Why Zia Cooke remained locked in, even after final buzzer in Sweet 16 win over UNC
As most South Carolina players celebrated escaping UNC 69-61 on Friday night to advance to the Elite Eight, Zia Cooke was stone-faced.
The junior guard walked through the handshake line and gave head coach Dawn Staley a hug near midcourt. The left side of her mouth tilted upward for a slight smirk as she headed to the scorer’s table for an interview. She couldn’t bring herself to get too excited.
The Gamecocks have made it to the Elite Eight before, this being their fourth trip in five NCAA tournaments. A national championship, though? They’ve only had one of those.
For Cooke, that’s the goal — and she’s not getting too high or too low until the job is done.
“The whole time I was thinking we got three more, and that’s what I kept telling myself,” Cooke said of her focused, Black Mamba-like postgame thought process. “We got three more. It’s March Madness. It’s fun, but I’m super locked in right now. We got three more. I just want to execute and get it done.”
South Carolina’s last and only national title was in 2017, two years before Cooke arrived on campus. Four years later, she’s ready to be part of a championship.
The Ohio native had her strongest shooting performance of the NCAA tournament Friday with 15 points, matching her scoring total against Kentucky in the SEC tournament finals 19 days before. She shot 60% from 3-point range after one half, but fell off some in the final two quarters for just under 50% and 35.3% overall from the field in 34.5 minutes played. Coming into the game, the guard was shooting 28% from long distance.
“Zia is a player that is in the gym all times of the night,” Staley said. “She actually invests in this game. She invests in her game.”
Cooke came to South Carolina with a noticeable intensity and passion for the game. Not even into a full season of college basketball, she asked Staley about a professional hoops career.
“She’s like, ‘Should I be thinking about the WNBA?’ I’m like, ‘Right now? Your freshman year?’ ” Staley recalled. “It’s just the way she’s wired, and she attacks her workouts in that way.”
Always keeping the endgame in mind, Cooke is ready to turn three more games into two more games when the Gamecocks take on No. 10 Creighton in the Elite Eight on Sunday night.
Then two more games in the Final Four, with the final game in Minneapolis for all the marbles.
“She’s super competitive. She wants to win. Like, she wants it all,” Staley said. “She wants everything that you could probably get out of the game, like, now. She has no filter when it comes to that. … She doesn’t want to fail. So some of this is a little fear of failure, and some of it is just, ‘I’m just super competitive.’ It’s a little bit of both of those.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Why Zia Cooke remained locked in, even after final buzzer in Sweet 16 win over UNC."
