Cooper seeking perfect finale to an imperfect senior season
AUBURN | Kasey Cooper lives life at a fast pace.
It's not necessarily a function of who is she is, though. The Tigers' third baseman simply has a lot she wants to accomplish and, well, there's only so many hours in a day. She's an honors student in mechanical engineering with an eye toward a career in medicine. She's an all-conference performer at third base on a team vying for its third consecutive trip to the Women's College World series.
Oh, and she just happens to play internationally for Team USA.
Cooper's pace slowed Monday. The final grades of Cooper's final grading period were entered — "another good semester," she said — and the program's do-everything player finally, for the first time since high school, is ready to throttle down a bit.
"I think I’ve slept more in three days than I have all year," the Dothan native said with a laugh Tuesday. "It’s fun just to focus on softball — for once. We have two weeks, three weeks where we can just have fun and play softball. This is the funnest moment for me. It’s so great — we don’t have hardly any distractions off the field. We can go out and lay out by the pool and then come to practice. It’s awesome."
Simply reaching this (brief) period of mental tranquility has required Cooper to endure more anguish than expected. The most decorated player in Auburn history finished the month of March with a batting average under .250 and she went 11 consecutive games without an RBI to open the Southeastern Conference season.
Cooper eventually picked up her pace and now is hitting .301 with 42 RBIs, the team's second-best tally, and has settled into a groove defensively. League coaches were impressed enough to bestow upon her second team All-SEC honors, which would make almost any player giddy with excitement.
Not Cooper. She's already been on the first team twice and was the league's Player of the Year in 2016. This latest accolade is another reminder of the depths of her senior-season slump.
"With the season I’m having, I was shocked that I was even All-SEC caliber," Cooper said. "Yeah, it’s disappointing."
Cooper believes she has a strong finish ahead. And she's no stranger to strong finishes.
She ends her undergraduate career with a 3.98 grade-point average, which is a massive collection of As with one lonely B in the mix. The truth is that Cooper wound down several semesters with strong performances in final exams to turn high Bs into solid As. In fact, she entered finals last fall with four Bs and turned three of them into As.
The outlier? A class known officially as MECH 3040. It's more commonly known as Heat Transfer.
"I told my parents that I did the best I could do," Cooper said. "It was a solid 85. I was pretty proud of that. I earned that grade. If I could have done something better, I would have. My mom told me that I was more hirable because thy don’t want someone to fail the first time when she's (working) at a nuclear plant. It was a hard semester."
Cooper is notoriously hard on herself. Nowhere is that trait more obvious than in the batting cage, where she scolds herself after swings that don't yield her desired outcome in her desired manner. Perfect hits receive zero feedback, zero joy. They're expected.
Her individual performance this spring is irreparably damaged in her mind, but that doesn't mean her senior season is a bust. No, Cooper has her eyes set on one final goal — to leave Oklahoma City a winner. Auburn lost in the semifinals two years ago. Auburn lost in the final game last summer.
Getting beyond that final hurdle is the only goal. It will consume her for the next three weeks.
"She’s chasing the one thing she hasn’t been able to accomplish yet — and that’s win the national championship," coach Clint Myers said. "You can’t ask for more (individually). She was Player of the Year a couple or three times. Only a few special people get that honor. That’s what everybody is driving for. To walk off the field saying I won the last game is a huge accomplishment. That really means a lot to Coop right now."