BREAKING NEWS: Perry steps down from St. James
Jimmy Perry led St. James to its first state football title in December. He announced that he will step down following the season. (Marvin Gentry)
By TIM GAYLE
With a calm and steady voice concealing his emotion, St. James coach Jimmy Perry told his team on Tuesday morning he was retiring after 11 years as the Trojans’ football coach, just six weeks after leading the team to the school’s first state championship in football.
“This is the perfect time for me to retire,” Perry told his players. “I get to walk away after coaching the greatest group of young men I’ve ever been associated with. I appreciate you, I love you.”
After serving 43 years as a coach on just about every level, Perry said the door isn’t closed on returning to the coaching ranks but he was stepping down as the head coach at the school.
“I do want to work again,” Perry said. “I know God will bring me a job where I can work and be productive but at the same time spend a lot more time with my wife, my children and my grandchildren. A football job, if it’s done correctly, that’s a very hard balance. Now’s a great time. The program is in great shape physically and financially with a great team coming back.
“I love spending time with my wife,” the 65-year-old coach added. “I’m not done working, I’m not done being productive, but whatever I do in the future will allow me a lot more time with my wife and my family. It’s been an honor and a privilege to coach all these kids all these years.”
Publicly, Perry made no recommendation for his replacement. If school administrators plan to hire from within the staff, offensive coordinator Neal Posey is the only full-time assistant who isn’t a coach of another varsity program within the athletic department.
“I trust the leadership of St. James School, the administration and athletic director Katie Barton to keep this program going,” Perry said.
St. James head of school Larry McLemore took note of the coaching shoes he has to fill but said the criteria remains the same as it did when Perry was in charge of the program.
“I think it’ll be quick,” he said of the search. “You know, we’ve got such a strong football program that our focus is on keeping it going. I think it’ll be very clear quickly the man that is a person of character and integrity and knows how to build up boys with our values, which is character, commitment, courage and community. And knows football and how to lead a football program.”
Larry Ware, a former player under Perry at Robert E. Lee and an assistant at St. James for 10 years before taking a job last fall as head coach at Valiant Cross Academy, called Perry “an encyclopedia of knowledge” who could fill just about any position in society.
“He’s an outstanding man, first of all,” Ware said.”He’s an outstanding husband and father and he’s an outstanding leader. I don’t want to call him a coach because he’s been doing it so long, he is more than just a coach. He’s a leader of young men. A lot of what’s going on in the industry, he has it figured out. He has trusted his gut instinct and all the knowledge he has acquired over the years to lead and guide him through his spirituality and his coaching career. It has led to success everywhere he has been. The coaching world will be different in Alabama without him in it.”
The next head coach will have huge shoes to fill. In addition to replacing the knowledge and wisdom of the Hall of Fame coach, Perry also brought a charisma to the program that endeared him to his players.
“Everybody respects him and that’s the most important part about being the coach,” Trojan quarterback KJ Jackson said. “He’s a great guy who has a sense of humor. He’s old school, but he’s funny with it. You can tell he really loves what he does. His passion is really what drives us. Not only do we want to be good for ourselves, but we want to be a great team for him as well. He knows exactly how to push everybody on the team. He knows who needs to be screamed at and who needs to be instructed. He has relationships with everybody. He makes everyone feel special.”
Perry’s coaching path started five decades ago when he got the opportunity to serve as an assistant coach right after graduating from Auburn in 1979. It wasn’t the career path he would have chosen, but it ended up being a lifelong decision.
“I did my student teaching with Charlie Williamson, when he was an assistant at Jeff Davis,” Perry said. “Then Charlie took the Trinity job and hired me straight out of college. I had a ball. I always figured I would coach awhile, make a lot of contacts and get into the business world, but it never happened. It’s fun working with these kids every day.
“You’ve got to love it if you stay in it because you don’t make enough money. You make a lot more money in the private sector, but if you enjoy what you do every day, you never work a day in your life.”
He would remain at Trinity for three years, then returned to his alma mater, Robert E. Lee, in 1982 as an offensive line coach for Bo Boswell. His career would be forever changed in 1984 when Spence McCracken took over as head coach of the Generals.
He was promoted to offensive coordinator and the Generals emerged as the dominant high school team in the state, winning 10 area titles in 11 seasons (1984-94), earning three state championships and reaching the quarterfinals of the playoffs six times in a seven-year span, Lee compiled a 118-25 mark over that 10-year span and won 26 of its 27 area games.
“Jimmy’s the best assistant coach I ever had,” McCracken said. “When I left Lee, I told them, ‘there’s only one guy here that ought to be the head coach, Jimmy Perry.’ He knows how to coach, he knows how to handle boys, he’s a good disciplinarian and he’s a good friend. He’s very loyal, too.”
