From Burlington backyard to Division 1
Kendall Cooper had to skip Team Canada training camp, but is scoring for Quinnipiac
This will get a “Well, of course!” response in the Burlington and Stoney Creek hockey communities, but Kendall Cooper’s college career is off to a pretty good start.
The first-year defenceman ranks fourth in Quinnipiac University Bobcats scoring, and tops along the blue line, with three goals and four assists over the NCAA Division 1 team’s first nine games, two of which she had to sit out.
“I don’t really focus on getting goals and getting points, I just focus on playing my game on what I can bring to the team,” the 18-year-old graduate of Aldershot High School says, modestly, over Zoom from the Hamden, Conn., university.
“It’s nice that I have been able to produce some offence along the way, but that comes with playing as a team and the girls are getting me the puck. And I’m passing to them.”
Cooper is grateful she has the opportunity to play games and practise regularly when most young men and women back home do not. She arrived at Quinnipiac in August, was able to return to Burlington over the holiday break and returned on Jan. 2.
She quarantined at both ends of those journeys, the reason she had to miss a couple of games.
She is also missing the national women’s hockey team’s current two-week training-camp bubble in Calgary. She was among the 47 invitees and has been squarely in Hockey Canada’s sights since her mid-teens. Among many resumé items that catch the eye: She starred for the Stoney Creek Sabres; moved the puck ahead to Maddi Wheeler for the winning goal in the overtime final of the 2019 world U18 championships in Japan for Canada’s only gold in the past six years; and captained the silver-medal team that was edged by the U.S. in the 2020 overtime final in Slovakia.
“It was pretty exciting to get the invitation to Calgary and I would have loved to go out and compete with them,” she says. “But it just couldn’t fit within my schedule. I’m still pretty young so, in talking with my coaches and with some of the staff members of Hockey Canada, they thought it was best for me to stay back in school and play against other universities and get that exposure, especially since it’s my first year.”
Students returned to Quinnipiac on Monday “so it’s kind of been a lockdown on campus. They want to make sure there’s no outbreak the first couple of weeks,” says Cooper, who’s studying physical therapy and living in a dorm with six roommates, observing tight safety precautions.
“The school has put in good protocols, so I feel safe,” she says.
Quinnipiac’s home conference, ECAC Hockey, is playing a reduced pandemic-delayed schedule which ends in late February, no fans allowed. Players are tested three times a week and strict game and practice safety precautions are in place.
The Bobcats are 6-3 and sit just outside the national top 10, but Cooper feels last weekend’s two-game split with No. 10 Clarkson indicates they’re coming together as a unit and building moment.
While hesitant to describe her onice style, she will allow she’s composed, with an equal commitment to offence and defence, and has good up-ice vision.
Her earliest hockey influences were her older brother, Cole, whom she followed into the game, and her parents, who built their kids a backyard rink.
“I spent hours out there, trying to keep up with my brother,” she said. “That’s where I learned some of my skills, for sure.”
And those skills, as college opponents are discovering, tend to produce results.