Sunday's game a full-circle moment for Ohio Gamecocks
On Nov. 25, 2018, Zia Cooke’s high school team lost its season opener. Toledo Rogers High School lost 48-37 against Mason High School. It was the last time Cooke’s team would lose to an in-state opponent that year, ripping off 22 straight wins against Ohio opponents on the way to a state championship.
But that day was an early step in a journey that will loop back around on Sunday afternoon when Cooke and the Gamecocks take on No. 8 seed South Florida in the second round of the NCAA. Over on the other side of that matchup starting for Mason was Sammie Puisis, the 6-foot-1 guard who originally committed to Florida State before transferring to South Florida.
“I remember it,” Puisis laughed in the locker room after South Florida’s practice. “I remember me and Zia just guarding each other, and it was just back and forth, back and forth. But it was fun.”
Cooke and Puisis were two of the eight finalists for Ohio’s Ms. Basketball award in 2019, given to the state’s top high school basketball player. Other finalists included future WNBA first-round draft pick Kierstan Bell, Tennessee superstar Jordan Horston and Ohio State’s Jacy Sheldon.
Both Cooke and Puisis were also McDonald's All-Americans in 2019, playing in the annual showcase in Atlanta that spring. Puisis scored 14 points in her team’s overtime win over Marquette in the first round, and has averaged 15.8 points per game for the Bulls this season. And if anybody on the Gamecocks knows how dangerous Puisis can be in a big game setting, it’s Cooke.
“Sammie was real cool,” Cooke said. “She’s a very, very good shooter. She has a lot of length to her; she definitely will rebound as well. But we definitely are going to have to contest all of her shots, because she is a lethal 3-point shooter.”
The Ohio connections on the court Sunday extend even further with South Carolina guard Bree Hall. Although she is two years younger than Puisis and Cooke, Hall has played in games with both of them. The trio played together on the same AAU team, a bond that they have shared through their diverging college careers.
Hall and Cooke of course won a National Championship together last season in Columbia, and the former still keeps in touch with Puisis. Before those AAU tournaments, the whole team would get together in what Hall called the “fun house” on the team. More specifically, that meant the Puisis family would host her teammates before AAU tournaments in Cincinnati or Columbus.
“Her house was really, really big,” Hall remembered. “I’m talking like, a waterslide in the back and a really nice pool. And then she had an extra added part to it that had arcade games and stuff like that. It was really cool.”
On Sunday afternoon, this will come full circle for the trio. Cooke and Puisis, both starting guards, will almost surely get direct facetime on each other in the thick of the action. She will get a chance to beat one of the only players who got her in her high school career. Hall will get the opportunity to re-live some of those memories of hanging out with Puisis and the team, her “favorite part” of playing AAU basketball. There will be a sense of familiarity, the type of closeness you would never expect out of two programs from different conferences who have never faced each other before.
And most of all, in another highly emotional NCAA Tournament game as the Gamecocks continue their bid for a repeat, there will be a little slice of family involved on both sides.
“It’s kind of weird,” Puisis said. “But it’s fun. I’m excited.”
Tip-off between the Gamecocks and Bulls is set for 1 p.m. ET on ABC.