At first glance, it’s hard to imagine Cooper Helfet playing lacrosse. He’s listed at 6-foot-4 and 240 lbs., and he looks every bit that big. The average Duke lacrosse player, by contrast, weighed in at 191 pounds last year.
Fortunately for Duke’s football program, it’s also hard for junior Cooper Helfet to imagine himself playing lacrosse. In fact, he already tried that, and still ended up on a circuitous route back to his first love: football.
Helfet was a three-sport athlete in high school, lettering in basketball, football and lacrosse. But a back injury ended his junior football season early, and prior interest from FBS schools faded. Fully recovered for the spring, however, Helfet put up a strong showing on the lacrosse field.
Several FCS schools had interest in him for football, but when it came time to make a college decision, he couldn’t turn down a Division I lacrosse offer from Johns Hopkins.
His passion for football, however, never stopped gnawing at him.
“I found myself out there wishing I was playing football,” Helfet said. “I couldn’t give 100 percent for lacrosse… because my passion was really for football.”
Helfet got in touch with his high school teammate Grayson Galloway, who as a quarterback had connected with Helfet 42 times for 811 yards in their senior season at Redwood High School in Larkspur, Calif., about 11 miles north of San Francisco. Galloway was playing at Santa Rosa Junior College in northern California, and head coach Keith Simons had seen Helfet play while recruiting Galloway in high school.
“I’ll get you to a D-I school if you come play for me,” Simons told Helfet.
Helfet transferred to Santa Rosa, and while he wasn’t a focal point of its offense in his first year, he shined in the team’s final game, the Premiere Bank Bowl, in which he snagged 12 passes for 188 yards and three touchdowns en route to a 28-20 victory.
After that performance, attention from four-year schools starting pouring in. Duke wasn’t one of the first. He was already midway through his second year at Santa Rosa before the Blue Devil coaching staff obtained his highlight tape.
But when they did get it, they were impressed. “It was one of the best I’ve ever seen,” special teams coordinator and tight ends coach Ron Middleton said of the tape.
Interest grew between Helfet and Duke as he finished his second year at Santa Rosa with 40 catches for 657 yards and seven touchdowns, and the Blue Devils offered the then-wide receiver a scholarship.
Helfet enrolled at Duke last spring with two years of athletic eligibility remaining. The Blue Devil coaching staff moved him from wide receiver to tight end, and he led the tight ends in spring practice with a 4.73 second 40-yard dash, a 345-pound bench press and a 30-inch vertical jump.
Despite his athleticism, Helfet had a lot to learn. He had to get used to being in a three-point stance instead of a receiver’s two-point stance. And while he’d seen plenty of individual talent in junior college, the defenses at that level were nowhere near as well-coached or as schematically complex as those of a Division I school. Most importantly, though, he needed to learn blocking techniques essentially from scratch.
“Asking him to block a defensive lineman a couple of years ago would’ve been unheard of [to him],” Middleton said. “In the run game, in the blocking aspect of it, he’s like an infant.”
And because two years of his eligibility were already gone, Helfet would not only have to learn a lot but learn quickly.
“We told him that he’d have to come in with his feet moving when he hit the ground,” Middleton said. “It’s not his fault he was never asked to run block or pass protect, but he hasn’t backed away from it one bit.”
And while he may be an infant when asked to block, Middleton called him a “fish in water” in the receiving game. His rare combination of size, speed and good hands allow him to easily create mismatches.
Despite not being fully recovered from a foot injury that sidelined him for the team’s first game against Elon, Helfet has continued to work hard. An injury to tight end Brett Huffman created an opportunity for him to see game action, and he impressed in his debut against Wake Forest, hauling in a nine-yard touchdown pass. While he only has 22 total receiving yards on the year, he serves a multipurpose role in the Duke offense.
“We split him out some, we motion him some, we do all those things,” Middleton said.
Helfet and his coaches see a bright future for him. Continued mentoring from fellow tight ends Huffman and Brandon King—who Helfet said have been like “big brothers”—will help him refine his game. A full season of a rigorous Division I weight-lifting regimen will give him even more speed and strength to use against his opponents.
“Once he gets more comfortable with the offense, once the offense gets more comfortable with him, he’ll catch a lot more passes,” Middleton said.
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