DEFIANCE – With a prominent area coach on last year’s football coaching staff and already a teacher in the high school, the news of Travis Cooper taking over at Defiance High School comes as little surprise.
His hire is pending board approval later today.
Cooper, a 1998 Fairview graduate, replaces Kevin Kline, who stepped away from the program last month and was named the head coach at Marion Pleasant earlier this week.
The Defiance job has been a dream of Cooper’s.
“This is the job I’ve wanted since I started coaching,” said Cooper, who teaches high school science at Defiance. “Although we’ve had some lean years lately, I’m super pumped.”
He was in the running for the Defiance job in 2017 when Kline took over the program.
Cooper stated he had other possible head coaching opportunities the last couple years.
“I didn’t want to jump into a job for the sake of jumping into a job,” said Cooper. “I didn’t see anything locally that peaked my interest that I wanted to take over, because I wanted to be all in on it.”