With hitting down to a science, Auburn's Kasey Cooper named espnW player of the year

ByGRAHAM HAYS
June 6, 2016, 1:56 AM

— -- Like a lot of kids, maybe even like most of us, Kasey Cooper's curiosity confronted a world full of wonders. Before we know how much of anything works, everything is a mystery. Of course, most of us simply ask for explanations or lose interest at the first distraction.

When you are the daughter of an instructional technologist at the Farley Nuclear Plant and an air-conditioning and refrigeration instructor at Alabama's Wallace Community College, you grow up seeking your own answers by reducing things to their smallest components.

Cooper's curiosity didn't kill the cat, but it did imperil household valuables from time to time.

"Maybe once or twice," she said. "The VCR -- that was kind of a bad one."

Not that she is much better at leaving well enough alone these days. Consider the aftermath of her most memorable hit during her junior season on Auburn's softball team. Shortly after the ball she struck toward the fence cleared the right fielder's glove by a few feet for a walk-off home run against conference rival Georgia in April, Cooper offered this memorably joyful assessment: "I knew when I saw her jump that it was going to be a SportsCenter Top 10 or that we were going to win."

Full stop and file away the moment in the scrapbook, right? Not so much.

According to Auburn coach Clint Myers, it wasn't long before Cooper started disassembling the moment, just like she took apart the VCR years before. She didn't just enjoy a movie on the screen or a memorable hit on the field. She wanted to know why it happened, and perhaps how she might make it even better.

"It wins the ball game for us, but she's still analyzing that swing," Myers recalled. "[She felt like] a little bit lower on the ball, there's no question that ball is out. Again, that's the perfectionist.

"She just wants to really excel at anything and everything that she does."