 | | | Levi Cooper |
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By Garrett Rudolph
Sometimes it's funny, how things just have a way of working out the way they should.
As an eighth-grader, Levi Cooper had to make a decision between wrestling and basketball, with coaches on both sides playing tug-of war with the youngster's future.
"It was actually a tough decision for me to make, one way or the other," he said. "Which is funny, thinking about it now, but it really was."
Later, as a freshman at North Marion High School, he considered transferring to Canby, because of the opportunity he saw in playing football for a larger school. Again, the decision was difficult. He weighed his options, considered the positives and negatives of both possibilities, and in the end, decided to stay at North Marion, where so many of his family members had gone before him.
Four years later, and Cooper is a three-time district wrestling champion, two-time finalist at the state tournament, two-time heavyweight champion at the World of Wrestling tournament in Reno, Nev., and perhaps most importantly, can look back at his high school career, without any regrets.
So, when faced with another decision - whether to play football in college, or wrestle - somehow, it seemed his decision was going to be the correct one.
At some point, word had gotten around that he was more interested in playing football than he was in wrestling, although he had never actually said so himself. Schools weren't pursuing him as a wrestler, but all that changed during the state tournament at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland.
"We were at state this year, and literally 15 seconds after I got off the mat, after my quarterfinal match, Pacific (University) talked to me," he said. "Then I walked around the corner, 10 seconds later, and Southern Oregon talked to me."
Still, Cooper was leaning toward playing football, with Lewis and Clark and Linfield pursuing him the hardest, but started to reconsider things, when he was contacted by Mike Haluska at Portland State.
"Before Portland State called me, I was dead-set on going to Linfield," he said. "I was just kind of leaving my options open as to what looked like the best opportunity for me."
On April 9, Cooper officially made his decision, signing a National Letter of Intent to wrestle at Portland State University, after visiting the campus and meeting with the coaching staff.
"I'm kind of glad he made the choice to go wrestle," said North Marion wrestling coach Mike Robinson, "because everyone I've talked to thinks he's probably one of the most athletic heavyweights they've seen - more apt to fit the college style.
"He's not one of those stalling, slow-motion kind of guys. He'll actually take a good shot. As time's gone on, he's gotten more and more athletic, and for a guy that size, he's got a lot of agility, and a lot of athletic ability. He's the real deal. He has the ability to go and beat anyone in that division, in my opinion. At the college level, nobody gives up anything - you may spend an entire round trying to score a point, so hopefully, that fits Levi, because he's the kind of guy who gets himself in pretty good shape and he's persistent."
Cooper said one of the things he's most excited about, is being able to focus all his energy on one sport, whereas in the past, he has always been divided between wrestling, football, and track. At the same time, being able to play three sports for all four years of school, while still maintaining a 3.82 grade point average, is an aspect he holds as one of his proudest accomplishments.
"School really meant a lot to me," he said. "That's what I'm going to college for. I'm going to college for an education. That's probably the most important thing."
In many ways, Cooper's athletic accomplishments speak for themselves, but the praise of Robinson goes beyond the mat.
"He was one of those that led by example," said Robinson. "He was always at practice, put in the extra time outside, took some of the younger athletes under his wing, tried to help them along and make them better wrestlers. In a lot of ways he was almost like a player-coach.
"He's also very intelligent, and I think a lot of people don't understand the other side of him ... He's kind of a double-threat in that regard - he's athletic, but he's also got the academic skills."
Cooper went 39-2 during the high school season, with both of his losses coming to Bubba Owens of Tillamook, who knocked him out of the state tournament in each of the past three years - the last two times in the finals.
While Cooper came up just short of his goal of a state title two years in a row, he doesn't look at it as failing. He sees it as an experience that has helped him to learn, to grow.
"If you know what you want and you go at it 100 percent, even if you don't get there, you can't be disappointed with what you've done," he said. "I just think the higher you set your goals, even if you don't reach your goal, the better it's going to make you."
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