Florida – Head Basketball Coach:  Mike Cohen

Jasper, Florida is a town that even most Floridians aren’t aware of. Jasper is the county seat of Hamilton County, a small, rural county in Florida’s panhandle with the state of Georgia serving as its northern border. The county is only 519 square miles and has less than 14,000 residents, over a quarter of whom live below the poverty line.

Yet a few residents of this tiny town are hoping to make their mark on the world stage this fall. In October of 2007, the Special Olympics Hamilton County “Stompers” men’s basketball team will be representing the Untied States at the Special Olympics World Games, in Shanghai, China.

The Stompers have won State Championships before but now must prepare to play against the world’s best and leading them is Head Coach Mike Cohen.

A modest, soft-spoken man, whose laughter is as genuine as it is generous, Cohen has a radiant smile, and his gentle demeanor makes it easy to believe that it’s probably harder for him to administer the “tough love” of a coach, than it is for his players to receive it.

A native of Jasper originally, Cohen (and his whole family) has lived in Jasper most of his life. For the past eight years he has served as a Deputy for the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, after retiring from a twenty-one year military career. In August of 2007, Mike was named the School Resource Officer of the Year by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Mike Cohen has volunteered with Special Olympics for over eight years and became involved because of his cousin, Helen Udell, who serves as the Special Olympics Hamilton County Coordinator. Almost all of the young men on the Stompers were students of Helen’s and Cohen was assigned as a school resource officer to Helen’s school, so she invited him to come out to practice and watch and, as Cohen said, “they were good, I was surprised because I thought they were really handicapped, but once I saw what they were doing on the court, I realized that all they needed was someone to say ‘Hey, do this, do this, etc’ and I’ve been there ever since.”

Cohen began his coaching career in the military where he coached DYA (Dependent Youth Activities). Cohen has been coaching the Stompers for over seven years; when he first started the boys were all in their mid-teens.

Cohen has watched his players become young men and feels more than a little parental: “they call me day and night and say ‘come by the house’, or ‘Coach, I’ve got a problem.’” Between Jasper being a small town and Cohen having lived most of his life there, it affords a certain level of comfort with his athlete’s families: “I can go to the house and talk to them and the family will say ‘Mike, do what you need to do to keep them straight.’ Being in law enforcement helps; they know that if they’re with me they’re not getting in trouble.”

Cohen has served as more than just a coach to many of these young men as family support is not always present. “A lot of them come from single-parent households, some of them their parents have personal challenges, so we try to be there for them and tell them that day or night we’re here for them if they need us. So we do a lot when it comes to helping them away from the program.”

When Cohen looks back on the boys’ progress as individuals and as a team over the years, he says the biggest difference he sees in them is their attitude: “Sportsmanship. We’ve gotten compliments from other coaches saying what great kids we’ve got. They’re respectful. They might accidentally knock a kid down going for a dunk but they’ll turn around and help them up. Before they were just wild, I’ll admit it, and I had to take a couple and make examples of them, but they’re still with me and have bought into what I was selling, sportsmanship and a better attitude.”

On the subject of why law enforcement representatives should become involved with Special Olympics, Cohen says: “Our job is to protect and serve and to me, that means giving and there are always going to be times when you give and you’re not going to get anything back in return, but you look at some of these kids, when you do give your time and you see the smiles on their faces, you can’t replace that. We had guys on our team that used to always walk around with a frown on their face and they were mad at the world because they didn’t have, but now every time you see them they’ll say ‘Coach I’ve got 5, 6 gold medals.’ They may not have any money, but they’re proud. That’s worth it, if you can make a kid smile that has a handicap, that’s worth its weight in gold.”

Cohen hopes that through involvement with Special Olympics, law enforcement representatives will be better educated on how to work with people with special needs in the course of their jobs: “A lot of deputies don’t understand what kind of person or thought process you’re dealing with here, you’ve got to listen, be patient and reason with them in a different way because they may be twenty years old, but in a way they’re not, when it comes to certain decision making skills.”

Cohen’s own involvement in the program has caused many of his law enforcement colleagues to support Special Olympics: “I really believe that some of them would have never gotten involved if I hadn’t. If I call and say I need someone to cover my shift, they’ll say ‘Why? What are you going to do?’ and when I say it’s for Special Olympics, it’s always ‘OK, no problem.’” Cohen adds, “Before I came, a lot of them didn’t know anything about it, they thought I was just a bunch of handicapped kids riding around in wheelchairs, but now they come out and do things [for Special Olympics] with me. When we’re out riding around on patrol, they’ll stop and talk to the athletes. If they see them out walking around after dark they’ll say ‘Hey, aren’t you on Mike’s team? You know we’re going to tell him it’s one o’clock in the morning and you’re out here!’”

In terms of support from the community, Cohen says they’ll take any support they can get: “We use the uniforms that are kicked back from the local high school.” As the assistant coach for the high school’s JV and Varsity teams, he can occasionally get help with the team’s uniforming and equipment needs, but it’s clear that not having to rely on hand-me-downs would be a tremendous help.

Only recently has it begun to sink in for the Stompers that they’re going to travel to the other side of the world to represent the United States. “For a lot of them it was ‘OK, we’re going to go play basketball,’” said Cohen, “But now it’s beginning to sink in that they’re going to go somewhere they’ve never been, where their families have never been, where Coach Mike has never been, so now they realize it’s for real.”

Despite his many years of travel in the military, this will be Cohen’s first trip to China, which he says “probably never would have happened if it weren’t for Special Olympics. So I tell the guys ‘I want to thank you all because without you I wouldn’t get this opportunity’ and they say ‘No coach, it’s because of you,’ so we agreed that it was because of ALL of us that we’re getting to do this.”

Hamilton’s team is accustomed to being at or near the top of Florida’s Division I basketball teams, so Cohen knows he has to step it up to get them prepared for a whole new level of competition: “Normally we have some idea of the competition we’re going to be up against because we know the teams from around the state, but this unknown. I just tell them that we just have to be ready, to practice hard, and we have to practice the way we’re going to play. We practice against high school teams and it’s ‘no quit, no quit.’ We’ve extended our practices to be longer and we always end practice with sportsmanship. We tell them that ‘even someone makes a basket on you, you pat him on the back.’ We intend to win, but win or lose; we’re going to show sportsmanship.”

The advanced level of play his team demonstrates often confounds on-lookers says Cohen, “Everywhere we go people say ‘Man, there isn’t anything wrong with those kids’. When they’re on that basketball court, they’re in their comfort zone. I’ve got guys that don’t have jobs, but they get up in the morning, and at 9:00am I’ll ride by on patrol and they’re out there playing basketball. It’s 5:00pm and they’re still out there playing ball. They’re not getting in trouble, they’re not into drugs, they’ not messing with anybody, they’re just playing basketball.”

Cohen’s big heart is tempered by years of real-world experience in law enforcement and the military and he knows that sometimes tough-love is the answer to helping kids. “The structure and support helps us with recruitment, or when they see them practicing or hear we’re taking a trip to Miami or Orlando to compete. Athletics is what we use to get them in, but once they’re in we “preach” to them, we talk to them. We tell them you’re going to have to work and follow rules.”

Mike Cohen says he sees himself staying in Special Olympics for another thirty years or as long as his health will allow him; “I love it and I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.” That’s good news for Special Olympics and a little place called Jasper.

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