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If you've made your way to this site, it’s probably because your life, or the life of someone in your orbit, has been impacted by Jimmy Hires. Perhaps profoundly. You likely already know some of the relevant chapters in Jimmy’s story.

But it’s highly unlikely that you know mine, or how I came to serve as the unlikely fulcrum for this project.

On my 25th birthday in 1987, I was offered the opportunity to revamp high school sports coverage for the Savannah Morning News. As a Yankee (a provenance of which I was reminded on a daily basis after relocating from Ohio), I was mesmerized by the coastal antebellum city. I readily accepted the offer from the paper’s executive sports editor over a feast of Low Country Boil at a Thunderbolt restaurant.

But I had done my homework and accepted the position conditional on a single caveat: the freedom to significantly expand prep coverage beyond Chatham County, where the sports teams of the resource-challenged, aging schools were rarely competitive on a regional level, let alone on a statewide basis. 

A few months later, my reporting on an illegal transmitter deployed during Evans High School’s narrow state quarterfinal victory over Effingham County in a battle of undefeated teams at opposite ends of the Savannah River embarrassed the Georgia High School Association into declaring a forfeit, disqualifying the 12-0 Augusta-area powerhouse — ranked No. 2 in the state — from the large-school football playoffs in a historic precedent.

All of a sudden, the Savannah Morning News was selling more newspapers outside of Chatham County than it had in well over a century of publishing. When basketball season rolled around, I set my sights on what I believed to be another long-neglected market: Bryan County. Specifically, the burgeoning program at Richmond Hill High School.

That’s when I first crossed paths with Coach Jimmy Hires, a dynamo of a man who a few months later willed the scrappy Wildcats to the Class A state championship to conclude a tour de force of a season. He came within a game of repeating the feat a year later.

I moved on to cover college and pro sports for bigger papers in bigger markets, eventually settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. But for three-dozen years, I’ve kept a reminder of Richmond Hill proudly displayed on a prominent shelf: A basketball signed by the entire 1988-89 state runner-up team, presented to me by a UGA-bound guard named Bernard Davis.

But there’s another reason that Richmond Hill occupies a permanent place in my heart.

On the same night that Bernard presented me with the keepsake ball at the Wildcats' spring banquet, I presented him with my newspaper’s Coastal Empire Player of the Year Award. I was running late, rushing to Richmond Hill after covering a baseball game in Statesboro (Bulloch County was my spring expansion project), and hadn’t had time to prepare any remarks.

But I’ve always been comfortable with adlibbing, so I simply called Bernard to the dais to accept the award with the first words that came to mind, which were approximately these: “If I ever have a son, I’d be proud if he embodied half of the character of the young man I’m about to introduce.”

Being a Yankee and all, it never crossed my mind how those words might play to a small community in the Deep South: a white guy speaking with familial reverence of a young black athlete. But on my way out the door, a grizzled white man — perhaps the grandfather of one of the ballplayers (I never did learn his identity) — stopped me and held out a shaky hand.

As I grasped it, he said to me in a long, languid drawl: “I heard what you said about that boy. Things sure have changed around here.” 

During an awkward pause in which I was trying to determine in which direction the conversation was headed, I thought I detected his eyes misting. After composing himself, he concluded with this:

“Maybe it’s about time.”

I have covered the Super Bowl and interviewed hundreds of athletes who wound up in the halls of fame of whichever sports you prefer. But to this day, I consider that brief encounter in Richmond Hill to be the most profound moment of my career.

So perhaps it was kismet when, a few months ago, I came across a message in a neglected email account, inquiring if by any chance I was the Brian Higgins who worked for the Savannah Morning News in the late 1980s. Curious, I pleaded guilty and left a number. No more than a few minutes passed when my phone vibrated and I instantly recognized a syrup-thick Tarheel accent from my past: Libby Hires, Jimmy’s wife and biggest cheerleader. 

Once upon a time, journalists were friendly with, rather than antagonistic toward, the subjects of their reporting. Good reporters embraced coaches' families, as well; trust is the master key to the kind of interviews that truly reveal a subject to readers. And wives are the keyholders.

I got to know Libby more than most wives when she was pregnant with their first child and I wrote a story about Jimmy becoming a father for the first time at 39, which in the late 1980s was enough of an anomaly to warrant a story (Libby is unlikely to forgive me if I don't mention that she was still shy of her 24th birthday).

By the by, that bun in her oven is now the girls basketball coach at Wayne County, Kala Hires Hobbs. Libby's second bun, Jay, is the girls JV basketball coach and assistant girls varsity coach at — let's bring this full-circle — Richmond Hill.

Libby and Jimmy were reaching out, she told me, because Jimmy was feeling sentimental and long credited me with helping put his career on the map, a career that righteously concluded with his induction into the Georgia High School Coaches Hall of Fame.

She put Jimmy on the phone, and we caught up on the years and the players and the accomplishments (he won two more state championships at Richmond Hill). Though a bit gravelly from chemotherapy to treat a particularly nasty strain of a deadly disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the 75-year old coach spoke proudly of the new high school in Richmond Hill.

After we finished, Libby grabbed the phone and talked some more about Richmond Hill. About how I would never in a million years recognize it. About how the new high school resembled a private college. As we spoke, I got online and checked out the Bryan County Board of Education website and was indeed impressed with the sparkling new Richmond Hill High. It exuded modernity without sacrificing architectural grace. And it featured a gym – the website called it an “arena” – fit for champions.

I asked what I considered to be a rhetorical question: “They’re naming it after Jimmy, right?”

So here we are, with the holidays upon us in 2025, and I find myself freshly dedicated to a most worthy cause: to join in chorus with legions of former Richmond Hill athletes, non-athletes and citizens of every ilk to convey to the Bryan County Board of Education (the members of which I am unburdened by opinion, residing as I do on the opposite coast) the groundswell of support that exists for the Jimmy Hires Arena at Richmond Hill High School.

Whether you put any stock in my opinion that Jimmy Hires was the most gifted basketball coach I encountered at any level over the decades, from high schools through the NBA, I hope you'll come to agree (if you don't already) with the scores of men and women encompassing a generation that have brought honor to Richmond Hill as student-athletes and accomplished alums: This legacy is a no-brainer.

The testimonials of those former athletes and others impacted by Coach Hires will fill the pages of this site in the coming weeks and months. And though I have evolved to become the one thing that undoubtedly gives a proper Southerner more cause for bruxism than a Yankee — a Californian — I respectfully request your indulgence on this conclusion:

Jimmy Hires is the reason that an old man, shaken by the revelation that we should not be defined by the color of our skin, found the courage to approach me on that long-ago evening in a small town — long in the shadows of Savannah — upon which the light had begun to shine, thanks to an indomitable band of brothers that refused to lose.