A place can come to define a person, particularly if his formative years there were so often spent without heat, eating mayonnaise sandwiches because there was no meat and cornflakes with water because there was no milk. Ed Cooley put aside those circumstances to become Rhode Island’s high school basketball player of the year and later the state’s most recognizable face. Eventually, he was presented the key to the city of Providence. All he had to do was stay at Providence College, where his home arena was a mile from his childhood stomping grounds, and his statue would have joined those of Friars legends Joe Mullaney and Dave Gavitt outside the school’s $30 million practice facility.
The place can seem perfect, inseparable from who the person is. It can also be suffocating.
“I was raised by a community,” Cooley said, sitting in the John R. Thompson Jr. Intercollegiate Athletic Center, where he walks past the statue not of Mullaney or Gavitt but of Thompson — because he is the men’s basketball coach not at Providence but at Georgetown.
“That’s why there’s so much anger, vileness, quote-unquote ‘betrayal’ in me coming to Georgetown,” he said. “I was raised by that community. But it was time for a life change that people just didn’t know. Nor did I want to expose.
“Like, enough. I’d had enough. I’ve done it. I’ve lived here my whole life. I needed something different for my own soul.”
From a Georgetown perspective, the most significant aspect of Cooley’s first season as the Hoyas’ coach — in which the Hoyas (5-3) host Syracuse on Saturday — is that he walks past Thompson’s statue and works in a building named for Thompson but isn’t beholden to the Thompson legacy. Think about what a break that is for that school. Big John took over his hometown program in 1972. In the years since, the Hoyas employed his top assistant (Craig Esherick), his son (John Thompson III) and arguably his most iconic player (Patrick Ewing). That’s a half century of a single man’s influence, which means Cooley takes this job on a tightrope — which he’s only too glad to walk.
“It’s easy,” he said. “Respect tradition. Respect legacy. But this s--- is different. I’m doing it my way.”
It all goes back to Providence, where his way was formed. His mother had the first of her nine children when she was 15. Ed was the seventh. He does not share a father with any of his siblings. At 54, he has far more empathy for Jane Cooley’s circumstances than he did a decade ago, a generation ago. “I never gave her grace on that,” he said, “and it’s something that I’m very mindful of now.”
“He is humble, and has a spirituality, based on the hardships of poverty, of life,” said Harold Metts, his high school basketball coach. “His economic conditions shaped him but in a positive way.”
There were realities, and they were harsh. Ed Cooley makes millions of dollars annually and is entrusted with restoring glory to what was once one of college basketball’s legacy brands. The odds of that happening when he could have coached forever at Providence seemed long. The odds of that happening when he was growing up did not exist.
“The fact that I’m still here and the fact that I’m alive, the fact that I went to college or graduated from high school or …” he trailed off. “I mean, the littlest of little things could have derailed that when you were raised the way we were raised in our community, in our home. Honestly, brother, it’s a f------ miracle.”
‘Sports saved me’
Ideally, a kid grows up learning how to treat people, how to act, what to do. The streets of South Providence taught Cooley what not to do.
“I didn’t like how people treated children,” he said. “I didn’t like how some of my relatives treated women. That shaped me. Whether it was drugs, gambling, sex, alcohol. It’s real life. But it told me: ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do that.’ ”
Cooley didn’t meet his biological father until he was 11 or 12 and only then when his oldest sister walked him into a bar. The man sitting on a stool with two drinks in front of him was his spitting image. Cooley said he became fast friends with Ed Smith, his father. But he also had no choice but to let a community raise him. The alternative was disaster.
Cooley learned the meal schedules of different families in the neighborhood so he would know when to show up and get fed. By middle school, he was living mostly with the Searights, a family around the corner where he shared a bedroom and a bed with two of the family’s four boys.
“He always had the smile, the charm, the wit and all that,” said Eddie Searight Jr., a year older than Cooley, a bedmate back then and a friend to this day. “That helped. Where we grew up, it was a tough neighborhood. But we had sports, so it was a little different. When you’re playing sports, you kind of get away from all the stuff that goes on in the neighborhood.”
