Giant Talent: Jena’s Kiette Cooper reaches ranks of elite two-way player
by William Weathers // GeauxPreps.com Contributor
When pitching instructor Steve McNemar first encountered Kiette (pronounced Key-ette) Cooper nearly five years ago, he immediately noticed an infectious smile and gangly body.
Cooper was a 12-year-old pitcher in search of the finer points of the position, and McNemar represented her first venture into personal instruction.
When McNemar moved to Lafayette, Cooper followed and every other week, made the 250-mile round trip from her home in Jena, where McNemar discovered more than an aspiring talent.
He saw there was plenty of work to be done.
“She really didn’t know how to use her body,” said McNemar, who has helped 43 girls sign college scholarships during the last eight years. “She didn’t know how to use her core. She didn’t know she had hips. It just took her a little while, how to open and close her hips.
“It’s been fun to watch her,” McNemar said. “With most good athletes, they tend to be a little stubborn. You have to break through just a little bit, sometimes in a loving way, sometimes in an unloving way. Just to kind of push her a little bit.”
Mechanically speaking, Cooper was lacking in that area, and her spin on the ball was non-existent. She compensated with good placement, and once she laid out an ambition of joining the ranks of the elite, McNemar provided a road map.
The 5-foot-7 Cooper remained faithful in her time with McNemar, growing both physically and mentally. She’s no longer reliant on a blazing fastball that’s climbed into the high 60s, but that pitch has grown in velocity with better command of her off-speed stuff this season.
Cooper, a McNeese State signee, has developed into an elite pitcher, and her presence at the plate has given Jena one of the state’s top two-way players going into Friday’s state playoff matchup.
The top-seeded Lady Giants (25-5) face eighth-seeded Berwick (21-8) in a Division III non-select state quarterfinal at 5 p.m. Friday at Jena’s Town Park.
“I’m trying to make sure I soak up the moment knowing that it’s the last ride with these girls,” said Cooper, a three-time Class 3A All-State selection and school record-holder with 1,195 strikeouts. “We’re just going to make sure we take advantage of the time now before it’s over.”
Cooper’s part of a four-member senior class that’s in pursuit of its fourth straight trip to the state tournament in Sulphur.
Jena, which won a state championship in 2021, was the state runner-up in 2025 with a 4-3 loss to Doyle. The Lady Giants also ran into Sterlington and suffered a pair of one-run setbacks in semifinal action the previous two seasons.
“This has been the most successful class in softball,” said Jena coach Sarah Roark, the wife of the school’s football coach Jay Roark. “They’re dying to be state champions. They’re very serious about their leadership roles, and she (Cooper) has also. She’s been encouraging and talking to the girls. She’s been more vocal in addressing her defense. She’s really stepped up in her leadership role this year.”
Roark has learned to temper emotions when conversations about the next greatest talent in town are awaiting enrollment at the high school.
“I’m always focused on the now,” said Roark, the Class 3A Coach of the Year in 2021. “I usually never pay attention because there’s a difference between what people say and what the reality was. We’ll just see when they get here.”
Roark had heard of Cooper through the discussion in the town of more than 4,000 residents. When Cooper stepped on campus at the LaSalle Parish school, she let out an ear-to-ear grin.
“I heard people mention her,” Roark said. “I was super excited when all of the hype was real. She came ready to work, and her work ethic has made her better every year. She’s matured every year and this is the best she’s ever pitched since I’ve seen her. She’s really put in the effort.”
Cooper discovered at a young age, while competing in T-ball and coach’s pitch, softball would play a major role in her life.
“I fell in love with the game,” she said. “I started as a catcher and then decided I wanted to pitch, and then I had to choose between the two and ended up being a pitcher.”
Her family was all in on Cooper becoming the best pitcher she could become. There were lessons with a lady at LSU-Alexandria before taking a step back and later uniting with McNemar, who spent a year as pitching coach at LSU-Eunice.
