He’ll coach in the Sweet 16 this week. But his school might not want him back next year.

The bus bringing Randall K. Cooper High School’s boys basketball team got caught in some traffic on its way to Truist Arena, where the Jaguars were set to play Lloyd Memorial for the 9th Region championship last Tuesday.

When he was younger, it might’ve frustrated Tim Sullivan, the school’s only boys basketball coach since it opened in Boone County ahead of the 2008-09 season. Now a veteran 46-year-old with 18 years of head coaching experience, he’s learned to roll with any punches sent his direction.

“I told the bus driver on the way, ‘You know what, you take us there however you want to get us there, cause they can’t play the game without us and I gotta stop trying to control everything,’” Sullivan said.

But no amount of seasoning could fully prepare Sullivan for the body blow he took in late January.

That’s when, according to a public Facebook post on March 3 by Tim’s wife, Andrea, Cooper principal Michael Wilson told Tim that following completion of the 2024-25 season he would have the choice to resign as boys basketball coach or not have his contract renewed for the 2025-26 campaign.

The stated reason, according to the post: her husband “didn’t have a sense of urgency to improve the culture of the program.”

The message could not have been more stunning: Cooper’s administration didn’t want the coach who led the program to its only Boys’ Sweet 16 in 2017 and was fresh off back-to-back 33rd District titles and an appearance in last year’s 9th Region finals, on the sidelines next winter.

As the season progressed, word of Tim Sullivan’s potential dismissal got out. A few days after the Jaguars secured their third straight 33rd District championship, a Cooper student created a “Keep Coach Sullivan as Head Coach” online petition. As of March 21, it had more than 3,000 signatures and 600 comments of support.

Andrea Sullivan made her March 3 Facebook post in response to the petition going viral. In it, she wrote that the family, through an attorney, was working to meet with Boone County superintendent Jeff Hauswald or “someone at the board who handles these matters” to discuss Tim’s treatment this season and throughout his time as a coach and teacher at Cooper.

On March 18 — the day of this year’s 9th Region championship — Tim Sullivan said he hadn’t spoken with Wilson since their January meeting but that he had spoken with Hauswald. Barbara Brady, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education, told the Herald-Leader that Hauswald “does not want to comment because this is a personnel matter.” Asked if she could confirm that Hauswald and Sullivan have spoken about the situation, Brady said, “No, I cannot.”

As of this week, no final decisions have been shared publicly by Cooper High School regarding Sullivan’s future with the school. That’s probably because the season isn’t completed yet.

Amid all the controversy over the previous two weeks since word got out, Cooper won the 9th Region championship.

There’s still a state tournament to play.

Building Cooper

Cooper ranked just outside the top 15 in the final poll of media members across the state before postseason play began in February. In that same poll, 9th Region voter Brendan Connelly of the Cincinnati Enquirer tabbed the Jaguars as the region’s best team.

They defeated Highlands in the opening round of the region tournament before dispatching Covington Catholic, Connelly’s No. 2 team and the statewide media’s favorite, in the semifinals. Lloyd Memorial fended off Newport, the two-time reigning 9th Region champ, in the other semifinal to set up an enticing title game for storyline-seekers.

The winner would either be a first-time Sweet 16 participant or a team whose administration had become very publicly at odds with its coach and many supporters.

The outcome was more or less decided in the first four minutes. Cooper jumped to a 12-0 lead, buoyed by a pair of 3-pointers from Illinois Chicago commit Andy Johnson, and the Juggernauts never got closer than five points for the remainder of a 53-38 decision.

Elijah Sullivan, Tim and Andrea’s sophomore son, came off the end of the bench and scored the Jaguars’ final basket — possibly his last wearing school colors as old as him. Elijah, the Sullivans’ first of three children, was born on Oct. 25, 2008. Cooper played its first basketball game on Dec. 1 that year.

The Jaguars won two of their 27 games that inaugural campaign and only five the following season.

“Elijah kind of kept his sanity,” Andrea said, referring to her husband’s difficult early days. “He could come home and had his baby after every game, no matter how bad they got beat. And they got beat by a lot.”

Losses remained more common than wins in year three, but the margins narrowed. In 2011-12, Cooper won the 33rd District Tournament and its first 9th Region Tournament game in just its fourth season. The Jaguars repeated those achievements the next year before a slight dip.

Then came season nine. Sullivan had a 2016-17 team that was not only good enough to win the 9th Region championship in its first appearance, but also capable of challenging for the state’s biggest trophy.