It is the thread that held him together, that kept him on the path. “Sports saved me,” Cooley said. He wasn’t particularly quick or athletic, but he grew to be 6-foot-4. He could shoot. He could work. And he could think.
“The one thing I admired about him the most was his work ethic, even at 11, 12 years old,” Searight said. “If he wanted to get better at something, he would practice it to no end. He used his brain, his knowledge of the game, to really beat people, and he worked and worked and worked.”
At Central High, Cooley was a leader of a class who grew together under Metts. In those days, when Georgetown would visit Providence College, John Thompson Jr. would use Central’s gym for the Hoyas to practice. Metts and his assistants were allowed to watch the sessions. No one else was.
“We’d keep the door chained shut,” Metts said. “You know who would crack the door and put his big head through so he could peek in and see what they were doing?”
That would be Cooley, who figured he stole the Georgetown Starter jacket he wore because he couldn’t afford one of his own, who saved for months to buy the Hoya Nikes when they came out. In his junior and senior years, he helped Central to the state championship. As a senior, he was named the Rhode Island player of the year. But his game wasn’t good enough to attract Division I offers, and his SAT scores weren’t good enough to get into most colleges. He needed a year of prep school. The problem: He couldn’t pay for it.
So Metts and others drove him around New England, asking for help. His basic plea: “I need this more than you know.” The answer, invariably: Sorry. Until he scraped some savings and donations and gifts — maybe $5,200 — and returned to the New Hampton School in New Hampshire. Cooley remembers the cost to attend as $12,000, $14,000, something like that. Somehow, he worked his way past the gatekeeper and into the headmaster’s office.
“I said, ‘If you let me in, I will do the dishes,’ ” Cooley said. “ ‘I’ll get up in the mornings. I’ll rake the leaves. I’ll shovel the snow.’ ”
The school admitted him. He did the dishes. He got up in the mornings. He raked the leaves. He shoveled the snow. He played basketball and furthered his education.
‘I was born to lead’
When Cooley speaks in public now, he invariably covers the same themes: the importance of food for kids, the idea that it’s okay to be different — and issues around race. Inner-city Providence was almost all Black and Latino. When Cooley arrived at Stonehill College in southeastern Massachusetts to play Division II basketball, he stood out.
“I felt like I didn’t belong,” Cooley said. “You leave an inner-city community that was mostly you, and now you walk into an environment where I was a raisin in a milk bowl.”
Still, if Providence formed him, Stonehill freed him. He was a three-year captain in basketball, but a back injury — and surgery — limited him as a player. He found no limits socially. There were very few Black kids at Stonehill. Cooley took a difference and made it an advantage. When Ed Cooley walked into a room, you knew he was there.
“It’s a testament to his ability to connect with just about anybody from any background in any circumstance,” said Pete Boyle, a freshman hallmate who became a senior housemate and is another lifelong friend. “ … He had a different background from almost any other student on that campus, but he flourished. Basketball afforded him these opportunities to go to the school, and he took advantage of every bit that Stonehill had to offer.”
Part of that was education, of course, and Cooley turned that into a job teaching history at a nearby high school. But part of it was relationships, too. One of Cooley’s teammates at Stonehill, Steve McCracken, graduated a year before Cooley. Before he moved to Florida to begin a career, he received a two-page, handwritten note from Cooley thanking him for the memories and giving him best wishes for the future.
“That always kind of stuck with me,” McCracken said. “It just speaks volumes to who he is.”
When Cooley began teaching after college, he thought of it as a path to becoming a superintendent. “I was born to lead,” he said. “I don’t know why, and I don’t know where it comes from.” But even as a first-year teacher, he took a job as a part-time assistant coach at nearby Massachusetts Dartmouth. The pay: $72 a month. In the fall of 1995, when the assistant coach who recruited him to Stonehill took over the head job, Cooley returned to his alma mater. From there, Al Skinner, the coach at the University of Rhode Island, took note of the kid he first saw at Central High.
