Journey To Jadwin - Steve Cook
11/18/2020
“Education Through Athletics” and “Princeton In the Nation’s Service And In The Service Of Humanity” are both mottos that are key components of Princeton University’s mission.
A College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) Academic All-American and an Allstate National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Good Works Team honoree his senior year, Steven Cook '17 is the living embodiment of this mission.
Cook was born in Chicago and lived downtown for a couple years, but spent the majority of his upbringing in Chicago's northern suburbs save for a short stint in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when he was in kindergarten and first grade. He had a ball in his hands from a young age and developed his competitive spirit early.
“I had one of those mini hoops that was outside,” said Cook. “I used to move it into my living room during the winters and my older brother and I were always hyper-competitive in a lot of ways, I used to play with him all the time. My dad would get out there and play shooting games for pennies and nickels and dimes and that sort of stuff, we made shots from certain spots which was always fun for us. I played one-on-one with my brother even when I was a toddler and I always played with his friends growing up, which I credit a lot with my development because I was four through six-years-old and was playing against the six through eight-year-old kids who were always bigger than me, always pushed me around and toughened me up.”
Cook’s passion for the game continued as he grew older and began attending camps. The more basketball he was exposed to, the more he fell in love with the game.
“I would go to the camp or go play in a game and then come home and play with my brother for another five hours in the afternoon and I just loved it so much that I was out there 24-7,” said Cook. “When I came back the next year in fourth grade, I remember having the feeling I was progressing a lot more than others in my age group and that gave me the confidence I needed to play better and keep working on my game.”
That was when I got the first motivation and real feeling of confidence that maybe I could be good at this.Steve Cook
Growing up in the Chicago area, being a Bulls fan came naturally to Cook. While he was unable to see Michael Jordan play in person, he was heavily influenced by the Bulls’ teams of the late 2000’s.
“Towards the late 2000’s when they drafted Derrick Rose and added players like Joakim Noah, Jimmy Butler in his earliest days, that's when the team got super-interesting again and that was right as I was going into high school,” explained Cook. “Chicago is a huge sports city already between the Bears, the Cubs, the Sox, the Blackhawks, all of that, but when the Bulls were doing super-well I think the city got reminiscent of the times of Michael Jordan. When they made that eastern conference finals run against LeBron and Miami it was such a fun environment to be a part of.”
Given his upbringing, it should come as no surprise that both his brother and the Bulls were his earliest basketball role models. Cook also credits one other individual for influencing him early in his life.
“Alex Rossi is probably a name that nobody knows, or not a lot of people know outside of Chicago,” said Cook. “He was a really, really good player at my high school (New Trier) and played at Cal. He had a solid college career and I used to go to the high school basketball games all the time. He was the person I watched the most, he was also a tall, lanky guy who had a similar game so I took a lot of things from him.”
Cook was able to apply what he had learned from those influences through his high school's feeder team, from sixth through to eighth-grade.
I think our record during those three years was 84-4, or something like that. It was one of those teams growing up where it's your best friends in the world that you're playing with. You're playing together all the time in practice, out of practice, always making each other better. We were a hyper-competitive group that really, really wanted to win and really, really cared about playing the right way.Steve Cook
While he was able to experience a great deal of success throughout those years, Cook would play on the freshman team as a freshman and the sophomore team as a sophomore in high school. He came into high school as a 5’10’’, skinny guard who could shoot the ball quite well was an above average ball-handler.
“Towards the end of my sophomore and junior year, I had a massive growth spurt,” proclaimed Cook. “I came up playing guard, developing those guard skills, developing the ability to shoot as you know again, I was a small, 5’10 skinny guy.”
While he had not yet played a game of varsity basketball, Cook began attending camps between his sophomore and junior year. One of those camps was the Princeton Elite Camp.
“I had my AAU coach write Coach Henderson a note before saying hey, keep your eye on this kid,’” explained Cook. “He probably gets 80 of those notes before each camp so I doubted he was keeping his eyes peeled for me, but I distinctly remember I was having an okay camp then Coach Jenkins, who now coaches at Richmond but was at Princeton at the time, wandered over to my court that I was playing on."
I scored a couple buckets in the game right as he walked over, for whatever reason, I just hit a hot streak where I hit a three, had a dunk, had a steal, a break away layup then I hit another three, back-to-back-to-back-to-back, right in front of Coach Jenkins. Of course I snuck a look at him and he's sitting there nodding his head like okay, who is this kid?Steve Cook
“I continued to play great throughout the day and got the invite at night to go play with the actual Princeton players at the time,” said Cook. “In my first game playing with them, I hit two threes in a row first possession, again the craziest streak maybe I've had in my entire career between what happened earlier. Later I would come down the court, lay the ball up then come down and roll my ankle. It swole up and I was out for the rest of the camp, literally the coaches didn’t see me play outside of those little hot streaks where I had maybe the best streak in my entire basketball career up until that point. In the moment, I was super, super disappointed. I traveled out to the east coast to go play in this camp, my ankle was swollen, I can't walk around on the basketball court.”
