Raines defenders Micah Merritt (5), Jyon Simon (9) and Geterius Brown (0) are ready for action against St. Johns Creekside. Raines defeated Creekside 44-14 on Friday, Oct. 18, 2024. Raines scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns to remain undefeated. (Photo by Will Brown)
Published on December 12, 2024 at 4:33 pm
Free local news and info, in your inbox at 6 a.m. M-F. Sign up for the Jacksonville Today newsletter.
Raines High School hopes to party like it’s 1997.
The Vikings head to the state football championship on Saturday. At the predominantly Black high school in Northwest Jacksonville, the return of the dominant football program amid the dry air of December has also shined a spotlight on the school’s recent academic and administrative achievements.
“I really wanted students to have an opportunity. When I first got here, I heard about that 72% graduation rate,” says longtime Raines Principal Vincent Hall. “If you get a certificate of completion but you have great athleticism, you can’t go anywhere because you don’t have a diploma. You can’t go to the next level. We wanted to make sure that every kid, regardless of athlete or not, had opportunities.”
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
Winning time on the Northside
This year, the school earned its first ever ‘B’ grade for academics from the Florida Department of Education. Its 94% graduation rate in 2024, which continued record highs in 2022 and 2023, put it 11th among the 21 non-charter high schools in Duval County. Raines’ graduation rate is also now equal to or higher than five of the seven non-charter high schools in Clay County, two of the seven in St. Johns County and three of the four in Nassau County.
Hall was also named the Duval County Principal of the Year this year.
Outside the classroom, the school’s football team just completed its first undefeated regular season since the 1997 squad that finished 15-0 and won a state football championship. This year’s Vikings (13-0) are one win away from becoming state champs.
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
Raines, the preeminent public school football program in Northeast Florida, has sent more than two dozen alumni to the National Football League and has produced the same number of Pro Football Hall of Famers, two, as the University of Florida.
“It means everything in the world” to be a Raines Viking,” says senior Jyon Simon. “I wouldn’t want to be with no other team. I don’t want to be any other place. It’s the best school in America to be a part of.”
Simon will play his final high school game on Saturday night in South Florida. The defensive lineman, who is headed to Rutgers on a football scholarship, has served as a captain for a defense that has held opponents to 14.3 points per game and posted three shutouts this season.
The soundtrack of those Friday night successes is the top-rated William M. Raines Marching Vikings.
Raines’ superior rating from the Florida Bandmasters Association in November was the first time in at least 25 years that it earned that score at its district competition.
Last Friday, as the football team was staving off Sarasota Booker in a state semifinal, a local videographer quipped that the Marching Vikings sounded like his beloved the Bethune-Cookman University Marching Wildcats — a comment that likely would have been music to the ears of KuRonde’ Washington, Raines’ director of bands since 2009 and the school’s Teacher of the Year in 2022.
Shameless standard of excellence
Raines is named after a local educator who spent 28 years in Duval County, including 12 as principal at Matthew Gilbert, a segregated Black high school on the Eastside in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Despite opening a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed separate but equal education, Raines was established as a Black high school in 1965. As it nears its 60th anniversary, the student body remains 90.9% Black.
“We are unapologetically Black. We show who we are every day and we are the best at it,” says 2017 alumnae Nazah Reddick, a former Raines track star who graduated from North Carolina A&T in 2021. She says the supportive culture is one of the reasons Raines is successful in sports and education.
When Hall became principal in 2013, Raines had earned a ‘D’ grade, or worse, from the Florida Department of Education in six of the previous seven academic years. The school’s 72.1% graduation rate was equal to Duval’s overall graduation rate.
“As we always say, it doesn’t matter the neighborhood you are from, it’s the school you attend,” says Hall, the principal, who grew up as one of eight children in a three-bedroom home in the Magnolia Gardens neighborhood. “We believe in our kids. Our teachers believe in our kids. We make certain that they understand that they could be the doctor, the lawyer, the actuary or whatever it is they want to become. All we have to do is believe and foster that level of support they need in order to be great.”
Dispelling misperceptions
The foils and failures at Raines have been magnified in local and national media over the decades.
For one, a 2000 Folio Weekly column concluded that former Raines Coaches Earl Kitchings Sr., Jimmie Johnson and Freddie Stephens were “drastic underachievers” because none had won a state football championship.
But their impact went far beyond the Raines end zone.
Before he became Raines’ first football coach in 1965, Kitchings had led the segregated Matthew Gilbert High to Duval County’s first undefeated Florida Interscholastic Athletic Association state championship title in 1958.
