Off-duty time with Legal Eagles recreational hockey team set lawyer on path to become an NHL coach
The career path that made former public defender Jon Cooper the coach of a National Hockey League team was a convoluted trajectory.
At first, after graduating from college, he worked on Wall Street for Prudential Securities. Then, wanting to become a sports agent, he went to Western Michigan University’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School.
While he was earning his law degree there, Cooper honed his high school hockey skills by joining the Legal Eagles, an adult recreational team in Lansing that had a number of lawyers as members. When he graduated from law school, he had an established career network, thanks to the team, according to the Associated Press and USA Hockey magazine.
Initially, that helped Cooper get work as a low-paid public defender. There his charm and communication skills were noticed, because they helped him speed cases through the system.
“He could negotiate with the prosecutors; they would give away the store to him,” retired District Judge Thomas Brennan Jr. told USA Hockey in 2013. “He’d have been terrific had he stayed in law.”
But Brennan himself put the wheels in motion for Cooper to make another career change. One day in 1999, Brennan recounted to the AP, he gave Cooper a call. “I said, ‘Jon, do you want to coach my son’s high school hockey team at Lansing Catholic?’”
Cooper did, and one thing led to another. From coaching junior hockey he progressed to the minor leagues. In 2010, he moved to an American Hockey League affiliate of the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning, and for the last three years he has been the Lightning’s head coach.
One of his good friends is coach Jeff Blashill of the Detroit Red Wings, whose team has been facing off against the Lightning in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
“I think Coop’s journey is great,” Blashill told a MLive.com reporter. “In the end he followed his passion. I was with him the day he left for Texarkana to leave his law business for good and go to a spot that not many people have been to that certainly is not a hockey hotbed. I watched him grow a junior program from scratch in Texarkana. It was a pretty big risk but he followed his passion. Same thing I’d say to young people, follow your passion and good things will happen and they certainly have for him.”
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