In August, Georgia Tech offensive coordinator Buster Faulkner was bubbling with excitement about running back Trey Cooley.
“Trey Cooley’s had a great, great spring. A really, really good summer,” Faulkner said Aug. 13. “He’s gotten bigger. He’s stronger. He’s one of the fastest guys on the team. The bigger he’s gotten, the faster he’s gotten. And he’s played a lot of football for us and played a lot of football in his career. Got nothing but confidence in him to go out and play.”
Eleven days later, in Dublin, Ireland, Cooley was one of two return men back to receive a Florida State kickoff after the Seminoles had taken an 8-0 lead early in the first quarter. Former Tech receiver Christian Leary fielded the ball on the right side of the field and took off from the goal line. Cooley sprinted in front of him to throw a block, but at the 14-yard line he was leveled by FSU’s Byron Turner Jr.
Cooley was left writhing on the Avida Stadium turf. He left the game and didn’t return.
For the next two months Cooley remained on the sideline for the Yellow Jackets, missing eight games because of an undisclosed injury. It wasn’t until Nov. 9, in Tech’s 28-23 win over Miami, that Cooley finally got back on the field.
He played 20 offensive snaps and ran the ball six times for 26 yards.
“The crazy thing is he was working his way back into the mix last week on scout team. We had to make sure he knew exactly the plays and stuff,” Tech coach Brent Key said half-jokingly Nov. 12.
A 5-foot-10, 205-pound senior, Cooley began his college career at Louisville. He ran for 431 yards on 86 carries as a freshman in 2021, then saw his production drop in 2022, when he got the ball 59 times and totaled 278 yards — Cooley missed the final five games of that season.
A former four-star prospect, according to the 247Sports Composite, Cooley transferred to Tech in January 2023. Cooley appeared to return to form through the first eight games in 2023, rushing for 274 yards on 64 attempts primarily as the team’s No. 2 back behind starter Jamal Haynes.
That was a role Cooley was expected to resume when the 2024 season kicked off. But fate had other plans.
“It’s been tough. When it comes to tough times like that, you really gotta lean on your brothers to keep your head up,” Tech right tackle Jordan Williams said about not having Cooley on the field for the majority of this season. “He was always around the team, always in high spirits making sure that everybody’s head was straight. Then him just being able to come in the (Miami) game and do that without really being out there taking all the reps at practice throughout the week, the whole team was impressed. He already had a whole lot of respect on the team, but that just made it go up even more.”
Cooley has dealt before with not being able to play the game he loves.
At Knightdale High School in North Carolina, Cooley missed part of his junior season with an injury, and his senior season was wiped out because of COVID-19. Still, Cooley was reported to have more than two dozen scholarship offers coming out of high school and to have chosen Louisville over programs like Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. Former Tech running backs coach Tashard Choice reportedly offered Cooley a scholarship in November 2019.
Somewhat prophetically, in a 2020 interview with highschoolot.com, Cooley said earning a football scholarship was a vehicle to receiving a college education because of the unpredictable and dangerous nature of the game.
“It’s important because the ball will unfortunately drop one day. Injuries happen, especially with the position I play, you get beat up a lot, so I feel like having an education to fall back on is a great thing,” Cooley said. “For me, my whole reason to play football was to get a degree, to not pay for school.”
Cooley’s return to Tech’s backfield in a season now more than three-quarters finished came just in time for him to face his hometown team in North Carolina State. His Knightdale High School is about a 30-minute drive east from N.C. State’s Carter-Finley Stadium, where his younger brother, Tamarcus Cooley, plays safety for the Wolfpack. He is a 5-foot-11, 205-pound redshirt freshman who began his career at Maryland. This season he has 26 tackles, an interception and a sack in all 10 games for the Wolfpack.
If the elder Cooley doesn’t opt to use the 2024 season as a redshirt year (at most he can play in four regular-season games this season to have the choice to redshirt) and doesn’t rejoin the Jackets for the ‘25 season, a season in which Tech plays at N.C. State, Thursday would be the only time the Cooley brothers would get to face each other during their college careers.
Cooley was named one of Tech football’s players of the week this week, and he’ll be one of 23 seniors honored at Bobby Dodd Stadium on Thursday. It will be an honor well-deserved after a season that was anything but easy.
“I’m very proud of Trey. He’s gone through a lot this year. Never once did anyone in this program waver on Trey Cooley,” Key said Tuesday. “We’ve been there with him and wanna make sure he has what he needs to be successful five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, not necessarily in the moment as it is.”
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