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Rick Cooper

Cooper traveled more than halfway across the country to play basketball at Wayland Baptist in Plainview as a college sophomore in the late 1970s.  By the time his playing and coaching career was finished more than 30 years later, Cooper, a native of Bridgeport, West Virginia, became the all-time winningest coach at both Wayland Baptist and West Texas A&M.

As a 6-foot-5 forward at Wayland, Cooper averaged 13.4 points and 5.3 rebounds over his career, and his 1,209 points were 14th all-time for the Pioneers when he graduated in 1981.

Cooper entered coaching. After one year at Idalou High School, he joined the Wayland staff as an assistant coach under Ron Mayberry. After six years as an assistant, five of them under head coach Mark Adams, Cooper was named Wayland’s head coach in 1987. In six seasons with the Pioneers, he kept a good thing going that began under Adams. His teams averaged 25 wins a year, and he was Wayland’s all-time winningest coach with 152 wins.

In 1993, he went 60 miles north to Canyon as head coach at WT. Over the next 20 years, Cooper’s teams would total a record of 394-145, again setting a school record for most wins by a men’s basketball coach. His teams won four Lone Star Conference titles, went to the NCAA Division II tournament eight times, and one appearance in the Elite Eight national tournament. He was named LSC coach of the year six times.

After the 2013 season, Cooper, already in the Wayland Hall of Honor, became athletic director at Wayland where he was named Sooner Conference athletic director of the year in 2018. In 2021, he was reunited with Adams as basketball chief of staff at Texas Tech, a position he held for two years until retiring three months ago. Living in Canyon, he and wife Janie have two adult children and five grandchildren.