Editor’s Note: This is the third in a five-part series on the UL Athletics Hall of Fame Class of 2026, which will be honored Friday.
By the numbers, Tenna Cooper ranks as one of the greatest to ever wear a UL women’s basketball jersey.
She’s the Ragin’ Cajuns all-time career rebound leader, the second-most accurate shooter in program history and ranks seventh in scoring, all despite her collegiate career ending almost four decades ago.
Imagine what she would have accomplished if Ross Cook had let her play under the basket her whole career. But the Cajuns coach had bigger plans to run his high-post offense.
“Players like her are program builders,” said Cook, who coached the Cajuns in the first three years of Cooper’s career. “She could do all the little things on both ends of the floor, and then you realize she’s 6-foot-3 and can run and pass, and with a basketball IQ that was off the charts.”
Cooper helped lead the Cajuns through uncharted waters and conference changes.
In fact, she’s one of the few in UL history to earn all-conference honors in two different leagues — the Southland Conference where she was a first-team pick as a junior in 1987, and the fledgling American South Conference where she took those honors in 1988.
“She had a quality of character you don’t see in the stat line,” Cook said. “She had that, but she could also fill the stat box if that’s what we needed. We had a lot of people that could score a lot of points, including her, but she was the reason that people scored those points. She made everybody around her better.”
Because of that, Cooper will be inducted into the UL Athletics Hall of Fame on Friday. She will be inducted along with baseball standout Dylan Moore, three-time All-America triple jumper Lawrence Willis, football standout Fred Stamps and former Cajuns football coach Nelson Stokley.
Almost 40 years after her final game, Cooper remains UL’s all-time rebounding leader with 1,082, and nobody has come within 100 rebounds of that total. She also ranked second in program history in scoring at the end of her career, and she still ranks seventh on that list with 1,358 points, making her the only Cajun ever with 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds.
She also shot 56.1% from the floor in her career and still holds the record for single-game shooting with a 10 for 10 effort against Rice in 1988, a year in which she shot 61.8% from the field.
That season, Cooper accepted a leadership charge from Cook that he said made great moments possible over the next few years when Kim Perrot joined the program and began her legendary career.
“We had one of the best players that’s ever played the game out at the point,” Cook said. “Tenna would come to me and say she’s a freshman that’s turning the ball over too much. I told her I know you can handle what I’m about to tell you, you’re looking at one of the best players in America but she’s not yet. I’m going to let her go, let her play wild and loose for a while, and I’m asking you to understand what I’m doing.
“I told her she had to go to Kim and tell her where the two of you can do more, where you score best, where you need to get the ball. I wasn’t going to squeeze her game at that point, that would come later, but Tenna as an older and very intelligent player, I let her find out what’s best for her and how she was going to improve.”
That season capped a stellar career for the Slidell native, which included her leading the Southland in shooting (60.9%), field goals (195), rebounding (282) and rebound average (10.4). She led the team in scoring as a junior, and the following year finished off leading the Cajuns in rebounding for three straight years.
The scoring totals might have been higher if she’d played closer to the basket, something that Cook admitted.
“We had Aronji (Johnson), and she was so good down low,” he said. “But I bet 80 percent of Aronji’s scoring came from passes from the high post and that was Tenna. That kind of thing gets lost, and we asked a tremendous amount from her and she did it all.
“When we beat Oregon, she played the low block the whole game, and she went down and battled and did it brilliantly. We beat them like a drum and she was the big reason. They couldn’t do anything with her.”
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