In hindsight, that camp was maybe the best thing that happened for my basketball career.Steve Cook
Cook carried that confidence into the remainder of his high school career, culminating in a spectacular senior season.
“We made it all the way to the state playoffs and played in the Elite Eight, which is pretty high up in the top division here in Illinois,” explained Cook. “We played against Simeon, which was Jabari Parker and Kendrick Nunn’s team. Jabari was the number one play in the country at the time, Kendrick is someone who just played in the NBA finals, the rest of their team was DI guys and we had a very close game against them at Chicago State University. We ended up losing by a few points, but it was that was kind of like the cap on what was a quickly rising career that led up to my time at Princeton.”
Cook also had a successful AAU run playing for legendary AAU coach Mike Weinstein at FundamentalU.
“I'd already committed to Princeton at that point so I wasn't too worried about recruiting,” said Cook. “I had an awesome time playing with I think eight other guys who all played in college, either in DI or DIII. I got to play all over the country and of course the Princeton coaches were always coming out and watching me, calling me and shooting me texts the whole time.”
Committing to Princeton was not a difficult decision for Cook.
“It's really hard to pass up the opportunity to go to Princeton, first as an academic school,” proclaimed Cook. “For the past ten years it's been No. 1 in U.S. News & World Report academically, it has an incredible campus that I got a chance to visit a couple of times."
Cook lists going undefeated in Ivy League play and winning a conference championship his senior year along with turning in his senior thesis, which he wrote on how social-emotional skills impact academic performance, as his best memories of Princeton.
On the court, Cook would flourish at Princeton; he was a three-time All-Ivy league honoree and ended his career with 1,148 points, 425 rebounds, 159 assists and 135 steals.
As impressive as he was on the court, he was just as impressive off of it; along with his CoSIDA Academic All-America honors in 2016-17, he was a two-time Academic All-Ivy honoree and was named to the Allstate NABC Good Works Team, earning a trip to the Final Four where he was recognized and participated in a community service project his senior year.
“A guy named Tom Catena started a hospital in Sudan in this region called the Nuba Mountain region that has been for a long time a war-torn area with not a lot of resources for the people who are affected by the conflict,” explained Cook. “He ran the only hospital at the time that was serving a population of about a million people. The most interesting bit about it is he's actually a former Ivy League student-athlete himself, he played football at Brown and essentially went to medical school then started getting involved with these folks in Africa and decided to completely dedicate his entire life to to serving the people in the Nuba Mountain region. A buddy of mine forwarded me that story in the New York Times between my sophomore and junior year and I was just completely struck by it. My buddy was too and we decided to raise what ended up being over $25,000 for that hospital. Again, a lot of folks I met at Princeton were super, super supportive of it.”
Cook acknowledges the important role head coach Mitch Henderson played in helping him achieve his accolades on and off the court.
Along with Henderson and the coaching staff, Cook was able to gain severe mentors away from basketball.
“Dov Grohsgal was a huge mentor to a lot of people on the team,” said Cook. “He's a history professor, got his PhD at Princeton and was super close with a lot of the folks on the basketball team. He's somebody who if I ever had an issue, needed to talk about something, just needed an ear for a bit, he was someone I went to all throughout college and still continue to this day. The Grossman’s (Gene and Jean) are still super-impactful people in my life,” explained Cook. "Mrs. Grossman was my thesis advisor and was a huge mentor to me."
Post-graduation, Cook played two seasons of professional basketball, one in Estonia and one in the Netherlands and now works as an analyst for Chicago Ventures, a venture capital fund.
“Having my experience at Princeton, leading into my time overseas where I explored what I really wanted to do then having the opportunity break into the venture capital world at a young age, which ends up being like very selective,” explained Cook. “That's really gratifying and I'm loving being a part of the Chicago Ventures team I'm part of now.”
While the academic and athletic aspects of Princeton undoubtedly helped Cook get to where he is today, it was the people he met and lifelong relationships he developed at Princeton that he is most thankful for.
I'm the beneficiary of being surrounded by a lot of good people in my life and Princeton was the pinnacle of that. Your peers, the people you're playing with on the team, the professors that I still keep in touch with to this day, they're literally an extension of my family at this point. I cherish those relationships more than anything in the world because at the end of the day that's what's most important in life.Steve Cook
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