The first meeting between Juwan Howard and Frankie Collins wasn't your typical coach/recruiting experience. It happened many years earlier when Howard, then with the Miami Heat, took time to talk with an eight-year-old Collins and give some advice, taking a picture with him and counseling him.

It was the first of four meetings over the next several years, and Howard was never anything but supportive and kind.

“When he started recruiting me, he didn’t remember because he meets a lot of people,” Henderson (Nev.) Coronado’s Collins, now a Michigan signee, said. “Then I sent the pictures throughout our time; by then it was four pictures. When he saw them, he was like, ‘oh, wow!’ That made him want me even more.

“One time I had been playing against [Juwan’s son and U-M freshman] Jace at a camp and saw him. After that, I saw him when we went to visit the Miami Heat facility my sophomore year. He was just walking the hall, and I took another picture with him. That time he remembered me.”

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The relationship has only strengthened since. When they talk, Collins said, they discuss just about everything but basketball — their days, their families and life. Collins talks to Jace Howard just about every day, to the point that Howard said he felt it was ‘meant to be’ that he’d be his coach.