Published: June 30, 2008 09:48 pm            

COMMENTARY: Coach Cooper was a master technician

LOCKPORT — The Lockport Invaders were already a highly-respected, talented, national-champion semi-pro football organization by the time Doug Cooper took over the head coaching position in the early 1990s.

Many of the team’s best offensive weapons changed allegiances, leaving Cooper with little to work with. But starting literally from scratch, like a good brick layer, Cooper slowly rebuilt the team — brick by brick, one player at a time — and soon, Lockport was once again a national powerhouse.

According to long-time friends and coaching rivals, including Bob Boudeman, it was just another example of Cooper’s remarkable ability at getting the most out of his players individually.

“I think his legacy started way back in Lockport Little Loop and carried over throughout his life. He was a football technician, if not a strategist — a guy who dotted his Is and crossed his Ts. That was his key to fame,” Boudeman said.

“Doug wasn’t the best game-day coach. I was with him when he coached in Newfane and at DeSales and on game day he could panic, but up until that time, if you’re talking about a technician of the game and someone who was good at working with kids, there was nobody any better.”

Cooper, a 1952 graduate of Lockport High School where he was an all-star athlete, played on Lockport’s original semi-pro football team, the Lockport Essos, from 1955-60. From there, he helped organize the creation of Lockport Little Loop Football and coached in the program for eight years.

Cooper’s mentor, the late great Les Dugan, brought him on board in 1970 as an assistant coach at DeSales Catholic High School. In almost five decades of coaching, Cooper went on to coach at William Penn College in Iowa, Trenton State College, St. John Fisher College and the University of Wisconsin at Plattsville.

Among the local high schools, Cooper worked as an assistant coach are Newfane, Lockport, DeSales and right up through last season, Wilson, while battling the cancer that eventually took his life just shy of 75 years.

Taking over the Lockport Invaders semi-pro football team in the 1990s, Cooper immediately found himself face to face with Boudeman, who was coaching the Buffalo Gladiators.

“Back in 1963-64, it was old story of two guys who fought and argued, but we were friends,” Boudeman said.

“It’s one of those things where coaches are in sort of a fraternity together. You root for one another, because each one knows how much effort it takes. Seldom do you ever find any animosity between coaches. He did a nice job with the Invaders, considering so many of his good players left.

“We used to argue a lot about football, so we decided a long time ago that the last guy with the pencil won — and we used to say that to each other,” Boudeman said.

Cooper’s tutoring of Wilson senior quarterback Doug Edwards turned out to be one of his last, but most memorable coaching assignments, guiding Edwards to an outstanding season.

“The guy knew his (stuff) and he knew how to translate his knowledge of the game to a player in a way that the player could understand it,” Boudeman said.

“He was such a technician. If you talked to him about the wishbone, he’d lay out every option in the intricacy of the play.

“No one guy has all the answers. If you take things that one coach is doing, that’s cheating, but if you can take bits and pieces from different coaches, that’s sharing. He was great at that.”

        

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