New addition Hunkie Cooper doing a little bit of everything for UNLV football

By Mike Grimala (contact)

Saturday, Aug. 26, 2023 | 2 a.m.

When the UNLV football team is practicing, it doesn’t take long to identify the most energetic person on the field.

It’s not one of the players — it’s 54-year old Hunkie Cooper, a former receiver and all-purpose star at UNLV who returned to the program this offseason after spending eight years as an assistant coach at San Diego State.

Cooper makes it a point to match his players’ intensity, on and off the field.

“If I ever look like I can’t play, I won’t coach,” Cooper says.

His energy is easy to spot, but it takes a little more scrutiny to nail down exactly what Cooper’s job entails.

In his current role as director of player development, Cooper covers every inch of the practice field. He shouts encouragement to players, dashes in and out of the Fertitta Football Complex, and personally greets just about every visitor. It’s a wide-ranging job, and one that was created especially for him.

Cooper may be a made man in Las Vegas — in addition to his heroics for UNLV, he also served as head coach at Canyon Springs from 2009 to 2015 and is a 2019 inductee into the Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame — but he was unknown to new head coach Barry Odom when he took over the program in December.

After leaving San Diego State, Cooper was in town for a coaching convention in February and set a meeting with Odom, just to make an introduction. What was supposed to be a short meet-and-greet turned into a four-hour mind meld, and Odom left convinced that Cooper had to be part of his staff.

Odom had already filled all the openings for assistant coaches, so he fashioned the director of player development title and gave it to Cooper.

According to Odom, that just might have been the smartest move he’s made since taking over.

“I know that I can give him a number of responsibilities and I don’t have to worry one more time about whether they’re going to get done or not,” Odom says. “He’s the best of the best. Uncontested, undenied, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. He’s awesome.”

Cooper is a football lifer. After graduating from UNLV in 1991, he became one of the Arena Football League’s greatest players and won two Arena Bowls with the Arizona Rattlers. He joined San Diego State in 2015 as the Aztecs’ wide receivers coach; by the time he left the program he was also an associate head coach.

At UNLV, Cooper describes his first priority as connecting with people in order to help them reach their potential on game days.

“My gift is, I can reach hard-to-reach young men. To create a development role at UNLV, that’s what it is. Football is all about development. We know they can run fast and jump high and they’re physical, but to teach them how to compartmentalize that, to teach them how to be a man first, that’s what I want to do.

“And that’s not just football players,” Cooper continues. “It’s young coaches. It’s young graduate assistants. It’s to give coach Odom a new set of eyes and a new perspective. It’s not to be a yes man. Not to tell him what he wants to hear, but tell him what’s effective, what’s efficient.”

Cooper also serves in an advisory role to Odom and the rest of the staff. With his local connections, Cooper has helped spearhead UNLV’s renewed efforts to recruit the Las Vegas high-school talent pool.

The way to do that, he believes, is to make UNLV a destination for blue-chip athletes, not a safety school.

“I’ve been in this conference for almost 10 years and had success every year,” he says. “And a lot of it was local talent. So we identified that we have to keep the local talent local. We’ve done a good job of getting five guys committed in the ’24 class. That was the first thing. The second thing is not just saying we’re going to recruit Las Vegas, but actually doing it. The head coach has been in every high school here.”

It's not just young players that Cooper is after — it’s also the old guard. He is in charge of outreach to former lettermen, and he has been hard at work tapping into his network of UNLV alums, trying to bring them back into the program.

It’s not an easy task, but Cooper believes he can win back their allegiance by making them feel invested in the Scarlet and Gray again.

“Those guys want to be involved,” Cooper says. “All they want is access. I don’t think they feel with the last regime they had access. So we want everybody to be a part of it. This is Las Vegas’ team.”

As part of that push, UNLV is offering all former players four free tickets to the opening game of the season, against Bryant on Sept. 2 at Allegiant Stadium.

Clearly, Cooper has a lot of spinning plates. That’s because Odom implicitly trusts him to take care of business, whether he’s being asked to motivate players, coordinate with the coaching staff, act as the program’s liaison to NFL personnel or some other as-of-yet-unassigned duty.

Odom says Cooper has had job offers from other programs since being hired at UNLV, but he has chosen to stay and be part of the rebuilding process at his alma mater.

“He’s like the mayor of the city,” Odom says. “You can’t go anywhere or talk to anyone without somebody saying, ‘Hey, how’s Hunkie doing?’ It’s unbelievable. The guy is as good of a person as I’ve ever been around. He’s sincere. This place is special and means so much to him. Since he’s been here, he’s had a number of job opportunities to leave, and it means a lot to me that his word means something. He said, ‘I want to stay here. We’re doing this together.’ That is hard to find in today’s world. He’s like family.”

Cooper makes it very clear, he’s at UNLV to win. He’s going to do everything he can — and expend his unlimited energy — to accomplish that goal.

“I want to do it at this school,” Cooper says. “I met my wife here. My daughter works for the Nevada legislature. My other daughter is a nurse at Sunrise Hospital. I’m a part of this community. Winning here would be the ultimate for me. To be back and be a part of my university, my alma mater, I’m going to do everything I can to make it the winner it should be.”

Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.