Johnson coached Raines to an appearance in the 1973 state championship but made more of an impact as principal and a member of the School Board. One of Johnson’s former students was Hall, the current principal.
Stephens won 142 games as Raines coach and made such an impact that when the football field was renamed after him in 2022, more than 60 former players celebrated with him on a Thursday night in Moncrief.
Then there was the 2005 story in The Los Angeles Times. Just before the Super Bowl kicked off in Jacksonville, California’s largest paper fronted its sports page with this subheadline: “Florida campus near Super Bowl site turns out stellar athletes but earns little respect for its academic performance”
The story lingered on the proximity of liquor stores and sagging homes and mentioned that the football stadium is nicknamed The Graveyard. The story never mentioned that the stadium’s moniker comes from the cemetery clearly visible from the east end zone.
Still, Raines students have gone on to leadership roles in education, arts, music, publishing, labor, nonprofit management and the U.S. Secret Service. Three alumni are on the Jacksonville City Council. Another, Tracie Davis, is a state senator. Raines has produced scores of doctors, attorneys, nurses and more over the last six decades.
Willie Hall is not surprised by the slights. The 2003 Raines graduate, and keeper of its history room, says the demographics of the school and its location in one of the poorest ZIP codes in Florida, has, at times, led to its being painted with a broad negative brush.
“When we won (the state football championship) in 2017, we got some recognition and no key to the city,” Hall says. “We were the only ones who won. It wasn’t until Mandarin won (in 2018) that they called us to City Hall. And, they recognized them first. There was definitely a disparity.”
The 2018 Raines team did what no other public school in Northeast Florida has ever accomplished: win back-to-back FHSAA state championships.
Jessie Wilcox Jr., a 1972 Raines grad, has served as a parent, member of its School Advisory Council, booster club and spent 14 years as the public address announcer at football games in the years since.
“Sometimes public perception can drive some people away,” Wilcox says. “But, we know in the last years…the last four or five principals that have been here since the (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) was put in (have done) what it took to get Raines to a ‘B’ right now. It’s headed to an ‘A’. All of the hands that were on deck to get that done. We applaud them.”
Doing it for Duval
Wilcox says Raines is representing the entire city as it heads to Miami for the championship.
The undefeated Vikings play Miami Northwestern (11-2) for the Florida High School Athletic Association Class 3A title at Pitbull Stadium at Florida International University.
In scheduling the matchup of two historically and predominantly Black high schools with massive fan bases, the FHSAA set kickoff for a primetime Saturday evening slot.
“We know Miami Northwestern is a very big program. You may be running into the 20s, when it comes to thousands of people (in attendance),” Wilcox says. “When you start talking about those type of schools playing each other. We are up to the task. We welcome it.”
Current Raines football coach Donovan Masline was an assistant on the 2018 team that won the Vikings’ third state crown.
After last week’s semifinal victory, Masline thanked the community for investing in the young men who make up this year’s marauders from Moncrief.
“It means God is good. God is good! God is good! God is good,” Masline said. “I’m proud of the kids for believing in themselves first and foremost. I’m proud of the kids for believing in the coaches. I’m proud of the families for trusting us with their kids. This is for them. This is their moment. This is what they deserve.”
Masline is a Raines graduate who has spent a decade at the school as a player, coach or member of the faculty. He says the strength of this year’s team is their ability to play together and make plays in big moments.
Raines quarterback T.J. Cole has thrown for 2,812 yards and 43 touchdowns this year.
“Leadership runs through the whole team,” Cole says. “We (have) a lot of young guys that are becoming leaders. They’re stepping up and maturing. They are maturing to the point where we can trust them and we can rely on them a lot. To have that leadership, I’m just happy that we’re going to Miami and we have a chance to do something big.”
Cole has accounted for 52 total touchdowns this year, but none were bigger than his pass to Adron Walker with five minutes remaining in the third quarter of last week’s 28-23 semifinal win.
As the team celebrated, Duval County Superintendent Chris Bernier applauded from the sideline.
“This is a climate of excellence. It’s always been. They’re just starting to receive some of the fruits of their labor. The ‘B’ grade, Dr. Hall being the Principal of the Year…moving on to the state championship. They are an example of all of the schools in Duval County,” Bernier said. “We’re very blessed to have great school buildings, great leaders, great athletes, who deal with victory and with loss with amazing sportsmanship.”
The job is not finished.
Northwestern has won its four playoff games by an average of 52 points. A Raines victory would mark just the third time in 70 years that a Duval County public school concludes an undefeated football season with a state championship.
