Jason Cooper got into coaching at nineteen because a principal needed someone immediately, and Jason said sure. That was twenty-seven years ago. He has never really stopped.

Girls' basketball was first at Gillespie Middle School. Then, boys’ basketball, soccer, track and field, football, baseball, softball — across Gillespie, Mount Olive, Litchfield and Pawnee school districts. Today, he coaches his twelve-year-old daughter's travel softball team and his ten-year-old daughter's recreational team, which means on any given weekend, he is either at a tournament an hour from home or at a local park with kids who are just learning to throw. Two years ago, for the first time, he coached the granddaughter of a girl he went to high school with, she is back on his team this year. Twenty-seven years in, the circle is already starting to close back on itself.

He grew up in Benld, graduated from Gillespie High School, rode bikes to 6:30 a.m. weightlifting sessions as a freshman and sophomore because that was how you got better. He had a football offer coming out of high school and turned it down. The sports had already done what they were going to do for him. He understood that by then.

What he has spent the last twenty-seven years trying to communicate to young athletes is simpler than any playbook: "It's trying to teach those kids what sports can do for you. Not just the X's and O's, but what it's going to do to you in the future." Just because school ends at 3:00 doesn't mean the day ends. The work continues. That lesson transfers to everything that comes after.

A friend, who attended the same college as Jason and later stood by Jason’s side in his wedding — someone he later coached basketball alongside for eleven years, who still coaches in Litchfield today — had a phrase for it: be better than Litchfield. Not a knock on the town. A question. If someone moved in tomorrow and wanted your starting spot, could you hold it? Could you compete beyond the county line? The phrase stuck. When Jason stepped away from education in 2017 — he'd been a teacher's aide, then a half-semester history teacher, then a school librarian watching the stacks slowly empty as the internet replaced them — he took it with him. He joined a pest control company as a technician. He's been promoted twice. On June 1st, he starts as a general manager at Pointe Pest Control.

His wife is from Litchfield. They chose to plant themselves here deliberately, as a family. That investment is part of why he raised his hand when the Community Planning Committee formed.

Growing up wearing orange and black as a Gillespie Miner, school pride was the air he breathed. He noticed early on that Litchfield's identity sat a little quieter than that — not absent, but not as loudly worn. What he saw in the planning process convinced him it's turning the corner. "It was really nice to say that my voice mattered in this situation," he said. And that was before he watched the students in the room.

Kids who had come in with the tentative energy of people who weren't sure they belonged left understanding that they did. "It was neat to actually see them be involved, and seeing their eyes light up and seeing that their voice does matter." For a coach who has spent nearly three decades trying to convince young people their effort is worth something, watching that register in a community meeting was its own kind of win.

What he noticed about Superintendent Kelly was the same thing good coaches know how to do: she walked the room, listened, and didn't push her own agenda. She was collecting. "She let it go," Jason said. "And that was nice."

If the work gets carried forward — if the vision statement becomes action — he believes the result is straightforward: "It could even turn a better district into the best district."

He's been coaching long enough to know that it usually starts with someone willing to show up before everyone else.