Cooper family heading to Tampa as well

Now that it's confirmed Jon Cooper is moving to Florida to become head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning, the 45-year-old native of Prince George now has a big-league audience tuned into his every move.

And if they haven't done so already, his parents in Prince George, Bob and Christine Cooper, will be ordering the NHL TV package so they won't miss any of the Lightning's 15 remaining games this season.

"It is pretty exciting, I guess we did a good job with him," said Bob, who just returned from Newfoundland, where he saw Jon coach the American Hockey League-leading Syracuse Crunch to a pair of wins over the St. John's IceCaps.

"It really is unbelievable," said Christine. "The timing is kind of lousy because Jon's team was doing so well in Syracuse, but I think [the Lightning] thought if they don't make the move now he'd go some place else [in the NHL]."

Christine and Bob and their younger son Christopher, an oil executive in Calgary, will be traveling to Tampa on Thursday so they can be in St. Pete Times Forum Friday night to see Jon make his NHL debut on the Lightning bench when they face the New Jersey Devils.

"I wasn't going to go back, but he said you'd better get back, it's the first game," said Bob, who established R.J. Cooper Construction in Prince George the year Jon was born, nearly 46 years ago. "What I like about it is wherever he goes he says he's from Prince George, British Columbia."

Jon is Prince George's first-ever NHL head coach and Christine says her son is proud of his birthplace and is always quick to dispel some of the misconceptions attached to his hometown.

"Prince George is looked upon as such a Mickey Mouse, stupid place -- people from the Lower Mainland think we're idiots for living here," she said. "Jon has certainly never hidden the fact he's from here."

Jon played hockey and lacrosse as a kid while attending Spruceland elementary and Lakewood junior secondary schools. He still rates his team's gold-medal win at the Northern B.C. Winter Games as the high point of his hockey playing career.

He left the city in 1982 as a 15-year-old to play midget and junior hockey in Saskatchewan for the Notre Dame Hounds, which led to a scholarship at Hofstra University in Long Island, N.Y. He graduated with a business administration degree, worked two years on Wall Street and became a lawyer in Michigan. He was five years into his law practice when he got the call in 2003 to become head coach of the Texarkana (Texas) Bandits of the USHL, the top junior hockey league in the U.S..

Cooper's wife Jessie, a native of Cadillac, Mich., is also a lawyer. They have twin four-year-old daughters -- Julia and Josephine -- and a two-year-old son, Jonathan.