The Relentless Engine of Atlanta: How John Wesley Hollins Jr. Built a Legacy on Mentorship, Marketing, and the Mound

At RDC Magazine, we pride ourselves on highlighting individuals whose lives are powered by purpose and legacy. Few embody that spirit more than John Wesley Hollins, Jr., a man whose unwavering commitment to community, youth empowerment, and business excellence makes him nothing short of a force in the city of Atlanta.

When John Wesley Hollins, Jr. walks into a room, he doesn’t just bring a presence; he brings decades of impact, stitched into every stride like the seams of a well-worn baseball glove.

For more than 30 years, Hollins has operated as one of Atlanta’s quiet powerhouses, bridging boardrooms, baseball diamonds, and underserved communities with one resolute mission: uplift, mentor, and transform. To attempt to define him by a single title is to miss the point. He’s an executive, a father, a former Division I baseball phenom, a youth mentor, a philanthropist, a hospital board member, and the founder of a sports program that has funneled millions into scholarships. But perhaps above all, he’s a community architect who has spent his life pouring concrete foundations beneath dreams that might have otherwise crumbled.

At WANF-TV / Gray Media (also known as Atlanta News First), Hollins holds court as a Senior Account Executive. In this role, he has not only elevated the station’s profile, but also helped shepherd major advertising campaigns for the city’s top law firms, ad agencies, and growing businesses. His eye for opportunity is sharp, his client list elite, but it’s the small businesses that have felt his greatest touch. Through strategic media and marketing, Hollins has helped develop countless local enterprises, guiding them into Atlanta’s fast lane with the poise of someone who has mastered both the game and the grind.

But Hollins’s success in the corporate world is only one part of the story.

His legacy is arguably most profound off-screen, where he has spent his life mentoring underserved youth and building bridges to opportunity with tireless devotion. The roots of this work stretch back to Eastlake Meadows, the housing project once nicknamed “Little Vietnam” for its violence and hardship. It was there that his father, John Sr., planted seeds of change by launching the first organized football program in the community. He did it with a belief so radical and so simple: that all children were created equal and that sport could unify where society divided. His first recruit was his own son.

That moment didn’t just shape Hollins’s path. It ignited it.

As the Executive Director and founder of ATL Metro RBI, Inc., Hollins has taken that same ethos and scaled it. The youth baseball program he built from the ground up doesn’t just teach kids how to hit curveballs. It teaches them how to handle life’s curveballs. It’s about leadership, health and wellness, mentorship, and perhaps most importantly, access. To date, ATL Metro RBI has secured over $2 million in scholarship funding for students attending top universities across the country, from Georgia State to Stanford, Morehouse to NYU.

More than 700 young men have gone on to play college and professional baseball through the affordable training and support provided by Hollins’s program. Major League Baseball and the Atlanta Braves have backed him. Mizuno Sports and Better Baseball have partnered with him. In 2019, that work crossed international borders with over $100,000 in sports equipment delivered to Puerto Rico and Curaçao. ATL Metro RBI expanded into the Caribbean. That same year, the Mayor of Puerto Rico awarded Hollins the prestigious Roberto Clemente Award, an emblem of sports-driven service rarely handed to non-islanders.

Yet Hollins is no sideline cheerleader. He is a former star athlete himself. At Georgia State University, he lettered in baseball for four years, received academic and athletic honors, and was nearly named Conference Player of the Year. In 1986, he was invited as an unrestricted free agent by the Pittsburgh Pirates following the MLB draft. His approach to mentorship now is rooted in experience that is equal parts discipline and empathy. He knows the sacrifices. He knows the spotlight. And he knows that young people need more than inspiration. They need infrastructure.

His accolades are as numerous as they are impressive. In 2016, he received the Barack Obama Honoree Award for Lifetime Achievement in Community Service. His name is now forever enshrined in the 44th President’s Library. He has been a proud member of 100 Black Men of America since 2008, and from 2015 to 2018, he served as President of the DeKalb County chapter. In this role, he and fellow leaders mentored young men and women, opening doors to scholarships, global travel, and life-changing opportunities that many had never imagined possible.

Hollins is currently an Executive Board Member of Grady Memorial Hospital, where his leadership helps shape the healthcare systems that serve Atlanta’s most vulnerable. His capacity for service seems boundless. It’s the kind of work ethic that feels increasingly rare, almost sacred. The kind passed down by fathers like John Sr. and magnified by sons like John Jr.

Speaking of sons, Hollins’s legacy is perhaps most vivid in his own children. His eldest, John W. Hollins III, is now an attorney for Atlanta’s Public Defender’s Office. His youngest, Jordan, is a two-time national champion and professional MLB hitting instructor in the Appalachian League. Both, like their father, are stewards of community, navigating their own paths with the same principled compass.

Through it all, there is Tekki T. Hollins, his college sweetheart and wife of nearly 40 years. Together since 1987, their marriage is a portrait of stability, love, and partnership that has weathered the tides of time with grace and grit.

It’s easy to say a person is the heart of a city. But in John Wesley Hollins, Jr.’s case, it’s not a metaphor. He is the pulse behind so many of Atlanta’s progress stories, the kind of leader who doesn’t need headlines because his work speaks for itself. In an era where community is too often a marketing ploy, Hollins reminds us what true service looks like: quiet, consistent, and deeply personal.

That’s why RDC Magazine is honored to feature him—to spotlight a man whose story doesn’t just reflect excellence, but redefines it for generations to come.

In that way, he is not just a man of the moment. He is a man of the mission, living proof that legacy is not about fame or flash, but about the lives you lift along the way.