Cassie Cooke trains local athletes, stresses injury prevention and ‘female empowerment’

A set of four chairs are arranged on a makeshift basketball court as Cassie Cooke instructs incoming South Carroll freshman Kat Thompson through a series of drills on a humid Thursday morning.

The former Westminster and Winters Mill standout and Thompson both don yellow shirts that say “Girl Power” and the “P” is designed as a mermaid.

“This is my brand,” Cooke said with a smile.

Cooke, 28, said her “creative juices” started flowing after she started to watch the show “Shark Tank,” and it inspired her to bring a mermaid and a basketball together to build her own personal brand of shirts and headbands with “Girl Power” embellished on them.

She most recently wrapped up her first season as the head coach of the Baltimore Lions, a semi-pro basketball team in the Women’s Blue Chip Basketball League. According to the Lions’ website, the team consists of 15 women who have all competed on high school basketball teams across Baltimore, the state of Maryland, and nationally with the Amateur Athletic Union. A number of these women also competed at the college and professional level as well.

Now, she spends much of her time training local athletes to help them improve their basketball skills.

“When I first started training, I started it for survival purposes,” Cooke said. “I saw all these boys with these bulldogs and these sharks to represent their business and I normally like to wear glitter. You know how it is as a female. I dyed my hair orange to get out of my funk … once I started to connect with these girls and tell them a little bit about my story, this majestic, magical creature just keeps floating on.

“It also has female empowerment and represents myself as a woman in business.”

Playing with the boys

Cooke graduated from Winters Mill in 2009 and received Times Girls Basketball Player of the Year honors in 2008 after she helped lead the Falcons to a 25-1 record and an appearance in the state semifinals. Cooke received first team all-county honors as a sophomore, junior and senior, and she finished her high school career with 1,082 points, 564 rebounds, 473 assists and 336 steals.

She was also a prolific soccer player for the Falcons and was named Player of the Year twice, in 2007 and 2008. She registered 41 goals and 41 assists for 123 points in her career.

Cooke said she spent much of her childhood playing with the boys and as she got older, she realized that girls did not have outlets to train as much as they might want. Working with these young athletes has helped her stay close to the sport she’s most passionate about while pushing them to be better along the way.

“I think it’s really special,” Thompson said. “From the first day I met Cassie, it was late one night and she came over and we just automatically clicked. She’s younger too so it’s like an outlet, something you look forward to instead of ‘Oh, I have to go train,’ it’s ‘Oh, I get to hang out with Cassie,’ so it’s really fun.”

Bouncing back

Cooke moved to Westminster from Baltimore County when she was 14 years old and said she didn’t know anyone upon arriving at Westminster High as a freshman. Soccer and basketball were year-round sports for her and she said she always knew she wanted to be a professional athlete one day.

Making those adjustments at 14 has helped Cooke translate much of what she experienced then to what she now teaches her players.

Cooke tore her anterior cruciate ligament in practice three days before she was set to leave for Australia to play professional basketball in March 2017. In an effort to stay connected to the sport, she signed on as a microphone host for the Baltimore Lions last year and became the team’s head coach after the previous coach resigned this March.

She also coached an seventh/eighth grade Westminster Recreational League girls basketball team this summer at West Middle School that won the league championship.

“I was always naturally an athlete but that doesn’t mean you necessarily have strength in all the right places,” Cooke said. “There definitely weren’t a lot of female trainers when I was growing up so my main focus is to teach them not just to focus on the fundamentals, but you have to be mentally smart enough to be able to read something. It’s not just in sports, when you’re maneuvering around something you have to be a step ahead of it.”

Details, details, details

Cooke said 60 percent of people that have to get knee replacements in their lifetime are women, and women are five times more likely to tear their ACLs in sports. She also said there are between 100 and 200 ACL ruptures every year, and part of her training is made to help avoid these injuries.

Cooke works with Thompson about two times a week and together, they work on ball handling skills and court vision for an hour and another hour is generally devoted to ACL prevention techniques in the pool.

At one point during their session, Cooke reminds Thompson to flick her wrists and pay attention to the little details as she practices her 3-point shots.

“As a woman, we also have to take care of our bodies so we don’t have to get hip replacements or knee replacements when we get older,” Cooke added. “That’s not just for basketball players, that’s for women in general.”