By Kyle Williams, GoDuke the Magazine Online
The recent history of Duke Athletics has shown time and time again how impactful a student-athlete can be in their freshman season. While one’s mind may jump to the star power exhibited by men’s basketball rookies like Zion Williamson, Jayson Tatum and Marvin Bagley III (among numerous others), it is apparent across nearly all Blue Devil programs that newcomers can come in and stamp their name on the national stage immediately.
Just within the last three years, Duke has boasted ACC Freshman of the Year honorees in field hockey (Darcy Bourne), men’s lacrosse (Brennan O’Neill), women’s tennis (Kelly Chen), men’s cross country (Sam Rivera) and women’s outdoor track & field (Katelyn Gochenour). And although the perennially contending Duke women’s soccer team has faced no shortage of talented youngsters, perhaps no rookie in program history put together a more memorable debut season than Michelle Cooper.
This past fall yielded yet another strong campaign for the Blue Devils that included a 16-4-1 record – with wins over powerhouse programs Stanford, North Carolina and Florida State – a No. 1 seed in November’s NCAA Championship and a seventh appearance in the national quarterfinals since 2011. Despite the individual accolades and career-best statistics produced by the likes of graduate student Tess Boade, junior goalkeeper Ruthie Jones and classmate Sophie Jones, it was Cooper who finished the year with the most decorative list of recognitions.
The Clarkston, Mich., native who turned 19 on December 4 can look back at her first autumn at Duke and see a scroll of awards: United Soccer Coaches first-team All-American, TopDrawerSoccer.com Freshman of the Year, ACC Freshman of the Year, first-team All-ACC, semifinalist for the coveted MAC Hermann Trophy, just to name a few. It would be near impossible to argue the validity of each honor given the numbers Cooper put up. She netted 12 goals – a Duke freshman record – and tied for second on the team with five assists. Her 29 points ranked fifth nationally among freshman and fifth overall in the ever-competitive ACC (first among the conference’s newcomers).
In the midst of August’s preseason training sessions, the notion that Cooper would find success early in her Division-I career wouldn’t necessarily surprise her teammates or coaches – she arrived in Durham as the No. 5-rated forward in the TopDrawerSoccer class of 2021 player rankings. The immediacy of her dominance, however, and the manner in which she adjusted to the college game was a welcome sign to all within the program, even if not entirely predicted.
Like many freshman looking to earn their stripes on a high-level team, Cooper made it a point to keep any personal expectations in check.
“I honestly just came in with the mindset that I wanted to work,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t going to come easy, so there was a lot behind the scenes and a lot with the team at practice. I knew that if I came in with either mentality of, ‘This is going to be easy,’ or ‘This is going to be really hard,’ and kind of downplayed myself, it would’ve been bad. I just came in with an open mindset and it really helped that the girls around me on the team were very welcoming and very supportive of everything that me and all the other freshmen or transfers did on and off the field. That made it a lot easier.”
Cooper is quick to credit her teammates for establishing a culture that breeds trust, confidence and ultimately success. It is a staple of head coach Robbie Church‘s program, which has won two ACC regular season titles and gone to three NCAA College Cups in the last decade. But while a mentality geared around hard work and a supportive environment are certainly positives, Cooper knew her role would be to put the ball in the back of the net. It had been a few years since Duke trotted out a bona fide goal scorer, and in a 2020-21 season that saw the Blue Devils boast one of the nation’s top defensive units, the team was led in goals by Boade, defender Caitlin Cosme and then-freshman Olivia Migli, who netted six apiece.
So when No. 13-ranked Arkansas took a 1-0 lead in the 21st minute of the season opener on August 19, anyone using Duke’s last couple seasons as a reference might assume that the Blue Devils would be hard-pressed in finding the equalizer. But just 18 minutes later, Cooper rocketed a right-footed shot from 25 yards out into the lower left corner of the net, announcing her arrival to the Razorback defense and, more notably, Division-I soccer.
Three days later against No. 19 Washington, the freshman broke through again, this time showing off her blazing speed. She ran onto a through ball played near the left sideline and effortlessly raced past her marking defender before tucking a pinpoint shot by the goalkeeper with a calmness typically displayed by four-year veterans.
