This story originally appeared in the Feb. 23 edition of the weekly LINK Reader. To get these stories first, subscribe here.Â
Cooper High School girls basketball coach Justin Holthaus has a lot going on between the ears.
The former longtime Cooper boys assistant takes a cerebral approach to coaching while leaning heavily on preparation. When he looks at his team, he sees a selfless group of student-athletes with uncommon attention to detail who are working hard and having fun. He smiles a lot when he talks about them.
As Holthaus speaks, a sense of gratitude emerges. He invokes heartfelt terms such as “happy, together, focused and energized.” He speaks glowingly about assistant coaches Buddy Pittman, Stacie Kissel, Brett Perry and Jeff Ware. Cooper’s fourth-year head coach knows what he’s talking about. He’s seen it with his own eyeballs.
So, yes. That was an ear-to-ear smile spreading across the coach’s face two days before Valentine’s Day. His players just finished up practice and, unsurprisingly, the coach is talking about how much heart they have.
“They’re a great group of girls who care about each other,” Holthaus said. “We hang our hat on defense, and it shows. It’s a senior-led group with five seniors. They’ve pretty much seen it all, and they’ve had a lot of success.”
Cooper is the two-time defending 33rd District and 9th Region champion. The Jaguars won 22 of their first 26 games this season while going unbeaten against district and regional competition. By the second week of February, they had risen to No. 2 in the statewide media poll, behind only three-time defending state champion Louisville Sacred Heart, which handed Cooper two of its four losses by an average margin of 8.5 points.
That’s the small difference between Cooper and the unquestioned best team in Kentucky.
Beginning in December, the Jaguars went 42 days without a loss while embarking on a 15-game winning streak. Seven of those victories came against teams ranked in the Top 20 of the statewide media poll. Ten wins were on the road. By Valentine’s Day, the Jaguars had not lost to a district or regional opponent in 744 days.
The last time the Jaguars lost to a team from the 9th Region was Feb. 1, 2022. Ryle handed them a district loss that day. Since then, it’s been all Cooper. Entering the Feb. 23 regular season finale, Cooper had won 26 consecutive games against 9th Region opponents and 12 straight against the 33rd District.
No wonder the coach is smiling.
“Our girls play with passion and determination,” Holthaus said with, you guessed it, a smile. “We ask them to value the ball, share the ball and play hard on defense, and that’s what they do.”
The group bringing all that joy is led by seniors Logan Luebbers-Palmer (16.9, 4.9 rpg), Liz Freihofer (11.3 ppg, 4.5 rpg), Bella Deere (8.7 ppg, 3.5 rpg) and Maleah Alexander, the defensive stopper. They’re all captains and committed to college programs. Luebbers-Palmer (Evansville), Freihofer (Eastern Kentucky) and Alexander (Liberty) are heading to NCAA Division I programs. Deere (Gannon) is heading to Division II.
There’s also junior Zene Thompson, sophomore Addyson Brissey and freshmen Haylee Noel (8 ppg, 5.3 rpg) and Alivia Scott. Noel was installed as the new point guard in December, freeing Freihofer of full-time ball-handling duties.
“We did that right around Christmas time,” said Holthaus, who led Cooper to the 2022 Sweet 16 state tournament semifinals in just his second season. “I think it’s really made a difference with our team.”
After the change, Freihofer scored at least 16 points in three of the next seven games. Luebbers-Palmer averaged 23 points in three games wrapped around New Year’s Day. That followed a four-game pre-Christmas stretch when Luebbers-Palmer averaged just 12 points per game.
When Luebbers-Palmer found her groove, the Jaguars were all smiles.
“Logan takes pride in everything she does, and she’s really tough,” Holthaus said. “She set a screen against Frederick Douglass and got knocked in the chin and eventually had to get seven stitches to close it up. She still wanted to go back out there.”
The coach and his players are smiling and giggling as they talk about each other. But few things make the seniors smile more than talking about the good old days when several of them played on the same team as second-graders. And therein lies a big key with this close-knit squad.
“A lot of us have been playing together since we were seven,” said Alexander. “We grew up together. I think our chemistry is one of our biggest strengths.”
So much so that these are now the good new days for the girls at Cooper, where the ties that bind will remain forever strong.
“We’re friends. We’ll always be,” Luebbers-Palmer said. “We all play together very well because we’re friends.”