He heaves shots — hundreds of them — at a hoop, alone, in a gym. Any gym will do, and even just a hoop and a ball will work. Because before there was a gym, there was a driveway and before there was a driveway, there was a basement and before that, a kitchen.

And the whole time there was the shooter, relentlessly honing his craft, arcing a ball through a hoop.

There was Trevor Cooney.

Cooney’s a Division I athlete and a serviceable defender in Syracuse’s 2-3 zone, but so much of his legacy as well as the fate of SU’s upcoming season simply rests on how often he can score.

Jim Boeheim needs him to. The Orange is returning just over 37 percent of its points from last year — the lowest in Boeheim’s 38 years with SU — and putting points on the board, often three at a time, is what Cooney needs to do to carry him and his teammates deeper into the season.

SU faded with his shooting stroke in 2013–14. And while Syracuse fans badly want him to be more, 53.9 percent of SU’s 3-pointers from last season return with his stocky 6-foot-4 body.

“I always want to be known as a shooter,” Cooney said. “I like to shoot.”

He was a good basketball player who happened to score before he was known as and became a shooter. But Cooney likes being labeled. He likes the effect the slightest flinch of his eyes or head has on opponents.

But when he was squeezing a foam ball in his kitchen and shooting it at a plastic rim — the kind you’d have in a dorm room — he was just a 4-year old. While his parents did dishes, he shot baskets, his father Brian Cooney said.
It helped him relax before bedtime.

When he started to dribble, though, around age 6, his mother banished him to a 4.5-foot basket in the basement. There, he played with an inflated rubber ball before graduating to the driveway around age 7.

The only expectation then was that he would eventually go to sleep. That was before he’d step on a court as a high school freshman, catch a ball and have “Shooter-shooter-shooter” screamed at him before he ever fired a shot in front of the people declaring his role.
“They said it enough to him, he actually became the shooter,” Brian Cooney said.

He gets to the Carrier Dome hours before it fills up with the fans who hear about his marathon shooting — and making, he said he only counts makes — sessions at the Carmelo K. Anthony Center and want to see that success replicated. To them, it only matters so much that he’s being charged at by people whose job it is to make him miss or that he’s surrounded by people screaming for him to shoot. It’s just supposed to work.

“I think people kind of add to Trevor and they hope to get G-Mac (assistant coach and former Syracuse star Gerry McNamara) once again,” said Stan Waterman, Cooney’s high school coach at the Sanford (Delaware) School. “But I think they’re a little bit different in terms of the fundamentals of the way they shoot the ball, but I think they’ve got the same mindset in that they think that shot’s going in.”

The comparisons to McNamara aren’t fair to Cooney, Waterman said. They wouldn’t be to anyone. McNamara won the school’s only NCAA title as a freshman, shooting 35.7 percent from 3. And McNamara, unlike Cooney, was a point guard.

People close to Cooney said that he knows the comparisons are there. He doesn’t really talk about them. He just shoots.

“It’s what you are,” assistant head coach Mike Hopkins said.

In his freshman year at the Sanford School, Cooney shot practically one-handed, shot-putting balls toward the rim, Waterman said, but he made his shots. He was mostly just a spot shooter then.

The following season, opponents targeted Cooney with a box-and-one defense, designating one player to deny him the ball while the rest packed in their defense.

With a slightly lopsided rise and fall to his motion, Waterman said, Cooney became one of the best players in the state, but also one, Waterman said, he would catch being too unselfish.

“At times, yes, very,” Waterman said. “And I think that’s just a product of the person he is and the personality that he has, that he’s a competitive kid, but he is very unselfish and maybe needs to be a bit more selfish and a bit more aggressive in regards to his basketball game.”

On the last play of Cooney’s high school career, he ran off a screen, got the ball on the right wing from a baseline inbounds pass, then passed the ball. It was a state championship-winning assist.

The Syracuse coaching staff wants him to use his shot to set up and take better drives. The Orange wants him to be more aggressive on offense, matching his defensive intensity.

Against Boston College on Feb. 19 last season, Cooney shot 1-of-6 from 3 and 2-of-8 from the field in 40 minutes. It was SU’s first loss of the season.

“It’s not, ‘Oh, I know this is wrong or this is right today’ type of a thing,” Cooney said of his performance in the game. “It’s just kind of how sports are. And that’s just how it goes sometimes.”

He didn’t shoot better than 30 percent from 3 for the rest of the season. Syracuse lost four of its next seven games, including the first round of the ACC tournament against N.C. State and the round of 32 of the NCAA Tournament. He shot a combined 1-of-10 from beyond the arc in the two tournament losses.

Waterman watches Cooney from afar and thinks that sometimes when he shoots, it’s hard for him to slow down from the shuffling he does atop SU’s zone and the diving after loose balls that sends the Orange breaking down the court.

The groove Cooney said he found against Notre Dame last season, going 9-for-12, goes away. The hoop that Cooney said seemed bigger is just normal and pretty hard to put a ball through.

For himself and for Syracuse, the boy who used to squeeze a foam ball and shoot to relax needs to relax to shoot and score.

Said Boeheim: “He’s a scorer. He scored last year. When he shot the ball well, we won.”