Four years coaching together helped create a coaching bond between Mark Adams and Rick Cooper. The last 36 years of friendship brought the two West Texas coaching legends back together for one final ride.
Adams landed his dream job last April 6 as the Red Raiders’ new coach. He spent the next few weeks assembling his staff and his mind kept wandering back was Cooper, his one-time assistant at Wayland Baptist, his protégé and somebody who became a lifelong friend.
Cooper resisted at first, his life headed in a new direction after his recent retirement as the Wayland Baptist athletic director and with a newly constructed house in Canyon. There are four grandkids to spoil and the 63-year-old Cooper was eager for that phase of his life.
“Every time I called him, we’d talk about the new job and he was always changing the subject,” Adams said with a smile.
Adams didn’t relent and finally convinced Cooper to come aboard as his Chief of Staff. Pretty quickly, reticence gave way to excitement and the realization that working together is a nice twist of destiny for both men as they arrive at the stretch run of their professional lives.
Now, six months into their second stint together, Cooper calls his new post a dream job as well.
“I'm a guy who banged around at lower levels most of my life, and now Coach Adams is giving me this chance at a Power 5 school with a really bright future, and I couldn’t be more thrilled,” Cooper said. “I'm here for the experience of a lifetime. It's a dream come true for me, too, and I’m really glad to be here.”
Turn back the clock 40-plus years, and that same enthusiasm was present when Adams was a young first-time head coach at Clarendon Junior College and Cooper was a recent Wayland Baptist graduate who was on the Pioneers’ basketball staff.
First impressions weren’t a strength – Adams reports that Cooper showed up to recruit Clarendon players wearing jeans and an untucked shirt – but something between the two men quickly meshed. Shortly after that, Adams landed the job at Wayland and inherited Cooper as his assistant.
After a rocky 0-6 start in their first season together, the Pioneers found their groove with then 25-year-old Adams and 23-year-old Cooper as the brain trust. Wayland won 20 games that first season and soon began a run of three consecutive appearances at the NAIA Tournament, including a national runnerup finish in 1985.
Those four years together were the only time Adams and Cooper have worked side-by-side until now, but they built a rock-solid foundation of friendship.
“He's a hillbilly and I'm an old farm boy from Brownfield, so we really didn’t have a lot in common,” Adams said. Cooper hails from West Virginia. “But from the very start, we complemented each other. We shared a love for basketball, and we were both young and learning how to coach together. That's how we developed our philosophy together even though we came from completely different backgrounds.”
Buoyed by the four-year run of success at Wayland Baptist, Adams moved up the road to take over at West Texas State and Cooper slid into the driver’s seat at Wayland. When Adams departed WT for Texas-Pan American after the 1992 season, Cooper pursued the job but didn’t get it. When West Texas was in the market again a year later, Adams called the athletic director and made a plug for his friend.
That was where the two coaches’ careers diverged a bit. Cooper arrived at WT in 1993 and stayed for 20 seasons with unprecedented success. By the time he stepped down in 2013, Cooper had amassed a 546-242 record in his two coaching stops to earn spots in both schools’ hall of honor.
Adams got back into basketball in 2004 at Howard College and guided that program to a NJCAA national crown in 2010. He moved to Texas Tech as a director of operations under Tubby Smith, left for Arkansas-Little Rock on Chris Beard’s staff and came back to Lubbock when he landed the job in 2016.
After Beard’s departure last spring, Adams endured the arduous process of pursuing his dream job and Cooper kept close tabs.
They spoke as the process played out, which wasn’t a surprise. The volume of phone calls between the two was constant through the years, and a tell-tale sign of their friendship was that basketball was rarely the primary topic.
Instead, the two talked about how their lives were playing out – each with a son and a daughter, each now with grandchildren to spoil.
“We’ve always had the commonality that we both love basketball, but there are some differences that drew us together,” Adams said. “I always knew I wanted to be a basketball coach, and God made it pretty clear to me that was the skill set He blessed me with. Rick, on the other hand, could have been a lawyer, or a doctor or anything he wanted, and he would’ve been good at it. That's something that has always attracted me to Rick – not only do we share a love of basketball, but if I want to talk about anything in life, I know he’s so well-read and informed that I can learn something from him. I tell him once in a while that he’s not as smart as I though he was because he got into coaching and stayed in it.”
It’s that yin-and-yang that explains why Cooper is back in basketball after a seven-year stint as an athletic administrator at his alma mater.
Adams had established relationships with each member of his staff, so the basketball connectivity is there and strong. He needed somebody who he knew would keep it real on other fronts.
“There's just an incredible comfort level between for us, and it means a lot to me to know I can trust Coach Cooper and that he’s going to take care of things and take care of me,” Adams said. “He makes my job easier and takes the stress off of me. Knowing he is a friend who will tell what I need to hear with an honest answer is important.”
A fitting final chapter of a strong friendship that began with a love of basketball.
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Randy Rosetta is the Managing Editor of RedRaiderSports.com
Follow on Twitter | @RandyRosetta or @RedRaiderSports
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