Even as a coordinator, Perry was forging relationships with area coaches who were hungry for any insight into the state’s top high school football program.
“Jimmy helped me when I was over here at Montgomery Academy and he taught me the wing-T,” Robert Johnson said. “He gave me some film and everything. I was just a junior high assistant over here at MA and his willingness to help me out -- he spent a couple of nights with me, gave me films to study and kept up with me -- for somebody to do that, while he was running the ‘University of Lee’ over there, that was pretty impressive.”
When McCracken went to Opelika, Perry was promoted into his first job as a head coach. The Generals would win three area titles over his five-year tenure, reaching the quarterfinals of the state playoffs three times, the finals once and compiling a 38-24 record.
His first two teams reached the quarterfinals, but he thought his third team, in 1997, was a true championship contender. That’s before he was told his kidneys were failing. As he entered the 1997 season, doctors told him he needed a kidney transplant. Perry responded in a way that only a coach would understand.
“I said what can I do to slow my kidneys shutting down,” he said. “They said you’ve got to get off all proteins, all colored liquids and get on a carbohydrate-only diet. So that’s what I did. I’d get blood work every week and they’d let me know (his numbers). As long as you stay under these numbers, you can function.”
The Generals reached the state playoffs and defeated Baldwin County in the first round, setting up a rematch with Central-Phenix City. The Red Devils rolled into the second round with a 10-1 record, unbeaten in the state of Alabama and having whipped Lee earlier in the year.
“We got to the playoffs and my numbers started going up,” Perry said. “The good Lord took good care of me. We were playing Central and I woke up the day of the game and was throwing up. Your kidneys take the poisons out of your blood and my kidneys weren’t able to take out enough poisons.
“I had scheduled my kidney transplant for two weeks after the state championship game because I was counting on the Lee Generals being there. We got knocked out weeks earlier than I expected. That Monday, I started dialysis.”
It was the first of several health scares he endured, but he never wavered from his career path, even though other jobs could have lessened the workload or the stress.
“None of those jobs would have fulfilled me like coaching does,” Perry said. “And if you don’t live a fulfilled life, what’s the point?”
He returned to the job -- missing only nine days of work in the recovery from a transplant -- and coached the Generals to the second round of the 1998 playoffs before losing to McCracken’s Opelika team. In 1999, he did his best work in the postseason, taking a Lee team that won just four regular-season games to the 6A championship game before losing to Clay-Chalkville in overtime.
Then he was gone, accepting a job on Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville’s staff as the director of high school relations.
“At 42 years old, I had an opportunity to get to the collegiate level,” Perry said. “This door doesn’t open many times, I’d better jump through it. Because you can always go back to high school, but it’s hard to make that jump from high school to college. I saw the opportunity, prayed about it, my kids were going to Auburn, so I said I can go to college with my kids.
“Coach Tuberville came in at Auburn and I had some buddies on the staff -- Joe Whitt and Phillip Lolly -- and they got me hooked up. That was the same time my daughter was going to Auburn and my son was playing at Auburn High, so I got to watch my son play every Friday night. If I had still been at Lee, I wouldn’t have gotten to watch him play because he was at St. James.
“My son walks on (at Auburn) so I’m out there on the field with my son every day throughout his whole college career. How nice is that? When he graduated and went to med school at UAB, it lost its special feature and then it was just a job.”
By then, he was director of football operations at Auburn, a job he would hold until Tuberville was replaced by Gene Chizik after the 2008 season. But those nine seasons taught him some valuable lessons that he would bring back to the high school ranks when he accepted a job as the head coach at St. Paul’s Episcopal in Mobile in 2009.
“When I was in high school, I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Perry said. “But then I got to college and saw a different level of preparation, a different level of expectation. Every game your job is on the line.
“Everybody’s got the same number of hours in a day, it’s the ones who do the most with those hours. It’s more planning, preparation, time management, being more efficient.”
After three years at St. Paul’s, fate would intervene once more, forcing him to return to the central Alabama area.
“After my daughter started having grand babies, we had to move back to Auburn,” said Perry, who was commuting to work at St. Paul’s each week. “I didn’t like not living with my wife during the week.”
But as one door closed, another opened. Popular St. James coach Karl Smeltzer decided to step away from coaching after the 2011 season and the Trojans were looking for a new football coach. Over the next 11 seasons, Perry would expand on the accomplishments of Robert Johnson (1997-2006) and Smeltzer (07-11),
Over the last nine years, his teams have reached the playoffs nine times and compiled an 82-26 record, including 54-6 in region play. The Trojans became the first Capital City Conference team to win a football state championship since Trinity’s 2003 team, defeating Piedmont in the 3A finals. The senior class won a school-record 40 games in the last four seasons, including a current 17-game winning streak in region play, and reached the semifinals and finals for the first time in school history.