After two goals in the opening 33 minutes versus Western Carolina, followed by her first career assist in her first road game at Vanderbilt, Cooper and the Blue Devils faced their toughest test on Sept. 2. A 4-0-0 start was not uncommon for Duke, and despite a pair of early wins over ranked opponents, the group knew its greatest competition waited in the next three months. So when 10th-ranked Stanford entered Koskinen Stadium on Labor Day weekend, Cooper viewed the matchup as a measuring stick, both from an individual and team perspective.
“That was our first really big game – it was pivotal for us,” she said. “I think our biggest moment that I was like, ‘This team could be huge,’ was our game against Stanford.”
If there was ever a thought that a top-10 showdown would cool off her hot start, Cooper put that to rest in the 23rd minute with her fifth of the season. Even following the left-footed goal, however, she continued to shine all over the pitch. The freshman finished with five shot attempts, two on goal, and hounded the Cardinal back line with relentless pressure. The match will be remembered – and rightfully so – by Cosme’s game-winning free kick that ricocheted down off the crossbar in the 70th minute, just four minutes after Stanford knotted things up at 1-1. But Cooper’s performance in 79 minutes of action showcased an all-around ability that offered much more to a team than finishing an occasional scoring opportunity.
When reminiscing on that night, Cooper naturally jumps to talking about the team’s achievement, all the way down to not using the ‘I’ word when describing her goal.
“We did really well and I think being able to capitalize in the first 25 minutes, and then for them to tie it up 1-1 was a huge setback for us,” she recalled. “But our ability to have the drive and the power, and for Caitlin to score that absolute banger, I think that was a big moment for us as a collective to say, ‘We can do this, we can be big time.'”
Cooper and the Blue Devils were indeed, by any measure, big time. The 5-0-0 start was a first in the Church era, and after rolling to a shutout win over East Carolina a week later, the team finished its non-conference slate unbeaten and untied for the first time in program history. As for the freshman star – whether knowing or caring about the feat at all – she became the first player at Duke to score six goals over her first six career appearances.
And yet, as is custom in the ACC, there was no time to rest on any laurels. Each Duke season is judged by a number of benchmarks, one of which being the team’s result against its rival 10 miles down Highway 15-501. The Blue Devils had not beaten North Carolina since 2015, and hadn’t scored a goal against the Tar Heels since 2017. UNC, ranked No. 2 in the country with a 7-0-0 record, welcomed No. 4 Duke to Dorrance Field on a Friday night in September in front of a crowd of 5,301 spectators. In the world of NCAA women’s soccer, the matchup was just about as big as it gets.
In a back-and-forth affair in which it became apparent that the first goal would be the decider, it was the Blue Devils who broke through in the 55th minute. A counterattack started by Mackenzie Pluck worked its way to Migli, who fed Cooper to the left of the goal inside the 18-yard box. Cooper sent a no-look pass across the front of the net that found Boade all alone, and the grad student capitalized on what would be the pivotal opportunity in the match.
Cooper would tell you that it was her favorite individual moment of the year, surpassing any goal that came from her own foot.
“I think my favorite thing that I contributed to this year was the assist to Tess against UNC,” she said. “That was just my favorite moment of the year overall, not even a goal of my own. That’s something I literally replay and watch over and over again every other day. It’s so crazy, I feel that energy every time I watch it.”
Yet just as Duke – which overtook the No. 2 ranking the following week – appeared to be ascending at a meteoric rate, Cooper was dealt her first blow of adversity on a trip to face seventh-ranked Virginia on September 23. On the day of the match, she was placed in the school’s health and safety protocols and ended up missing the next three contests. The Blue Devils fell to the Cavaliers that night, three days before drawing against Virginia Tech. When Cooper did return on October 7, she was held to just one shot on target in 94 minutes as Duke lost in double-overtime to NC State.
A midseason slump brought on by unforeseen circumstances would be difficult for any student-athlete to work out of, let alone a freshman that had seemingly scored at will over the first month of play. For the team, which still carried a more-than-respectable 8-2-1 overall record, its two losses and a draw over a four-game stretch offered little to be optimistic about. The proverbial fork in the road had arrived for Church’s squad and its freshman sensation who, whether fair or not, would play a key role in how Duke finished the ACC schedule.
Cooper’s response was perhaps her most notable – if not most important – stretch of performances, and emphatically etched her name as Duke’s first ACC Freshman of the Year since 2012. She scored a goal in each of the next three matches, capped off by an overtime winner just 50 seconds into the extra period against No. 15 Notre Dame on October 21. In the regular-season finale at Louisville, she netted the game’s only tally to help the Blue Devils earn the No. 3 seed in the ACC Tournament.
