Tim Sullivan has gotten it right, now it’s time for Cooper to do the same

By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter

Plenty of time.

Plenty of time with the extra week off for the folks at Cooper High School, and the Boone County Schools, to get their act together and get this right.

Right now.

“Sully, Sully, Sully, Sully, Sully,” the Cooper students chanted as the clock wound down.

Basketball coach Tim Sullivan, as he’s done since he walked into the new Cooper building the day they opened the doors in 2008, has done his part. And just keeps doing it as he will surely do all the way through next Thursday night at 8:30 at Rupp Arena where the Ninth Region champion Jaguars will be holding court in the Sweet 16 against Second Region champ Henderson County.

Talk about grace under fire. What an example for his Jaguar players, the Union community, the Cooper students, all of Northern Kentucky, on how to handle things with – as his top guy Andy Johnson will tell you the one word that sustains them – “resilience.”

“It’s the biggest thing in life – resilience,” said Ninth Region MVP Johnson after Cooper had brushed off a Lloyd Memorial team not quite ready for this moment, 53-38, Tuesday at NKU’s Truist Arena. That’s a lesson he’s learned from a man who’s lived it these last nearly two months since he was told – the day before the Covington Catholic game by his principal – that he and his staff of three Cooper alums among four assistants — would not be back.

So, Sully & Co. have just gone out and made the most of right now, winning 16 of their last 17 as a clear statement that the youngest of Boone County’s four high schools and the smaller school in Union has become Northern Kentucky’s top boys’ basketball program.

SULLY, SULLY, SULLY, SULLY, SULLY.

That’s the one word across the front of the tee-shirts that one in every three of the several thousand Copper fans were wearing on this night and could be read from across the court.

It took Tim Sullivan and his Jaguar program just nine years to get to the Sweet 16 championship game for the first time in 2017. It took Holy Cross and CovCath more than three decades to get there. It took Covington Holmes six decades to make it that far. Highlands? How about 77 years.

So here we are, for the third straight year in the Ninth Region championship game, watching Tim Sullivan and his guys playing so well and having so much fun. They do the right things, make the right plays, take the right shots, do everything in their man-to-man defense they’re asked to do as they anticipate and trust one another. Just the way well-coached teams in the special programs do when they jump out, 12-0, and basically end this one in the first 4 ½ minutes.

Which is exactly the kind of talk Tim Sullivan wants to hear. “Make this about my team, not about me,” he pleads, pointing to how “six-foot-1 Jaiden Combs took on” Lloyd Memorial’s South Carolina-bound EJ Walker – all 6-foot-8 and 225 pounds – and held him to seven points.

“This is so much fun,” a smiling, grinning, hugging, hand-shaking and back-slapping Sullivan winked to a well-wisher on the bench after the game, “this is a special group. We’re together, man, it’s powerful.”

And then the man they called Sully waved to the cheerleaders to come down onto the court and be part of a second winning team photo. They’re part of this, too.

“I understand there’s a lot of noise around our program now,” Sullivan said in a master understatement. But the noise that made him smile was from all the support on this night when he had “thirty of my blood family here and they get to hear that.”

The Jaguars’ shooting shirts had a single word on the back: FAMILY.

“We are,” Johnson said. Especially on this night, the Sullivan family, with a big hug from his wife and most fervent fan and defender, Andrea, the Scott High School volleyball coach, and his sophomore son, Elijah, who scored the game’s final basket.

So now what? “We’re going to celebrate,” are Sully’s first words. “We’ve got a full week.” And the trust is there between coach and players and the players among themselves to know they’ll be able to handle it the way they did this last full week since the semifinal game.

But not to fear the Jags, who have been seriously under-ranked in the state all season, will get this wrong. Maybe another time, when he was younger, Sullivan says. But now, the motivation does not come in reacting to outside things. “It’s not about others, it’s about us,” he says.
 
And even if the principal and Tim Sullivan have not talked since that day in January, he has, he said, talked to the new Boone County Schools superintendent. No decisions made yet, but now there’s time.

Which is where something has to happen. Sure, maybe there was a bit of a dustup last year with Yamil Rondon ending up transferring to Newport after a family banishment, but no way that should be any part of a decision that could cost the entire Cooper community as important an asset – teacher, coach, example and a piece of living history here – who has developed a special Cooper culture through the years.

The welcome back from the Cooper players for Yamil, as he was named All-Tournament, was warm and welcoming. “I talk to him every day,” Johnson says.

Instead of interceding with the Cooper administration to reverse its self-defeating January decision, the call should be to Tim Sullivan to please stay – as he’s made clear he wants to do for his entire career – and keep doing what it is he does so well that every school needs.

Then as a final note, Sullivan said this: “We’ve got a pretty good culture here. It’s not about getting mad or holding grudges. We don’t hate anybody.”

Let the Cooper students have the final word on this, as the buzzer sounded, with the hope that the folks who run the Boone County Schools were listening to everything that happened here.

“We love Sully,” the students screamed. And with good reason.

Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.