By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
While KC Lightfoot and Bill Payne hold school records for the indoor and outdoor pole vault, respectively, no one has his footprint on Baylor pole vaulting more than Todd Cooper.
Not only was Cooper there at the beginning of Baylor's golden era of pole vaulting, improving the outdoor school record by 2 ½ feet, winning four conference titles and earning three All-America honors, he also coached both Payne and Lightfoot.
"When I coached at Baylor (1988-91), we had seven vaulters over 17 feet and three over 18, and Bill broke the NCAA record at 19-2 ¾," said Cooper, part of the 2020 class for the Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame. "The success of me and David (Hodge) and Mike (Shafe) really brought on some good recruiting. And then, when my vault coach, Carl Erickson, left and went to the University of Texas, Coach (Clyde) Hart called me, and we had a pretty good run."
That "good run" actually started in 1981, when Hart was able to recruit a state champion and record-holder from Excelsior Springs, Mo., named Todd Cooper.
With Cooper looking at possibly going to a smaller college to do track and play basketball, his high school basketball coach put in a call to Hart at Baylor. "He actually thought I could play basketball at Baylor, but I don't think he understood the dynamics of what all it took at the Division I level with the indoor and outdoor seasons," Cooper said.
One of the obvious attractions for Cooper was the warmer weather in Texas.
"I was tired of going through cold spring track seasons in Missouri," he said. "I say that jokingly, but that was one of the attractions. My high school basketball coach is a pretty religious man, and I grew up as a pretty sound fundamentalist Baptist. So, there was a nice connection there of beliefs, Coach Hart had a great program and the warm weather."
Making an immediate impact, Cooper broke Baylor's previous school record of 16 feet "three or four times" as a freshman. He was joined by David Hodge from Illinois that year and then helped recruit a close friend, state champion Mike Shafe from Lee's Summit, Mo., the next year, forming an impressive vaulting trio that would make history.
Already a four-time Southwest Conference champion and two-time All-American, with a fifth-place finish at the 1984 NCAA Indoor Championships and third at the '85 indoor meet, Cooper capped off his collegiate career as runner-up at the 1985 NCAA Outdoor Championships with a vault of 18-3.
Baylor's vaulters provided 17 of the team's school-record 37 points at the meet, helping the Bears finish third in the team standings behind Arkansas and Washington State. With Shafe and Hodge finishing fourth and fifth, respectively, at 18-0 ½, it was the first and only time that three vaulters from the same school went over 18 feet in an NCAA Championship meet.
"My sophomore year, things really took off," said Cooper, who was ranked No. 1 outdoors (18-5) and No. 2 indoors (17-8) when he finished at Baylor. "We actually got some pole-vaulting poles, a decent pole-vaulting pit and found a pole-vaulting coach (Erickson). And the rest was history."
Sponsored by Nike and part of the Athletes in Action team, Cooper continued to compete at professional meets in Europe until "I had a few injuries and life kind of gets in the way," he said.
An experience at the 1988 Olympic Trials in Tampa, Fla., left Cooper "pretty sour," a feeling that still sticks with him today, 32 years later. After using a full runway in the prelims, a hurdle was put up during the running of the women's 10,000 meters that shortened the runway.
Cooper finished second at the USA Outdoor Championships that year, but Kory Tarpenning, Earl Bell and Billy Olson earned the spots on the USA team at the Olympic Trials in Indianapolis and competed at the Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
"I was the only one affected," Cooper said of the shorter runway. "That left me pretty sour with some officials. So, I decided I'd had enough. It was something out of my control."
Transitioning to coaching, he worked with the Baylor pole vaulters for three years and helped Payne break the collegiate outdoor record with a vault of 19-2 ¾ that still stands as the school mark. Payne was inducted into the Baylor Hall of Fame in 2017.
Transitioning to coaching, Cooper had a successful three-year run as the athletic director and head football, basketball and track coach at Oglesby High School, helping the Eagles win their first and only district championships ever in track.
"We took a road grader and made a 300-meter track, got a pole-vault pit from (former Olympic champion) Bob Richards and some hurdles, and we went to town," he said.
From there, he returned to his hometown to coach the boys' basketball team at Excelsior Springs in 1995.
"It was odd," he said of being back at his alma mater. "They say you can never go back home, but we had a lot of success in basketball there for a few years, and it got to be a little bit of a grind for me."
Although he stayed in coaching and teaching at Excelsior Springs until 2009, Cooper opened the Just Vault program in 1999 when he "found a good deal on an Army surplus Quonset hut."
"I kind of took a leap of, 'if you build it, they might come,'" he said. "It got so busy that I quit teaching in 2009, and I've just been running my training facility for the last 11 years."
Todd and his wife, Anna, have a daughter, Hannah Cooper Sedgwick, who set the Missouri state record of 13-3 as a senior in 2008 and now coaches with her dad at Just Vault.
Inducted into the Missouri Track and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2012, Cooper coached seven state champions and six state runners-up at Excelsior and has worked with more than 200 all-state vaulters and 25 individual state champions at Just Vault.
That group includes Lightfoot, a three-time All-American at Baylor who broke the school indoor record as a freshman. He was ranked No. 2 in the nation with a mark of 19-1 ½ going into this year's NCAA Indoor Championships that were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
"He came to me the summer after his seventh-grade year and wanted to learn how to pole vault," Cooper said of Lightfoot, a two-time state champion at Lee's Summit, Mo. "I did a private lesson with him and spent a little extra time, and I repeatedly asked his dad, 'Are you sure he's never pole vaulted before?' I think he jumped 9 or 10 feet in the first hour and a half that he picked up a pole. That's not normal."
Cooper actually picked it up at about the same age, his interest piqued while watching the 1976 Olympics decathlon competition.
"I told my dad, 'Gosh, I really want to do that,''' he said. "My dad said, 'Well, OK, I can show you how. I used to pole vault.' I had no idea. Long story short, my dad (Gary Cooper) had the high school record I broke and then jumped at the University of Kansas for two years. So, Dad basically taught me how to jump on a metal pole because that's all he knew. He jumped on steel poles and landed in sand pits. We didn't really know what we were doing, but we were doing it."
That started a journey that earned Cooper a spot in the 2020 Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame with football's Brad Goebel, Andrew Melontree and Jason Smith, volleyball's Anna Breyfogle, All-American tennis players Lars Poerschke and Lenka Broosova and three-time softball All-American Brette Reagan.
"I'm humbled, because I was around Baylor Athletics for a long time and I know of all the great athletes that have come out of that university," he said. "So, it's a huge honor."
Due to COVID-19, arrangements for the Baylor Athletics Hall of Fame banquet are still pending.
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