Sullivan had developed a squad that prided itself on defense and brought the clamps to Rupp Arena. The Jaguars held Meade County and Collins to 11 and 12 made field goals, respectively, and then pulled away in the fourth quarter in a neck-and-neck battle with Fern Creek, one of two teams that entered that Sweet 16 with just two losses. The other was Bowling Green, led by Terry Taylor, a dynamic, rangy forward who’s since played for several NBA teams. He proved to be Cooper’s kryptonite in the state finals.

Eight years elapsed between that run to Rupp and Cooper’s current one, but the program’s deliberate approach on the court is unchanged. The following quote, taken from an interview conducted by the Herald-Leader in December 2017, after Cooper defeated Madison Central 52-42 in the finals of Lexington Catholic’s annual holiday tournament, feels right at home in 2025.

“We want to score quick, but we’re not going to do it at the expense of taking bad shots,” Sullivan said then. “There’s a right way to play and a wrong way to play, and the right way to play is to get a great shot. … I think people get it mixed up because we sit down and guard people in the halfcourt. So teams continue running their offense, and our goal is to keep the ball out of the paint and not to gamble. That turns into a grind-it-out type of game, but when we go up against teams that take quick shots — if we’re doing our jobs and boxing out — we’re flying the other way.”

‘Keep the culture!’

As the final buzzer approached and well after it sounded in this year’s 9th Region championship, students, parents and fans — some unaffiliated with either team in the game — erupted into a series of cheers.

“Sully! Sully! Sully!”

“We love Sully!”

“Keep the culture!”

That last one alludes to language Andrea used in her Facebook post describing the reason Wilson gave for the school’s desire to move on from her husband: “He didn’t have a sense of urgency to improve the culture of the program.”

Wilson was seated about 30 feet from the Cooper bench in the lower bowl of Truist Arena during the 9th Region finals. He was not seen on the court with the boys basketball team as it took celebratory photos and cut pieces of net, but he did remain in the arena through part of the postgame festivities.

Wilson called winning the region title “incredible,” but when asked by the Herald-Leader if there were concerns about the program’s culture, Wilson said, “We can’t talk about any type of personnel.”

Tim Sullivan isn’t the only one who’s been at Cooper since it opened; Wilson has been the school’s principal since its founding, and has worked in the Boone County School District since 1998, according to his LinkedIn profile. Asked about what his relationship has been like with Sullivan in their nearly two decades working together, Wilson began, “It’s, uh,” before finishing with, “no comment.”

Sullivan was asked the same question.

“I don’t really know, to be honest with you,” Sullivan said. “I don’t know where he stands. We’ll see.”

Randy Borchers, Cooper’s athletic director, was also said to be in the now much-discussed Jan. 21 meeting, according to Andrea’s post. Borchers, who’s also been the school’s head football coach since it opened, did not respond to multiple requests for comment made by the Herald-Leader. Seven of the 15 players on Cooper’s varsity basketball roster, including their second-, third- and fourth-leading scorers (Roman Combs, Isaac Brown and Jaidan Combs), were members of the school’s Class 5A state runner-up football team last fall.

Speculation abounds about when and where the inciting “culture” incident, if there was one, occurred. Andrea Sullivan told the Herald-Leader the family was worried that Cooper would not renew Tim’s contract last year.

Following completion of the 2023-24 season, two parents affiliated with the Cooper basketball program were banned from athletic events for a year in response to behavior that occurred during the 2024 9th Region championship game. One of the parents got into a verbal altercation with an opposing fan who allegedly screamed obscenities at his son, and Borchers had to intervene; the other Cooper parent allegedly threw a towel on the arena floor. The players of those parents transferred after the season.

Rodney Snapp, the head coach at rival Newport, sympathized with the situation Sullivan appears to be in.

“I’m just an outsider coaching against him, but that’s tough, man,” Snapp said. “The one thing I can say is I’ve known Timmy for a while and I respect him. We’ve had some really great battles and I enjoy coaching against him. I’ve never had issues with him.”

Kevin Whitmer, an assistant coach at Cincinnati Elder for more than two decades, doesn’t know Sullivan very well but came to his defense on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Elder, which plays in the city’s Greater Catholic League, has scheduled pre-GCL games against Cooper on several occasions because “playing Cooper is like playing another GCL team,” Whitmer told the Herald-Leader.

