Longtime middle school coach and teacher Jim Burks has officially retired after 34 years in Lampasas and a long, successful career.
Burks spent the majority of his career at Lampasas Middle School. That was exactly the way he wanted it, Burks said, as he was able to take care of students at some of the most impressionable times of their lives.
Burks served as the athletic coordinator at the middle school for 26 years. He came to Lampasas in 1993, when the current Athletic Director Troy Rogers was a senior in high school. Burks then taught at the alternative campus in Lampasas for the final six or so years of his career after receiving the DAEP assignment in 2020.
“It wasn’t my favorite thing, but it turned out to be good because you see kids in a different situation and they can adapt to you, and I adapted to them,” Burks said. “It has worked out really well.”
He added that the DAEP position was eliminated for the upcoming school year, and he was offered the option to teach science at the high school. He did not want to do that in year 41 of his career.
The coach did spend one year at the high school the season after Rogers had graduated, where he was the head baseball coach and coached the defensive line on the football team. That team went a couple of rounds deep in the playoffs before running into Austin LBJ and eventually losing.
However, Burks has a fond memory of that game. The Badgers scored two defensive touchdowns, and he had one of his defensive ends block a punt, and the other picked it up and returned it for a score.
Burks said Lampasas was about equidistant from his wife’s family in Bastrop and his family in Littlefield. That played a big part in his applying for the job initially.
“It’s been good for me,” he said of the Lampasas ISD. “I’ve gone through 11 athletic directors, I think seven or eight superintendents and lots of principals … .
“It’s been good for us, good for my family, all three kids,” Burks said. “My youngest son was six weeks old when we moved here, and my older son was valedictorian of his class here, and my daughter graduated second or third in her class. She went on to train for The University of Texas for four years.”
Burks added that his wife, Tammy, sat out of teaching for six years after they first moved to Lampasas, but then she started teaching at Kline Whitis Elementary School and has been there ever since.
“She was the Teacher of the Year a few years back,” he said. “She’s a special ed teacher, and I don’t throw this around a lot, but she’s the best in the world at what she does.”
Not only was middle school teaching and coaching exactly what Burks wanted to do, but it turned out that Lampasas was exactly where he wanted to be.
“It kind of grew on us … we did a lot of good things for kids over there [at the middle school], and it got to where it was a good fit,” Burks said. “We wanted our kids to all graduate from the same high school, and it played out really well for us and it just became home the longer we were here.
“I got asked more than once, ‘Why don’t you apply to be the AD?” Burks said. “Well, I don’t want to. I have no desire to sit on top of an octopus’ head and tie all of his arms together. God bless those folks who can because I’ve seen it, and that would not have suited me the way that coaching at the middle school did.”
As someone who spent his entire career focused on youth -- his own as well as others’ -- not much is going to change in retirement for Burks. His focus is going to go toward his grandbabies.
Burks said he and his wife are going to spend a lot of their time traveling to see their children who are in different areas now. They have one grandchild in Iowa, four grandchildren in Sanger near the DFW metroplex, and their daughter has one child, So they plan to split time seeing everyone when they can.
“I run Coaches Complete Lawn Care, which Coach [Aaron] Nuckles and I started when his son Aidan was born,” Burks said. “That summer we started Coaches Complete Lawn Care because my kids wanted to go to UT and bad as you want to believe it, it’s not free.”
That company has taken on a life of its own, as Burks said he has been mowing some lawns around town for about 18 years.
“We stay busy enough, and now coach [Nick] Leopold helps me because I hired Nick when he came here,” he added.
Burks had a storied career in Lampasas and the impact he has had on Lampasas ISD students has been felt for close to 30 years. The message he passed on was that he and other coaches weren’t just teaching some kid, they are teaching somebody’s kid. That made the difference.
