In bittersweet fashion, senior guard Gabrielle Cooper scored her 1,000 point in an orange uniform on Thursday night in the Carrier Dome.

With 8:31 remaining in the third quarter, Cooper sliced through the Georgia Tech defense, absorbed contact and switched hands in mid-air for a floater. She’d finish with four points in an 82-64 loss and recorded a team-worst -22 plus/minus.

“It means a lot,” SU head coach Quentin Hillsman said. “One thousand points is a milestone that every college player wants to reach. That’s a lot of success in college … She’s played with some very good players and I’m really proud of her.”

Shortly after her bank-shot rippled through the public address system announced she had reached the 1,000-point mark, exciting the Carrier Dome crowd. It was the loudest cheer of the night.

This year, Cooper is averaging 8.9 points while shooting a career-low 21.6% from 3. She entered the season shooting 30% from 3.

After Thursday night’s loss, Cooper said the past two games – SU has been outscored by a combined 33 points – have been among the worst for her team in her four-year career. SU is now back at .500 with 13 games remaining in the regular season.

“We’ve got to find a way to motivate ourselves,” Cooper said after the loss. “We’ve got to dig deep. Make the change ourselves. Like, okay, this is enough. We need to win. We have to win. We have to play with a will to win, and we’re not playing with a will to win.”

Cooper added: “It’s different when you lose by one or two points and it’s a possession game, it’s like they messed up here, we messed up there. These last two games, we just haven’t played good the whole game. The whole game was bad.”

Published on January 16, 2020 at 10:33 pm

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