“They’re gonna be well-coached, disciplined and prepared,” Whitmer said. “They’re gonna know their scouting report and follow it. It doesn’t matter if it’s their main guys or their bench guys, they just play the right way and they play hard. They’re not punky at all. We always want to schedule that game because it prepares us for our league. …

“But if Cooper’s not the place for Tim, if they don’t want him there, there’s gonna be somewhere he’ll go and do a great job. Because that’s all he’s done, is do a great job.”

‘I stand with Sully’

How does Sullivan define a nebulous concept like “culture”?

“It’s everything that we do from cleaning up the bench after the games to loving one another,” Sullivan said. “There’s nothing better than seeing a picture where one of our guys is on the ground and the other four guys are trying to help him off the ground. The way that we love our family, the way that our kids pray together. It blows my mind because that’s the kids, and they lead by example. They lead our student body.

“I don’t know that you can put a definition on it, but I know one thing: You can have bad culture, and you can have good culture, and our culture’s pretty strong.”

Before word got out through the petition, the Sullivans wanted to keep the ordeal in-house. Until March 3, the only people aware of the alleged meeting were Tim, Andrea, their two oldest children, Tim’s coaching staff and the two administrators who were purportedly there.

The outpouring of support from the community has been loud and demonstrative. At a Boone County Board of Education meeting on March 13, a large crowd showed up wearing shirts that read “I stand with Sully” and emblazoned with the school’s athletic logo. The boys basketball team wore the same shirts during pregame warm-up routines throughout the 9th Region Tournament, and hundreds of fans showed up sporting them at the 9th Region championship.

Senior Austin Alexander, who did not play basketball this season because he enrolled early at North Carolina as part of Bill Belichick’s inaugural football recruiting class, traveled from UNC to attend the school board meeting and speak in support of his former coach. Alexander’s father, Durran, also spoke.

“The people in this room, those that have bought shirts, responded on social media, the many students here that have personally shown their support of someone, those that have cheered loud in the region games, (know) that this man has fought very hard to be the type of leader and excel in establishing a culture that any parent would want their child to grow up in and be coached under,” Durran Alexander said, per a LinkNKY report.

Chris Rodriguez, a senior who scored seven of his 11 points to help Cooper build an 11-point halftime lead in the region finals, recalled watching Dante Hendrix, now one of his coaches, and Sean McNeil, a member of the NBA G-League’s Cleveland Charge who was in attendance for this year’s region championship game, win Cooper’s first 9th Region title when he was a kid.

“Ever since then, I knew I wanted to be a part of that,” Rodriguez said. “… I feel like every guy, even down to the JV guys doing what they have to do in practice to prepare us for these games, played as a family.”

Rodriguez was among a host of Cooper players who unabashedly defended their head coach. He was asked why someone might think Cooper’s culture isn’t good.

“They’re an outsider looking in,” Rodriguez said. “They don’t know what we do as a family. They don’t know how we pick each other up. They don’t know how hard we work. So they’ve definitely got a lot to learn.”

Hendrix, an assistant on Sullivan’s staff who also was a standout wide receiver for Borchers, and McNeil echoed the sentiment.

“I’ll tell you point blank, period: There’s no culture that needs to be changed,” Hendrix said. “Coach Sully has built this program from the ground up. He’s put his heart and soul into this program, and the culture does not need to change. That coach does not need to be anywhere but Cooper High School.”

“I’ve been very fortunate to be around a lot of coaches, a lot of basketball minds, here locally, around the country and around the world,” McNeil said. “Coach Sully sits right at the top of the list when it comes to a basketball mind, a basketball coach, a father figure, a human being. There’s no more deserving person than Coach Sully for this job.”

Back to the Sweet 16

Cooper won’t play its first Sweet 16 game until 8:30 p.m. Thursday — the final game of the tournament’s first round. That’s a lot of time for potential reconciliation between the parties involved, or for tensions to worsen.

Sullivan has coached every game this postseason as if it might be his last with the program he founded. The 9th Region pressure cooker is intense enough, and the nerves will only intensify into this week.

“People don’t realize how hard it is to coach and how hard it is to win a region, and then how much harder it is to win a 9th Region,” Sullivan said. “To win a 9th Region you have to have a lot of luck, you gotta have some health, but you better have a tight-knit group. And not only is our group tight, but our community is tight and our family is very tight. The word ‘family’ is not used as just a punchline in our program. It is who we are, it’s the way we live every day and the way that we play for one another.”

The Jaguars open against Henderson County, champions out of the 2nd Region. The Colonels are a fun story in their own right — they’ve not played in the Boys’ Sweet 16 since 1999 — but it’ll be tough for any team in this year’s field to outduel Cooper as the sentimental favorite this week at Rupp Arena.

