Who Is Jon Cooper Wife Jessie? Everything You Need To Know About The Woman Behind The NHL Coach Of The Year
Jessie Cooper painted ice lines in Texarkana so Jon could chase a dream. Jessie Cooper painted ice lines in Texarkana so Jon could chase a dream. Twenty years later, he's a two-time Jack Adams winner. She was there for every single moment.
Jon Cooper won his second Jack Adams Award as the NHL's coach of the year in 2026 after leading the Tampa Bay Lightning back into Stanley Cup contention. Behind every season he has coached, every playoff run, every road trip and every early morning, there has been Jessie Cooper, the Michigan native who fell in love with a lawyer who turned out to be something else entirely. Jessie was born Jessica Ann Novak in Cadillac, Michigan, the daughter of Steven and Cynthia Novak. She attended Syracuse University, James Madison College at Michigan State University, and Michigan State's College of Law, building a legal career that ran across firms including Patton Tidwell and Schroeder, Bentley-Hall Inc. and others, alongside work in media at Relix Magazine and the Syracuse New Times.
She and Jon met through a mutual friend, introduced at a local bar called Crunchy's in East Lansing, where both were working as lawyers.
The Texarkana Years That Defined the Relationship
When Jon closed his law practice in 2003 to pursue full-time hockey coaching, he was not doing it from a position of comfort or security. He took over a junior hockey team in Texarkana, Texas, operating in a multi-use facility where the ice had to be reinstalled 15 to 20 times a season. He sold advertising on top of coaching. The team had to drive an hour to reach a practice rink. There were nights when Jessie and other partners came down to paint the lines on the ice themselves to speed up the process before a game.
"You have to have fortitude and a lot of vision, and he just kept going," Jessie recalled of those years. She knew early on that he was not going back to law.
Marriage, Family and Life in Tampa
Jon proposed to Jessie on the dock at her parents' property on Lake Mitchell in Cadillac, with a bottle of champagne and a sunset. They married in 2005. They have three children: twin daughters Julia and Josephine, born in 2008, and a son Jonathan, born in 2010. The family relocated to Tampa in 2013 when Jon took over as the Lightning's ninth head coach.
The Coopers run an annual charity fishing tournament called Coop's Catch for Kids, established in 2016, which supports paediatric cancer research. Jessie stays largely out of the public eye but has been present at every significant milestone of a coaching career that now spans over 1,000 NHL games.