Jarrod Boston has been the basketball coach at Atlanta (Texas) High School long enough that Ben Collins set the school’s single-game scoring record for him in the 1990s — and then Ben’s son, Daimion, set a new record while playing for him 20 years later. Theirs is a tiny school in a farming community of about 5,000 people, and Ben’s kid, the 6-foot-9 McDonald’s All-America bean pole, certainly stood out there. Heading into Daimion’s senior season, plenty of bigger programs tried to steal the prized shot blocker with the promise of better competition and preparation for his future at Kentucky, en route to the NBA.
So when Ben came to Boston that summer and said, “I need to have a talk with you,” the coach felt his stomach sink.
“I thought, OK, here it comes,” Boston says. “He took me to a corner in the gym and said, ‘You need to do me a favor.’ I thought, Oh, he wants me to get onto Daimion or use him in a different way or something. He said, ‘You gotta tell your son to shoot more.’ My son was on the team with Daimion and I’m thinking: Well, that is definitely not how I expected this conversation to go.
“Ben said, ‘He’s our best shooter, and that’s what the team needs. Tell him to shoot more.’ From then on, he would come to practice every day and seek out my son and say, ‘Hey, you gotta be our shooter this year.’ That was Ben. He just saw the bigger picture. It was never about Daimion scoring more or Daimion getting more attention. It was about our whole team, about us winning ball games. That, and knowing his son was cared for, is all that mattered.”
Ben Collins was in Lexington when he died unexpectedly Tuesday at the age of 43. He was there making sure Daimion, who turned 20 four days earlier, was in a good head space before the start of his highly anticipated sophomore season at Kentucky. Freshman year was rough, adjusting to life in a much bigger city, on the biggest stage in college basketball, too skinny to battle SEC big men and not ready to play major minutes despite his five-star status. After an electric showing during four exhibition games in the Bahamas this summer, expectations were much higher heading into Year 2 — which comes with added pressure to perform. And Daimion, while excited for the opportunity, was also a little blue. His beloved grandmother died around this time of year while he was in high school, and it always gets him down.
“This year, Daimion was having an especially hard time with it,” Boston says. “So Ben was up there just to check on him. He said, ‘I’m going to stay a week just to make sure he’s OK.’ He said, ‘I want to get him through this.’ And now this happened. Now Ben is gone — just a shocker to all of us — and Daimion is going to be devastated for a while. I promise you, it’s going to be so hard. They were such a close family, and Ben and Daimion were, oh my, just very, very, very close. It was the tightest bond, the kind of relationship where they talked all the time.”
Ben and his wife, Kim, had recently leased an apartment in Lexington, and Ben, a truck driver, had worked out an agreement with his employer that allowed him the flexibility to be in Kentucky often. He wanted to be close to his son. In January, Daimion told Texarkana Magazine, “My first coach was my daddy. My pops pushes me to be the best I can be.” In his official UK bio, Collins lists his parents as his life’s greatest influence.
“I’m telling you, Ben loved that boy,” Boston says. “Loved that boy. You just don’t understand the way he loved that boy. Daimion always wanted to be in the gym when he played for me. He was always asking me if he could get in the gym. And he always wanted Ben in there with him, because Ben would critique him. Ben would tell him the truth. But it was always with love.”
Ben rebounded for Daimion during a workout at UK’s Joe Craft Center on Monday night. He was gone by Tuesday morning. John Calipari gathered Collins and the entire team together at his home that afternoon and the program has wrapped its arms around a grieving son. Calipari was scheduled to be in New York on Wednesday to accept the prestigious Jefferson Award for his philanthropy but canceled the trip. “I want to stay here to be (with) Daimion, his family and my players,” Calipari wrote on his social media accounts. Collins will not play in Thursday night’s exhibition game vs. Kentucky State.
Collins shared photos of his father on Facebook and wrote that they were “just in the gym last night working out (and) having a good time. It hurts to know you won’t be here for the rest of this process but you’re watching over me and (I will) continue to make you proud.”
When Collins averaged fewer than 10 minutes per game as a freshman at Kentucky — after averaging 35.2 points, 14.4 rebounds, 7.0 assists and 6.2 blocks as a senior at Atlanta High, where he was a consensus top-20 recruit — some expected he would transfer. Collins said he never even considered it. Neither did his parents, which was a rare and wonderful thing in Calipari’s eyes.
“I’m so happy for Daimion,” Calipari told The Athletic this summer, when Collins averaged 19.5 points, 10.2 rebounds and 3.9 blocks per 40 minutes during four exhibition games. “Last year, he knew he wasn’t ready. Even more importantly, his parents knew he wasn’t ready. I hugged them both. ‘The other guys are better than him. We know.’ What?!”
Boston is not surprised at all.
“That’s how they were with me,” he said. “They just wanted to know I was looking out for their son. Ben said, ‘You’re the coach. Do what you do.’ We never had a single conversation about how they wanted Daimion to be used.”
Collins, whose social media profiles now include LongLiveMyPops, has said regular conversations with his parents got him through the disappointment of not playing much last season. They “kept my head on straight.”
“Stay humble and keep working hard. That’s what they always told me, just to keep me grounded,” Collins said this summer. “And they sacrificed everything to make sure I had what I needed.”
Anyone who knows his family knows that, and it’s why an entire Texas town is grieving with him. Boston said he’s been flooded by people reaching out and asking how they can help support Kim, Daimion and his four siblings. Boston’s wife works at the middle school in Atlanta and was among the first to learn of Ben’s death when an inconsolable Kim arrived to pick up her younger children and deliver that unimaginable news. Daimion wrote on Facebook that he could not stop crying, vowing to take care of the family but adding: “It’s never (going to) be the same without you.” Sadly, Boston knows how true that is.
“Man, it’s rough. We are all just heartbroken,” Boston says. “They were both just great boys who grew up into great men. I wish I could do it all over again with them. That’s all I keep thinking about. Ben was a great kid, became a great dad, had a great kid of his own, and I got to coach them both. I was lucky to do that. Daimion thought the world of his dad, and Ben would drop everything to be there for Daimion. Not every father is around very much anymore, but Ben was around every chance he got. Every game, he was in the stands. I can’t even imagine how much Daimion is going to be missing that now.”
(Top photo: Jordan Prather / USA Today Sports)
