Kyle Cooper is a junior from Northville, Mich. He is the starting power forward on the men’s basketball team. He is studying accounting and has the opportunity to intern at PricewaterhouseCoopers next summer. He is also the Vice-president of Hillsdale’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. He was named GLIAC Player of the Week on Monday after averaging 36 points over the team’s first two games.
How did you get into basketball?
My first word as a child was ‘ball.’ I started dribbling a basketball when I was two years old. My uncle and dad got me a Fisher Price hoop and I would climb the counters and jump off it to try and dunk the ball and things like that. Basketball has always been a passion of mine from day one, I guess. I did football, basketball, and baseball in high school so that kept me busy year round. I loved football; I played quarterback and really enjoyed it. We lost the state championship my senior year. I love football and baseball, and still love those sports, but basketball has always kind of been my true passion, and so I just feel really lucky to have gotten the opportunity to continue playing it through college.
How did you find your way to Hillsdale?
It’s actually a funny story. I started out going into my junior year of high school I did AAU travel basketball and was kind of looking at schools around the area, University Chicago, at Ivy league schools like Yale, Cornell, things like that. And I had actually never heard of Hillsdale in my life except that I knew a kid who’s graduated—he played on the team last year, Tim Dezelski, he graduated from my high school and we played basketball together for one year—who had gone to Hillsdale, but that’s all I knew about it. Summer going into my junior year of high school, my high school coach called me and said, ‘hey I got a call from some of the guys at Hillsdale, and they are really interested in talking to you, would you be interested in making a visit there?’ I looked it up online, it was an hour and a half away, so I said, ‘Sure.’ So my mom and I, a week later, drove out to Hillsdale. And I always remember a coach—he coached at Holy Cross, out in Massachusetts—and he told me, ‘Whatever it is, and I’m not going to say it’s Holy Cross, but wherever you go, you’ll know when you find the right place.’ And I kind of wrote that off and thought, ‘Ok, whatever.’ I came to Hillsdale, and I toured the school, toured the gym, talked to the coaches, things like that, with my mom, and I just remember, we left that day and about a half an hour into the drive on the way back home I turned to my mom and I said, ‘I think that’s the place.’ I just immediately felt comfortable here with the coaching staff, the atmosphere of Hillsdale, the community that they talked about and it just sat well with me. I think it was the best decision I ever made. It just felt right. I talk about how great it is to all the people I know. It’s kind of corny to say, because that sign coming into Hillsdale says ‘it’s the people,’ but there really aren’t any better words to describe it.
What’s something, a hobby or an idiosyncrasy, that you don’t think people know about you?
A hobby that I think most people would not guess is that I love to cook. I love cooking. I don’t get to do it as much because of practice and I’m on a college budget and I don’t go to the grocery store trying to spend money. But I love cooking food, whether it’s macaroni and cheese or chicken marsala or steak or seafood or anything like that. I enjoy cooking. I always tell people that and they’re kind of taken aback.
