had been a gathering at JMU with his players from his time there. “The people that played for me at JMU, played 36 to 52 years ago. That night, we had 140 players that had played for me. When I walked away from that I was so proud, the loyalty of those guys to come. Gary Clark, all pro receiver for the Redskins, he drove down from Northern Virginia just to come in and do that,” he said.

Prince had gone to Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, VA, hoping for a career in the NFL as a quarterback,” but I couldn’t see over the offensive line. So they moved me to wide receiver,” he noted.

In his last game, he made a leaping grab of a pass for a 33-yard gain. Later in the game, while in punt coverage, he was blocked and blew his knee out. “I was in a cast for six months,” he said.

If he couldn’t play football, he could coach, and Shepherd University Coach Walter Barr told him that JMU was just starting a football program. That was 1972.

“I started on defense, coached the defensive secondary. Then after nine years they moved me to offense, and I coached quarterbacks and running backs,” he said.

The program started slowly—his first few years at JMU he also coached wrestling, a sport he had never participated in. He was successful at it though.

“My first year we won the college conference championship, and I was coach of the year,” he said.

JMU was getting some good players, including eventual NFL Hall of Famer Charles Haley and wide receiver Gary Clark, who played 11 years in the NFL and is in the Washington Commanders Ring of Honor.

Haley, Prince recalls was, “naturally strong, naturally fast” and Clark, “hated it when you didn’t get him the ball.”

And they had one thing in common. “As far as accepting coaching, both of them listened like they were a little leaguers,” Prince said.

Coaching, he said, is teaching. “You can’t separate the two.”

Along the way Prince has managed to coach and teach quite a number of sports.

“I coached girls’ basketball because my best friend was the varsity basketball girls coach,” he said. “I coached track my last year at Ocean Lakes [High School in Virginia Beach] because the track coach had gotten ill…We won the state championship.”

“It’s been a great run,” he said, reflecting on his career. “You can make a million dollars… but it’s nothing like the legacy of what you leave behind. Ending the 52 years, I can face it with a strength of knowing that there’s not a kid that I ever coached that they didn’t know that I cared about them.”