“I’d like to think we had a positive influence,” he said. “When I was at Robert E. Lee we had good athletes; when I was at St. Paul’s we had good athletes. Here, we’ve got some pretty good athletes, we just don’t have as many.”
But it almost didn’t happen. Perry, who had undergone heart surgery while he was at Auburn, would suffer a heart attack during an open date while preparing the Trojans for the first round of the 2016 state playoffs. He would require surgery a few years later to remove a tumorous kidney just 12 days before a season opener with Montgomery Academy.
As the wins mounted -- he would become the school’s winningest coach in 2021 -- he would continue to be recognized by his peers. He currently serves as a member of the Alabama High School Athletic Association’s Legislative Council and was selected to the Alabama High School Sports Hall of Fame.
“I have known Jimmy for a long, long time and just have tremendous respect for him as a man and as a football coach,” said Opp coach Mike DuBose, who first encountered Perry when the former was the head coach at Alabama and the latter was on Tuberville’s staff at Auburn. “Through all of the medical issues he has gone through, I got to know him even better, him and his wife, and they’re super, super people. He’s gone through an awful lot and in the process of doing that he’s given back a lot to people, the game of football, the people who play and the people who care about football. He’s a real ambassador for the game, a class act.”
Perry had decided the 2021 season would be his last. His grandchildren were now enrolled in school, leaving his wife Judy at home alone while he spent his days at St. James. His health issues appeared to be in the past. The competitor in him couldn’t walk away from a Trojan football roster that was the most talented in school history.
So he returned for the 2022 season, determined to coach the most talented team in school history to a state championship. But in the summer, a new health scare emerged in his lymph nodes. Few knew what he was going through. Those that did were sworn to secrecy. This was his final year, but he wasn’t going to let his health issues or his impending retirement take away from what his team was doing on the field.
“In hindsight, I probably should have quit last year,” Perry said. “Because I didn’t know I was going to get this this year. But once I committed to this year, I’ve got to go. This summer, they did a pet scan and the pet scan came back ‘not likely cancerous.’ Then they did the biopsy and I had it in four lymph nodes.”
Because of the 1997 kidney transplant, doctors could not do chemotherapy.
“Maybe we can cook them (with radiation treatments) and get them small enough that I can go into remission and have some life left,” he said. “But the good Lord’s got this. I don’t have it, He does. No amount of worrying is going to make it better. Just turn it all over to Him.”
His first radiation treatments came as his team was preparing for 4A powerhouse Handley. He would undergo 15 days of radiation that left him physically drained before he ever arrived at the school. Some how, some way, he pushed through it. During the week the Trojans played arch-rival Trinity, he prepared for the Wildcats uncertain of whether doctors would tell him later in the week that the radiation treatments had worked or whether his cancer was terminal.
St. James pulled off one of the biggest wins in series’ history, beating a talented Wildcat team by 16 points.
“I’d be the first one in … get my radiation and a lot of times I had to have somebody drive me,” Perry said. “I knew I’d be wiped out. I had a lot of people helping me on that and the school (administrators) were great. They knew what I was going through. But I can’t let these kids down, I can’t let these coaches down. So I went in there every morning for treatment and I’d be at work by 10 or 11.”
The 2022 season was different, not because it led to a state championship, but because Perry knew it was his last.
“It’s been more fun,” he said. “I enjoy the kids, not any more than any other group I’ve had, but I just cherish this last time. I’m going to miss it, I’m sure. But I owe it to my wife, all that I’ve put her through with football and my health issues. She is my rock. I owe her some time, her and my grand kids.”
After the Trojans’ final regular-season game with Carroll in Ozark, he didn’t even make it back home, stopping at a motel at 2 a.m. so that he could attend the mandatory Alabama High School Athletic Association state playoff meeting six hours later at Auburn University Montgomery.
“I worked 22 hours on that Friday,” he said. “I’m leaving nothing for Judy. Where was Judy in this?”
That level of commitment was rarely seen by parents or players, but Jimmy Perry was always a role model for his assistant coaches and those who knew his dedication to the game of football.
“Coach Perry turns over every stone,” Ware said. “He leaves nothing undone. He’s going to come early, he’s going to stay late until he feels like the job is done and he’s given his team the best opportunity to succeed. He is very thorough in his preparation. It’s been a blessing to coach under him because you learn so much from him. Whether you want to, whether you’re looking for it, you’re going to get something from him.”