“I wanted to give him a chance, an opportunity,” Skinner said. “As time went on, it was clear he was committed to becoming as good a coach as he could become. He put in the work. He put in the time. And he could recruit.”
Skinner hired Cooley as a restricted-earnings coach — $12,000 a year. By then, he had proposed to his future wife, Nurys Jimenez, a Providence police officer. The couple were used to $10 dates — a couple of nips (New England-ese for airplane bottles of liquor), a hoagie cut in half, and either hopping the fence to watch a high school football game in Cranston or taking in the 99-cent movie theater in Smithfield, R.I. But that wasn’t sustainable.
“She says, ‘Two years,’” Cooley remembered. “We can’t raise a family on $12,000.”
The next year, Skinner got the job at Boston College. He brought Cooley with him. His new salary: $35,000.
“We were rolling in it,” he said.
A new time in D.C.
Here is Ed Cooley in one breath.
“Doubt drives me, man,” he said. “Like, it drives the f--- out of me.”
And here is Ed Cooley, in another breath.
“We will win here, bro,” he said. “With me, it’s not if. It’s when.”
There are contradictions within, it would seem. Cooley categorizes them this way: His upbringing taught him that people will doubt you at every turn, and it’s your job to prove them wrong. In competition, he exudes confidence. He knows he can recruit. He knows he can build a staff. He knows he can coach. He has a brand at Georgetown that has been devalued — the Hoyas went 13-50 in Ewing’s last two seasons — but that he feels built to restore.
“I’ll be damned if I took this job and left home to not have even greater success,” he said.
Cooley’s first head coaching job was at Fairfield, where he led the Stags to back-to-back 20-win seasons for the first time in school history. That success led Bob Driscoll, the longtime Providence athletic director, to remember the young coach who used to swing by his office, yearning for knowledge.
“He had such passion and energy and wanted to learn,” Driscoll said. “He wanted to pick my brain about what athletic directors look for when they hire a coach. So when I was making a hire, he was the first guy I thought about.”
This was easy, right? Cooley immediately called Providence his “dream job,” and he was telling the truth. He oozed enthusiasm for the school, a Big East rival of Georgetown. His mantra — “Us. We. Together. Family. Friars.” — was printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
Through it all, though, was an unseen reality: Working at home, coaching a mile from a complicated past, can be fraught.
“When he first told me he was going to take the job at PC, my first question was, ‘Are you sure?’ ” said Searight, the childhood friend whose family helped raise Cooley and who also happens to be a Providence alum. “I grew up here. I grew up knowing what people are like when a hometown kid has success. I knew: It’s going to be tough.”
On the court, it was a success — though the degree can be debatable. In the 33 seasons before he arrived, the Friars reached the NCAA tournament seven times. In Cooley’s 12 seasons, he made seven trips to the tourney — and would have had an eighth had the 2020 season not been truncated because of the pandemic. His critics — and they have grown since his departure — would point out that in all those dances, he reached the Sweet 16 only once. Put that trip aside, and Cooley’s Friars went 1-6 in the NCAAs.
“It definitely is my dream job to be there,” Cooley said. “And I did it. Higher, better than anybody in the history of that school. If people just knew what I did behind the scenes as far as admissions, and we donated a couple of million dollars. What coach does that?
“And then, I mean, leaves?”
That’s where Cooley finds himself for the moment, as much defined by where he was as where he is. He knows why he’s in Washington and not Rhode Island. He knows that his daughter, Olivia, graduated from Georgetown and is building a life in the District. He knows how much having the elder Thompson as a role model — as one of the few Black coaches in the game at the time — helped shape him. He knows that Providence is the place he grew up, the place he became known statewide. It’s not who he is.
“I’ll always, always take the high road out,” Cooley said. “I’ll never be rude, disrespectful. People have their emotions, and I respect that. But it’s, it’s … ”
He sighed.
“It’s just a new time,” Cooley said. “It’s time to move forward.”