Sullivan’s employment status has attracted statewide attention and comparisons to a similar development that occurred just last March.

Rodney Woods, the boys basketball coach at Wayne County High School for 38 years, was fired by superintendent Donnie Neal, who was in his first year leading that school district. Woods took the Cardinals to nine Sweet 16 tournaments, most recently in 2014, and was coming off a 24-8 season with a team comprised mostly of freshmen and sophomores.

“We thought we had a really legitimate shot at winning the region in 2025 and 2026,” Woods told the Herald-Leader. Instead, Wayne County this season finished 13-14. Neal resigned as district superintendent at a school board meeting last week.

Woods alleges that Neal had a personal vendetta against him dating back about a decade during a previous search for a district superintendent, when Woods’ wife was part of a screening committee that didn’t recommend Neal as a hire. He wasn’t surprised when he was asked not to return to the sideline he patrolled for nearly four decades, but was hurt — for his family more than himself. Two of his sons also coached at Wayne County; one as an assistant under him, the other as the boys soccer coach. They both left for other jobs as part of the fallout.

Woods, who was the state’s only active head coach with 800-plus wins, didn’t coach this season but remains open to the possibility if something were to open near Monticello. He’s just not at a stage in his life where he’d uproot for a job.

“I’ve still got the itch to do it,” said Woods, who’s 72. He offered advice for Sullivan should his March end like Woods’ did last year. “If you love to coach, keep coaching. Don’t let ’em cause you not to do it.”

If the (alleged) whims of a single individual can end the tenure of a coach like Woods, no coach in the state of Kentucky is truly ever “safe” in their position. The Sullivans might be left to wonder if anything Tim did would be enough. Would a state championship save his job?

“He’s gone above and beyond what the principal’s asked,” said Andrea Sullivan, who coaches volleyball at Scott High School in Taylor Mill. “With his players and discipline and things like that, they’ve held him to a higher expectation than any other program. There’s no other program at Cooper that has the expectations that he now has from the principal. He was like, ‘Do other coaches have to do this?’ and basically, it’s him. I think it’s a personal vendetta against him. Maybe he just doesn’t like him. I don’t know why.”

What Andrea described as an “emotional roller-coaster” over the last few weeks will end, one way or another, on the biggest stage in Kentucky high school basketball. The outcome, like so many things, is out of their control.

All that’s left is to enjoy the ride, punches and all.

“He just does his thing and keeps winning,” Andrea said. “I’m unbelievably proud of him. He keeps fighting. They kind of messed with the wrong family.”

Herald-Leader staff writer Jared Peck contributed to this article.

2025 Boys’ Sweet 16

What: Sixteen-team tournament to decide Kentucky’s high school basketball state champion.

When: March 26-29

Where: Rupp Arena

Tickets: Available for purchase at KHSAA.org.

Online schedule: Boys’ Sweet 16 schedule at KHSAA.org

MARCH 26 FIRST-ROUND GAMES

11 a.m.: Bowling Green (27-6) vs. Adair County (30-5)

1:30 p.m.: Jeffersontown (26-6) vs. St. Xavier (31-2)

6 p.m.: South Oldham (29-5) vs. Danville Christian (29-3)

8:30 p.m.: Ashland Blazer (23-7) vs. Calloway County (31-3)

MARCH 27 FIRST-ROUND GAMES

11 a.m.: North Laurel (22-10) vs. Breathitt County (24-8)

1:30 p.m.: Lawrence County (23-10) vs. Montgomery County (21-10)

6 p.m.: Daviess County (25-6) vs. Great Crossing (31-4)

8:30 p.m.: Henderson County (25-6) vs. Cooper (23-5)

MARCH 28 QUARTERFINALS

11 a.m.: Bowling Green-Adair County winner vs. Ashland Blazer-Calloway County winner

1:30 p.m.: South Oldham-Danville Christian winner vs. Jeffersontown-St. Xavier winner

6 p.m.: North Laurel-Breathitt County winner vs. Lawrence County-Montgomery County winner

8:30 p.m.: Daviess County-Great Crossing winner vs. Henderson County-Cooper winner

MARCH 29 GAMES

11 a.m.: Semifinal 1: Winners of Friday’s afternoon session

1:30 p.m.: Semifinal 2: Winners of Friday’s evening session

7:30 p.m.: Championship game

This story was originally published March 24, 2025 at 6:30 AM.