Jim Hooper

Class of 2006
San Diego, California

Written by Frederick Niedner, director of the Center for Church Vocation and chair of the Department of Theology, for the Winter 2006 issue of “Lutheran Connection”

How many church musicians today could truthfully tell of the time they played basketball in a nationally televised game at Cameron Indoor Arena, home court of the mighty Duke Blue Devils and their notoriously crazed fans?

Valparaiso University senior Jim Hooper will some day regale his friends, and perhaps his grandchildren as well, with just such tales as he recalls his college days. First, however, Hooper has some accounting work to complete, and some checking up to do on a foundation he helped to establish.

No, Jim Hooper hasn’t led three lives, but he has come a long way toward fulfilling three distinct dreams he brought with him to Valpo. One of them involved basketball. Though he had broken his brother’s scoring records at Lutheran High School of San Diego, no Division I scholarship offers came his way. Still, hoops played a part in bringing him to Valpo. During sister Sandra’s first year as a VU student, Bryce Drew and his teammates took the Crusaders to the NCAA’s Sweet Sixteen.

Hooper was hooked. He enrolled at Valparaiso and, at the beginning of his first year, applied to serve as a student manager for the men’s basketball team. Former Coach Scott Drew took him on and, by the end of the year, Hooper’s hard work as a practice player earned him an invitation to join the team as a “walk-on,” a role he has enjoyed for the past three years. He’s not the only one who relishes his frequent, late-game appearances. The VU student section erupts with raucous delight when Jim enters a Valpo home game, and Valpo’s longtime radio play-by-play announcer Todd Ickow lets the regional and web-cast audience know, “It’s Hooper time!”

Playing of another sort fills his time as well. Hooper also dreams of serving one day as a church musician, and so he has studied organ for four years with Professors John Bernthal and Lorraine Brugh of the VU Music Department. “We were pretty skeptical about someone trying to meet the demands of both the basketball and music programs, so we pushed Jim,” recalls Brugh. “He showed us he could do both.”

In the fall semester (2005), Hooper served as a musician and planning member on the Chapel of the Resurrection’s Morning Prayer staff. Along with all his other commitments, he made a valuable contribution to the daily worship life of the campus.

Hooper will likely remain a juggler of multiple commitments and time demands, as he also is on track to finish an accounting major in Valpo’s College of Business Administration when he graduates in May. Indeed, he has already accepted a job offer from an Indianapolis accounting firm. “I knew I needed to be practical,” Hooper explains. “I won’t make a living playing basketball, and maybe not as a musician, either. This way I can serve the church as I’m able and still not starve.”

The complexity of Jim Hooper’s calling as teammate, musician, and businessman became clear behind the scenes of a very public story that gripped the Valparaiso community in the spring of 2005. Hooper’s roommate and fellow basketball player, Kenny Harris, suffered a mysterious heart stoppage while working out at the Athletics-Recreation Center. Afterwards, Harris lay in a coma for several weeks.

Throughout that wrenching stretch as Harris hung somewhere between life and death, Hooper proved to be one of the basketball program’s spiritual pillars. He arranged and played hymns for a campus and community prayer vigil held in the Chapel of the Resurrection and, along with teammates and Kenny Harris’ family, he kept his own vigil of prayer, encouragement and trust.

Homer Drew’s basketball program at Valparaiso University is known for its attention to the team’s spiritual health as well as its physical conditioning. Daily prayers punctuate the practice routine, and road trips include team worship when travel schedules don’t allow time for attending church services. Rarely have those disciplines proved so important as they did when the team had to cope with the devastating circumstances that had struck their friend and teammate Kenny Harris.

Jim Hooper, the accountant, also responded to this crisis. Along with brother David, an Indianapolis attorney and alumnus of the VU School of Law, Hooper developed a plan for establishing a foundation that would see to providing heart defibrillator machines in high school and college locker rooms and training facilities all over the United States. Such equipment had saved Kenny Harris’ life, and Hooper determined that every young athlete should have the same potentially life-saving equipment available.

Harris emerged from his coma during the summer of 2005, and while he has not yet and, may never, return to Division I basketball competition, he stood on the floor of the Athletics-Recreation Center with Jim and David Hooper before a Nov. 28, 2005, game to celebrate the establishment of the Kenny Harris Foundation. You can find it on the Web at kennyharrisfoundation.org.

People at Valparaiso University use the word “vocation” constantly, and some might say, too much. Vocation is the perfect word for describing the intersection of the dreams that brought Hooper to Valpo and the ways he has been educated and formed here for a life of service in a complex and broken world. Or, as some put it more simply, he has learned at Valpo to practice the connection between faith and life.

In Coach Homer Drew’s words, “Jim is a young man with a very quiet but firm faith in Jesus Christ. We’ve really admired Jim in our basketball program as his work ethic, his communication skills, and his ability to work with people have made him a wonderful addition to our team.”

Picture Jim Hooper sitting in a meeting room of the Christopher Center, dressed in a basketball travel outfit only hours from departing for a road game, describing how grateful he is for the ways both his coaches and his organ teachers have shaped him for a future as an accountant with something more than accurate numbers to offer his community and world. “This is the perfect place for me,” Hooper says matter-of-factly.

And he’s been perfect for this place as well.

Our Valpo