Jaguars on the Rise

By Sarah Turner
Photos by Cari Dean, Dawn Harrison, Jason Homan, Kelsea Schafer, Neal Wagner & Contributed

Fall Friday nights mean only one thing for most Alabamians. High school football rules all from August to November.

Across all classifications, there’s legendary programs, coaches and players that have all stemmed from the greater Birmingham area. However, Spain Park hasn’t really been in that conversation, until now.

Tim Vakakes is in his third year at the helm of the Jaguars’ football program, and he’s done what no other coach could do for the last nine years: win a region championship, beat Hoover and put together one of the most successful seasons Spain Park has seen in a long time.

Tim’s interest in coaching stemmed from his father. He grew up on sidelines and in locker rooms, following his father from school to school around the Birmingham area.

From Pelham to Montevallo, you could always find him on a football field on a Friday night. Once he was old enough to play, he took the field as a defensive back for Homewood High School, where his coaches there further convinced him this was a career path he wanted to take.

His playing days were over after he graduated from Homewood. His first coaching job out of college was as an assistant at Fairfield High Preparatory School alongside his father, who was the head coach at the time.

Assistant coaching at Fairfield was also his father’s first coaching job out of college. Much of Tim’s coaching style comes from what he learned from his father.

“I was blessed to be raised by my dad and see how he coached with so much humility,” Tim says.

He explains how his father treated people around him the same way—whether his team was losing or winning—and he’s taken that to every program with which he’s been involved throughout his career.

Tim inherited a Spain Park team that went 2-8 before his arrival. It was a task that a lot of coaches viewed as insurmountable, and they told him so.

Tim looked at it differently. This wasn’t the first time he’d taken a head coaching job with a fixer-upper program.

“I’ve never been scared of challenges,” he says. “I kind of wanted to go somewhere that people tell you what you can’t do there.”

Before moving to Hoover, Tim spent eight years as the head coach of Jackson-Olin “J-O” High School in Birmingham, where he was the team’s fifth head coach in seven years.

“People said I was crazy for going there,” he says.

Jackson-Olin hadn’t had a winning season in 15 years, but Tim changed that when he arrived in 2013. During his time at J-O, he produced four All-Americans, several playoff appearances and one undefeated season.

What has been accomplished at Spain Park this season almost never was. He says at first, he tried to talk himself out of the Spain Park job because of the love he had for J-O.

Both of his children were born during his time at J-O. His son had grown up on the sidelines of Jackson-Olin field—the same way Tim did with his father.

Ultimately, the Spain Park job was an opportunity he knew he had to take, even though it meant leaving the J-O community behind.

“The day I drove away from Jackson-Olin for the last time, I was driving down Avenue E with all my stuff in the truck, and I was bawling like a little 2-year-old baby just because that place means a lot to me,” he says.

Tim’s first season at Spain Park in 2022 was all about getting his feet wet.

“The first thing I wanted to do was set a culture of hard, honest, consistent work,” he says.

The first thing the team did with him was get in the weight room—something they now do four times a week.

The Jaguars went 3-7 in 2022, but they played a lot of the teams on their schedule very close. In 2023, Tim’s squad went 7-3, which is a stark improvement from the past few years.

Bottom line? His coaching style revolves around simplicity.

“I’m not smart enough to come up with something cute, something different or something radical,” Tim says. “We’re just going to keep doing what we do.”

The Jaguars’ 2024 season got off on the right foot with a 38-7 win in their opening game against Sparkman, but Friday, Aug. 30, was one of the biggest indicators of this team’s potential in 2024. Spain Park traveled to the Hoover Met to face mighty Hoover in enemy territory.

“I told the kids before the game, ‘We lose the game, and our season’s not over; If we win the game, our season’s not complete,’” Tim says.

Spain Park walked out of the Hoover Met with a marquee victory, 39-37, over the Buccaneers, the program’s first since 2015. Plus, the wins kept racking up, and they didn’t stop.

As of October 2024, Spain Park sits without a blemish on their record as Region 3 Champions—also for the first time since 2015.

Tim says he truly doesn’t know what has created these unprecedented achievements in the Spain Park program this year.

“I just do know when kids invest into each other, when they all put in the same amount of work and everything’s consistent…I think it breeds success,” he says.

Key players such as quarterback Brock Bradley and wide receiver Corey Barber, both juniors, have also contributed immensely to the Jaguars’ perfect record. Brock committed to Clemson University at the beginning of the season, and Corey has Division I offers steadily rolling in.

“Obviously when you have kids like that, they make coaches like me that aren’t real smart look a whole lot smarter than we really are,” Tim says, smiling.

He hopes that those who play under him will take away a lot more than how to run a curl route or how to play a zone defense.

“I want these kids to know that there’s way more lessons to be learned playing this sport in high school than any win you could ever get on the scoreboard,” he says.

As Tim and the Spain Park football program continue to gain momentum into the postseason, know that it hasn’t come easy.

“There’s a standard of how hard we’re going to work and how tough we’re going to be,” Tim says. “It’s what we did this week, and that’s all we know how to do.”