New LIU football coach Ron Cooper embracing challenge

Ron Cooper’s long road to Brookville began in the same place as a lot of other college football success stories — South Bend, Indiana.

It was there that Cooper met Dr. William E. Martinov Jr., then a recent college graduate looking for a job. While supervising move-in day at a Notre Dame football camp, the two struck up a friendship that resulted in Cooper offering Martinov a grad assistant football coaching position at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee.

Fast-forward 36 years later and Martinov, now the athletic director at Long Island University, hired Cooper to lead the school’s football program, one that’s still in the infancy of its Division I transition.

"Ron and a few other close friends have always been helpful to me," Martinov said. "When it looked like a time for us to look for a new head coach, Ron was on a very, very short list — at the top of a short list."

Cooper, who was last a full-time head coach in 2001 and has been on the staff of some of the best programs in the country (Alabama, LSU and Notre Dame, to name three), wanted one more run as a head football coach.

When a call from his old friend Martinov came through, he was excited about the challenge. It was a perfect match.

"To be truthful, that's probably why I'm here," Cooper, 59, said. "I don't know if I would have just talked to anybody."

Cooper was named head football coach at LIU on Jan. 4. Cooper has been a head coach at Eastern Michigan (1993-94), Louisville (1995-97), and Alabama A&M (1998-2001) and was the interim head coach at Florida International for the final eight games of the 2016 season. Last season, he was a senior analyst on Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama — a role he held through the national championship game.

As soon as the final credits rolled on Alabama’s season — they lost to Georgia, 33-18, on Jan. 10 — Cooper could fully devote himself to building up a LIU program that went 2-8 last season, only their second full turn in Division I.

"We know it’s a challenge and, at this time in my career, I think I needed a new challenge," Cooper said.

"There's definitely a commitment made by the administration, the president [Kimberly Cline] and everybody involved in wanting to have a big-time Division I program."

"The challenge we have here and what I really love is, ‘How can we build something special that has never been done here?' " Cooper said. "How can we help our football players and this university and the people who were involved be proud of it? It's a challenge, but it's something that can definitely happen and it will happen."

Although LIU (previously C.W. Post) had a history of Division II success, it is very much in the program-building stage of itst Division I history. It went 0-10 in 2019, its Division I debut.

"They played a schedule this past year when they played three Division I-A programs, [Florida International], Miami of Ohio and West Virginia," Cooper said. "How do you build it up? You’ve got to play teams like that, which will help you recruit, which will help the guys say ‘We're getting a chance to play a Division I schedule right now.’ "

Cooper said he plans to recruit wherever he can get good players and is excited to learn about the Long Island high school football scene.

"I'm excited to go and visit the high school coaches," Cooper said. "We're excited to have camps and clinics . . . Just trying to talk football and finding that special kid. Football players come from all different places, all different shapes and sizes, and every location around. But. trying to find that special player that fits us, that’s going to make us do something real good here."

"It’s in a great area, great location for recruiting," Cooper said. "We've just got to work our tails off to make sure we're doing the right thing to put our players in the best position to be successful and go out to recruit and try to build this thing the right way."

Football has changed a lot since the last time Cooper had control of a program without an "interim" tag attached. While many of his assistant coaching roles have come on the defensive side of the ball, including as defensive backs coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2012, Cooper knows the value of offense — and a lot of it.

"The bottom line is you have to be able to score points on offense," he said. "The game has changed where you're not going to win 10-7 or 17-14. You have to score points. You have to get players that are explosive, that can make plays. You got to figure out how to get the ball in their hands."

"We’re going to find the best players that can play to fit our university, fit our football team, and fit our philosophy," Cooper said. "If they come from two miles away or if they come from 200 miles, or 2,000 miles away, we're going to recruit those players that fit our needs and help us be successful."