Cooper in his element
Marquis Cooper has always had a knack for finding things that move fast.
"If I had one problem with Marquis growing up it was that he just had to have hamsters and turtles and lizards and bring them into the house," said his father, Bruce Cooper. "He'd go and catch grasshoppers and beetles and bring them in. I'd tell him, 'I don't want that in my house. I can't handle it.' Sometimes I wonder if the kid is truly mine because I can't explain his love of insects and animals and fish."
Flash forward a decade or so and Cooper is still stalking and capturing things that move, though now they usually weigh 225 pounds and carry a football.
Cooper, a junior inside linebacker for the Huskies, made a team-high 11 tackles in the UW's season-opening 31-29 loss at Michigan despite starting on the bench. Cooper entered the game on the second series after Michigan's Chris Perry ran 57 yards for a touchdown. He played most of the rest of the game.
"He was where he needed to be a lot of the time," UW Coach Rick Neuheisel said of Cooper, a native of Gilbert, Ariz., outside of Phoenix. "He's not always fundamentally perfect, but he is such a great athlete that he just finds the ball."
And this season, Cooper can at least make the tackle when he does find the ball, unlike much of last season, when he battled a shoulder injury that few knew about. Cooper said he first injured his shoulder in the UW's third game of last season at Cal but didn't let anyone know.
"I got chop blocked and landed on it and it was messed up (the rest of the season)," Cooper said. "But I was scared to tell anybody because I wanted to keep on playing."
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"I heard a pop and I couldn't move at all," he said. "It was like I was stuck there. It hurt so bad I had to tell them. I couldn't do it any more."
Cooper was diagnosed with a torn labrum and had surgery April 5. Though the shoulder still sometimes bothers him, he was back on the field for the start of fall camp and has run neck-and-neck with sophomore Joe Lobendahn at weakside linebacker.
That's the position Neuheisel always envisioned Cooper could play, though others wondered. Cooper weighed less than 200 pounds during his high-school career and played safety and wide receiver.
Arizona State coaches knew of Cooper — his father covers the Sun Devils on a regular basis — but the Sun Devils weren't sure whether he was Division I material because of his size.
Neuheisel has always said he thought Cooper's speed and athleticism could make up for any size at linebacker. Cooper usually lines up behind a defensive lineman, meaning he doesn't have to take on offensive linemen, but just has to move fast enough to find the ball carrier.
Marquis Cooper was as quickly sold on the UW as the Huskies were on him after his recruiting trip, in large part due to his love of the outdoors, which he now fulfills by fishing whenever he can.
"He called me and said, 'Rick took us on a boat and there's all this water all over the place and I can fish for days out there, Dad,' " Bruce Cooper said. "He's making this big decision on his future based on the surrounding water. But he told me 'Well, Rick's a good guy, too.' "
His best catches? A 30-inch salmon on the Cowlitz River and a 15-pound catfish at home in Arizona
"I like fighting the fish," Cooper said. "And just relaxing out there and being alone and being outside."
Which is just fine with his dad, as long as he leaves the fish there.