At 5-foot-7 and slight, young Adam Cooper was never the kind of kid people would watch out on the soccer field, nod, and think, “One of these days, he’ll be a pro.”
At 5-foot-7 and a little less slight, the current incarnation of Adam Cooper doesn’t look like the head coach of a Division I college soccer program. Or a former pro, which he is.
Cooper was tapped this month to head the U.S. Maccabi team’s junior boys squad, which will compete in Argentina in December. And it’s a pretty safe bet he’s the first Maccabi coach plucked from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, where he heads the men’s soccer team (though Cooper notes that he’s not the only Jewish coach on the Catholic school’s campus).
Fielding a soccer team of 14- and 15-year-olds to take on the world in the world’s game — in Argentina, no less, which has produced a few halfway decent soccer players — will be a challenge. But that’s OK. Cooper likes challenges.
“Soccer is pretty much the most popular sport in the world and going to a place like Argentina, where soccer is everything, I’m sure it’s going to be very competitive,” he said.
What’s more, while there’s a formal tryout process for the Maccabi games in Israel, there’s no such process for the Maccabi Pan-American games.
When asked what sort of recruitment process there was for top teenaged Jewish soccer talent, Cooper noted, “There isn’t one so to speak. A lot of it is just word of mouth. Kids apply online, I check their references and I talk to clubs, JCCs and [United Synagogue Youth] soccer.”
Cooper could use the younger version of himself. As a boy, he played in the 1992 and 1994 JCC Maccabi games in Baltimore and Cleveland and starred at Calabasas High School in Southern California before attending UCLA and playing four years as a starting defender in their program, a perennial contender that won the national championship in 1997, his junior year.
He stayed close to home out of college, playing for an Orange County squad in a United States developmental league. But his team’s owner went bankrupt after the season and suddenly Cooper was out of a job.
Serendipitously, a former UCLA assistant coach who had taken over Saint Mary’s top spot gave him a call right about then and shortly thereafter he was a Gaels assistant.
“You can only play so long, but you can coach forever,” he said.
“This was a Division I program in one of the best conferences in the country and I’d live in a great area.”
During his competitive days as a starter at UCLA and later as a pro, Cooper was often the only Jew on the field. But, he stresses he never thought of himself as a “Jewish player,” and points out that Major League Soccer star Jonathan Bornstein, who recently suited up for the U.S. National Team, is also a Jew who played at UCLA — so he wasn’t exactly a spectacle.
As a senior in college, Cooper coached at his former high school and he was also an assistant on the L.A.-area Maccabi squads that won six consecutive gold medals.
And to those young Jewish players, his status as a starter at UCLA — well, they noticed that.
“In terms of being Jewish, when I was helping with those JCC teams [in high school] and especially when I was older at UCLA, these were 13-, 14-year-old kids and they definitely looked up to you,” he recalls.
And if he manages to unearth a few tough kids, who knows? Maybe he can shock the Argentineans.
He’s looking for “someone who’s a tremendous worker and very competitive. There are all different types of players with all types of sizes and athletic abilities. And character means a lot,” he said.
“I want guys who want to win.”