With a pair of first-half goals in the NCAA Championship Round of 16 versus St. John’s, Cooper surpassed Kelly Cobb’s freshman scoring record at Duke, finishing the season with 12 in the back of the net. The record – and each accolade that followed – was well-earned, and it would be feasible to believe that Cooper will one day think back on her freshman season with a sense of pride for her individual efforts.
But in the weeks that followed Duke’s loss to Santa Clara in the NCAA Quarterfinals, she preferred to focus on the chemistry the team shared on and off the pitch. The comfortability with each other that each member of the group enjoyed, according to Cooper, was noticeable from her first days on campus.
“When I was still in the WaDuke for the first acclimation week, I called my mom every other day just to check in,” she said. “Every time, the first thing I would say on the phone was about the team culture. We were so close and we had only been together for five days to a week at that point. I was like, ‘The team culture is insane, they invite everyone and they’re open to everyone.’ Honestly, I knew it could’ve been a really good thing from the start. I knew that the girls were welcoming from the upperclassmen and the people who had already been here. I feel like as the season progressed, those connections really started to build, but I knew from the minute I came that we were a really close group.”
It was a reality Cooper hoped for during her high school years. As a sophomore, she moved from Clarkston to Bradenton, Fla., to attend the famed IMG Academy, a boarding school known for developing young athletes. With a wealth of experience in the U.S. National Team youth system and a pair of United Soccer Coaches All-America selections in 2017 and 2019, she had done more than enough to make herself known on the national recruiting scene. All the while, however, Cooper was set to become a Blue Devil, after originally committing on a visit during the fall of her freshman year.
“I was originally going to come down and visit sometime in September, and then I think there was a hurricane and we had to reschedule,” she recalled. “But I came and my mom said she could see it on my face – my jaw hit the floor when I first saw the stadium. I had this epiphany and I got really excited. Going through the rest of the time, I just looked around and my mom said she could see in my eyes that I was just shocked.”
Even before attending a Duke match later in the weekend, Cooper felt ready enough to make one of the biggest decisions of her life and playing career.
“I remember leaving being like, ‘When can I commit, mom?’ and she was like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ I said, ‘I want to go to Duke.’ We go back to the game the next day and I told Robbie, ‘I want to go to school here.’ It was a very quick turnaround, but I knew what I was doing. It’s the best decision I’ve made in my life so far.”
While a grueling freshman season would be enough for many to embrace a period of rest and reflection, Cooper faced a quick turnaround. She did take three days off, lining up her schedule with what the team would have done had it advanced to the College Cup, before preparing for the U.S. National Team Under-20 year-end camp. She hopes to earn a roster spot for the Concacaf U-20 Women’s Championship held in February in the Dominican Republic, with the potential of traveling to yet another country while representing the United States. She has played in seven different countries to date, claiming Croatia as her favorite spot so far.
After a Christmas break spent at home – and of course, going through an elite training program alongside players from the NWSL and across Division-I – Cooper will begin to shift her focus towards a sophomore season that is sure to include sky-high expectations. But as she continually proved throughout this past fall, there appears to be nothing out of reach. Just ask her coach, who has seen his fair share of remarkable student-athletes over his 21 seasons at Duke.
“She’s a special freshman,” Church said. “Not every freshman has that ability. She’s sort of like some of them that we see playing in Cameron, some of the basketball players who just play at a very high level. She got great training as a youth player, both with the Michigan Hawks and IMG Academy the last two years. She’s got a great desire to be not good, but great. We don’t have a lot of freshmen that roll in and score 12 goals in this league with the competition that we play.”
Though Cooper’s success during the rest of her Duke career will largely be gauged through the number of goals she scores, there remain other roles that she envisions herself in. One of which is being a leader on a team that will depart four graduate students. As the program heads into a new year featuring a new roster with new veterans, Cooper emphasizes the importance of helping maintain the culture that embraced her five months ago.
“I really enjoy being looked at as someone who can help lead a team,” she said. “It’s not something I want to do on my own – for sure, there’s other girls on the team that are great leaders. Sophie and Ruthie are going to be huge in that role next year. I would just love to aid them as not someone who necessarily has the label, but someone who can help the freshmen come in and grow into their spot on the team.”