Gold Bar twins love football, but not same team

Twins Ian and Isaac Cooper have lots in common beyond genetics.

Eighth-graders from Gold Bar, both play football at Sultan Middle School. Isaac’s a quarterback, Ian a running back. They’re in the school band, with Ian on trumpet and Isaac playing trombone. At home, there’s no fighting over the remote. Both 13-year-olds are hooked on ESPN sports broadcasts.

Birds of a feather? Not so fast. There’s a big rivalry in the Cooper house, a rift sure to grow wider come Saturday.

That’s when Ian and Isaac will be in Seattle’s Husky Stadium to see the University of Washington Huskies take on the Broncos of Boise State University. I’m no great football fan, but this UW graduate knows it’s a huge game.

Who can forget Boise State’s heart-racing 43-42 overtime victory over the Oklahoma Sooners in the Fiesta Bowl last New Year’s?

Isaac is true-blue to his Boise State Broncos make that true blue and orange, the colors of the Bronco jersey he wears.

“I liked the Huskies before he liked the Broncos,” said Ian, who’s as loyal a UW fan as his brother is a Boise State booster.

“I’m from Boise,” said 34-year-old Shad Cooper, the boys’ father. “My dad is a big Husky fan; he’s from Seattle. And his parents, my grandparents, are Huskies. On the other side of the family in Boise, they’re big Bronco fans. They’re season-ticket holders.”

Shad Cooper’s mother, Karen Cooper of Edmonds, is from Idaho, and he was born in Boise. They moved here when he was little, and Shad Cooper played football at Edmonds-Woodway High School.

At least once a year, he takes his sons to visit family in Boise. “I’ve even been to some scrimmages on their blue field,” Isaac Cooper said. In 1986, Boise State’s switch to blue artificial turf put Bronco Stadium on the map.

“I want to go there,” Isaac said of the Idaho university. “We go to Boise a lot, and I like it.”

The twins share a room, where they mix up their football memorabilia. If they follow their dreams, it’s unlikely they’ll be together in college. Ian hopes to attend the University of Washington. Both boys want to play sports in college and even beyond that, in the pros.

Football team preferences aren’t the only differences between the boys. They’re identical twins, but also what Karen Cooper calls “mirror twins.”

Ian is right-handed, Isaac left-handed. Their personalities differ, too.

“One likes long hair (Ian), the other short hair,” Karen Cooper said. “One is outgoing, the other quiet.”

“I’m more wild, he has the brains,” Ian said.

“They’re both super students,” said Marc Linn, a teacher who had the boys in classes at Sultan Middle School. “I had them in my physical education classes. They’re both leaders.”

Linn, now a PE teacher and coach at Sultan High School, kept up running sports jokes with the twins. A graduate of the University of Idaho in Moscow and a loyal Vandals fan, Linn teased Isaac about Boise State, which has a heated rivalry with the University of Idaho.

“We always talked football rivalry,” Linn said. “When Idaho was playing UW, I’d talk to Ian. Before Boise State played Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, I wore an Oklahoma shirt to school to rub it in.

“He let me know that Monday when we got back to school,” Linn said of Isaac. “He was blue and orange, very proud.”

No one is more proud than the twins’ father, who bought tickets to Saturday’s game “the second they went on sale.”

“They’re really good kids,” Shad Cooper said. “Ian is very outgoing, Isaac is more the thinker. They’re both very athletic. Both do well in school, but their strengths are different. There’s a little bit of competition between the two of them.”

On Saturday, make that a whole lot of competition.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.

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