“That’s quite a commitment,” McNemar said of Cooper’s persistence over the past five years. “When you see an athlete like Kiette early on, you’ve got to know there’s something different about them. Then she decided she wanted to be a really elite athlete; I laid it out for her. If you’re going to be an elite athlete, these are the things you have to do.”
Cooper had already been exposed to four years of the travel ball circuit, traveling to Texas and Mississippi, before earning a spot on the Louisiana-based United Fastpitch coached by Chris Albert.
The rise for Cooper in the circle was process-based, developing the proper mechanics to be able to make the appropriate pitch. There was also work on the mental side of the game, remaining poised when things unraveled.
The latter trait remained a challenge until this season, Roark said.
“She’s grown up over the years with getting frustrated with not getting the calls, and that would usually affect her in the past,” she said. “She might lose it, and I would take her out and then put her back in. Halfway through last season, and this whole season, we hadn’t had that all year. She’s learned how to refocus, talk to us about what’s working and what’s not working, and working through those problems.”
Roark said former pitcher Alli Brunson, the winning pitcher on Jena’s state championship team, was on a similar path to that of Cooper entering the program.
Brunson’s ability preceded her arrival as a freshman, and there were battles with control and mound presence, Roark said.
“She had some things to work on her freshman year and did really well,” she said. “Kiette came in and was already a little bit ahead of her. She still had those freshman tendencies where she got mad or got high in the pitch count. She was a little bit ahead, and we were able to start her right away as a freshman.”
Cooper was prepared to contend for playing time in 2023. There were no early indications as a freshman how much she would get the ball, but the amount of time and effort she put in made her a worthy candidate.
“I worked hard for whatever came my way,” she said. “Whenever I got the opportunity, I was prepared. I didn’t know what we were going to come, but I was going to work hard to earn the spot.”
Cooper started in 25 of Jena’s 34 games, helping the Lady Giants advance to the first of two straight semifinals. She was 14-12 with a 2.90 earned run average with 27 walks and 264 strikeouts in 191 of the team’s 217.2 innings.
She also became a fixture in the Lady Giants’ batting order – finishing second on the team with a .381 average to go with team highs in doubles (11), RBIs (27), and was third in home runs (four).
Cooper also led the team with a .618 slugging percentage.
“I like to hit more than pitch,” she said. “I enjoy it more than pitching.”
Cooper handled more than 90% of the team’s innings during her sophomore season with 193.2. She put together a 19-9 record, 2.46 ERA, and 301 strikeouts.
She surpassed .400 in hitting (.406) to lead Jena back to the state semifinals, where they lost another one-run heartbreaker to Sterlington. Her 35 RBIs and five homers led the team, and her 11 doubles were second.
“She was tall and super thin, and a real quiet voice,” Roark said of Cooper’s freshman season. “She’s got this presence on the mound, and she’s got this little bitty voice. The weight room has made a vast difference in her conditioning and being able to pitch more, and with how hard she’s throwing. It’s definitely helped at the plate.”
McNemar attributes Cooper’s success to her competitive nature.
“The thing that makes her great is that she’s a competitor,” he said. “She competes on every pitch. You have strikeout pitchers, and you have pitch-to-contact pitchers. Kiette’s always been a strikeout pitcher, and that’s always been her goal.
“She uses the right mechanics,” he said. “She uses her body in a fluid fashion and uses it in a powerful fashion. It’s not how fast you get off the rubber. That helps. But it’s being on time, using the right sequencing to deliver the pitch that makes you great.”
Cooper was back on the Class 3A first team in 2025 with a 22-7 record and career-best 333 strikeouts, 1.49 ERA, and just 50 walks in 178.1 innings. She threw four no-hitters and had a perfect game against Bunkie and registered a career-high 26 strikeouts in a 10-inning effort against Marksville.
Cooper, who batted .318 with 8 homers and 34 RBIs, also struck out 21 batters with no walks in a nine-inning 2-0 win over Pineville.
