Hopkins Named Principal at OMS

One of the state's top high school basketball coaches is stepping away from the sidelines.

Jim Hopkins, whose teams won over 300 games and a state championship in 18 seasons as the boys' varsity coach at Oceana and Westside was named principal of Oceana Middle School last Wednesday by the Wyoming County Board of Education.

The BOE vote was 4-0 (Board Member Arnold Harless was absent). Under board policy, principals are not permitted to coach.

"I'm looking forward to trying something new," Hopkins said. "It's a good opportunity career-wise. I look forward to going back to the school I went to school at."

OMS is in the former Oceana High building.

"It's going to be kind of exciting," he added.

Hopkins said he decided to take advantage of a program offered through WVU, in which educators can obtain their principal's certificate without going back to school.

"The more I got into it, the more I liked it," Hopkins remarked. "I'm fortunate they're going to give me the chance to show them I can do the job.

He looks back at his three decades as a coach at various levels with pleasure. "I had a wonderful experience athletically in Wyoming County," he commented. "I hear people say they want to leave. I lived here by choice, because I wanted to. I think that goes back to the days when I played athletics in the school and in the community and you could go anywhere you wanted around Oceana and feel safe."

He doesn't rule out the possibility of ever coaching again. "It's been a great ride, and I won't say I won't ever coach again," he stated. "But I'll never know if I can do this if I don't try."

Hopkins turned the Oceana hoop program into a model of consistency, winning at least 15 games in every season from 1990 on. He reached his first state final in 1993 and guided the Indians to the AA championship a year later. OHS beat Bridgeport, the team it lost against in the previous year's title game, to win it all.

"The state championship is a memory you can't replace," he observed. "We had problems that year and worked them out."

He also took Oceana to the Class A final in 2001 and Westside to the AA championship game in 2005.

"The last one was the most unlikely," Hopkins said. "We had lost almost all of our starters from the year before and people expected us to be down, but Robert Repass, Brooks Spolarich and Matt Lester said they weren't done."

Hopkins spent 22 years coaching and being an assistant coach in a variety of sports at Oceana High before it closed in 2002.

Now he'll be back in the building as principal. "You might say I'm going home," he said.