College of Marin

Jim Halm came to play basketball at College of Marin in 1964 because Coach Cal Riemcke recruited him from Redwood High School along with just about every other promising player in the county.

For Halm, who joined the team at just 17, it was a transformative two years at the college. Both years, the team was ranked in the top five in California. The bleachers were packed every game. For Halm, the era of COM basketball was rounded out by “really good teachers” and “an awful lot of really colorful people that were just characters” on the campus. “It was kind of a wonderful scene."

Halm’s first year on the team, the team’s two star guards, Jay Johnson and Brad Busch, dominated the game. Halm and Fred Arnold were known as the Twin Towers. Coach pitted them against each other during practices, not letting on until the first game that they would both be starting players.

In his sophomore year, the team was undefeated in what was then the Golden Valley Conference. COM was the only team to ever go undefeated in that league.

During his sophomore year Halm was the only player to get every coach’s vote – a unanimous First Team All-League selection. “I thought that was quite an honor to gather every coach’s vote in the league,” Halm says. “Thus, I went from nowhere to somewhere in a short two-year period."

Halm earned a full scholarship and went on to play division basketball at the University of Hawaii. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in History and attended the University of San Francisco where he earned a master’s degree in History.

“For me, it was a transformative experience,” he says. “I graduated from high school on the All Nothing Team. There were no honors. There were no awards. There was no recognition. Two years later, after playing with really wonderful players and a coach in a terrific program, I ended up being a relatively widely recruited athlete.”

Halm went on to coach and teach, two positions that are inseparable in his mind.