“She just wants it,” Roark said. “She wants the big games and the high pressure. That’s where she wants to be, and that’s something that you really like to see in an athlete. She’s batting in the 3-hole and usually has done a good job of coming in clutch and driving in runners. She steps up and makes it happen when we need something.”
Last summer brought Cooper closer to her objective of playing college softball.
Because of her play with her travel ball team, which usually unfolded in front of a captive audience of college coaches, Cooper was noticed by McNeese State head coach James Landreneau on two different occasions.
After the second time, Landreneau, now in her 14th season in Lake Charles, asked Cooper to take a visit to McNeese last August.
“He watched us in a tournament in Baton Rouge and in Indiana,” said Cooper, an A and B student. “When he called, I went there and fell in love with the place. That’s where I decided I wanted to be.”
A signing ceremony at Jena in November was the realization of a lot of hard work from Cooper and devotion from her family to make such a big day in her life a reality.
“It was exciting to know all of the work that I had put in,” she said. “Also, all of the money my family had put in. It had paid off. I’ve watched (college softball) games all of the time and thought I wanted to be on TV.”
The one-run loss to Doyle in last year’s state title game was a driving force for this year’s Jena team to seek a different result in Sulphur this season.
Before the start of the season, McNemar said Cooper didn’t pick up a ball for at least a month to adequately recover from a busy travel season. It was another example of her increased maturity level and the preparation required for a senior season, she may throw approximately 3,000 pitches.
“She’s bought into that and helped to keep her body healthy,” he said. “That’s a commitment to resting and taking care of her body. We talk to them about rest, and some don’t want to do it. To watch Kiette mold into the pitcher that she is, she’s come a long way.”
A show of the Lady Giants’ consistency this season included winning streaks of 13 and 10 games, respectively, with wins over tradition-rich teams such as Division I’s St. Amant and Ouachita, and Division II’s North DeSoto and Brusly.
There was also an undefeated District 2-3A championship over Buckeye and Marksville. The Lady Giants didn’t incur consecutive defeats until the end of the regular season against Pineville (4-1) and West Monroe (6-5) – a pair of Division I foes.
“After the loss (to Doyle) last year, we had the same mindset of what we wanted to do this year,” Cooper said. “That loss really helped us for this year. We won’t be satisfied unless we win it all. It’s very important that we get over that hump and win it this year because this year’s senior class went to Sulphur every year and fallen short.”
Cooper threw her fifth no-hitter of the season in Monday’s 11-0 run-rule regional victory in five innings over Church Point. She also doubled, walked, and drove in two runs.
Cooper’s had a resurgence at the plate this season, batting .341 with eight doubles, eight homers, and 28 RBIs.
It’s been in the circle, though, where Cooper’s continued to blossom, thanks in part to the development of her off-speed pitches. She’s 20-3 with a career-best 1.128 ERA and 303 strikeouts – the fifth best total nationally – and has thrown five no-hitters against Airline, Benton, Church Point, Marksville, and St. Frederick.
Cooper’s also thrown the second perfect game of her career against West Ouachita.
“This year she has really got a hold of her of her change of speed and off-speed, which has made a huge difference,” Roark said. “She’s had the speed and great control over her spin. She’s been needing that (change of speed) for three years and now she finally got it, and it’s paid off big time.”
Jena’s won an average of 23.5 games (90-41) during Cooper’s career.
The two-way contributions from Cooper have been a constant in the Lady Giants’ success. She’s a career .367 hitter with 133 base hits, 55 runs scored, 35 doubles, 21 homers, and 122 RBIs.
She’s been just as dominant in the circle with a record of 78-32, 1.988 ERA and 1,195 strikeouts – an average of 11.7 per game – with nine no-hitters and two perfect games.
“I’ve worked hard and whoever I face,” Cooper said, “I’m ready for whatever comes. My hard work’s going to pay off.”