Interview with Cooper Wohlgemuth
Cooper Wohlgemuth played baseball and is from Portland, Oregon. He went to a few colleges so he will be telling us about that. He is currently working at Costco, recently promoted to department manager. In his free time he loves to do outdoor activities. He has a brand new truck specifically outfitted for camping, which he goes backcountry camping every weekend. Every day he does something outside, such as kayaking, fishing, hiking, and in the winters snowboarding.
Below I have written most of what we talked about but you can listen to the full podcast HERE.
Q: You quit baseball for about a month and a half. What made you come back to the sport?
A: I quit baseball in the middle of my sophomore year. I ended up coming back because I felt like I wasn’t done. I based my identity on being an athlete specifically within baseball. I was living in a house with 9 of my previous teammates. They had just started practice and I was feeling down in the dumps. I wasn’t doing anything on the daily basis. I was just finishing classes. I didn’t really know who I was or what I was doing. An opportunity arose so I jumped on it right at the first second.
Q: What was your journey like with going to 3 different schools?
A: I left high school as a high performing student. I knew I wanted to have a balance between a high academic program and the opportunity to play at a competitive level of baseball. I committed to George Fox University out of high school, which is a division 3 school. They were ranked 14th in the nation when I committed. When I entered that freshman season we had top 25 rankings. As a freshman, I wasn’t really playing at all. I expected to jump in as a freshman and play, which was naive of me to think that. I was playing on a competitive club team in the northwest with a lot of guys that were going to play in the PAC12. I didn’t have a ton of success but I felt like I was competitive. I was shocked to have a very humbling experience my freshman year not getting an at bat. That put me back on my heels a little bit. I put my nose down to work really hard. I left the fall without the confidence that I was going to see the field my sophomore season. At George Fox I was in the honors college and we were a sister program with Oxford. I had the opportunity to study abroad. I had a rough experience not playing at all. My dad and I sat down for a long time after my last fall ball game and I felt overwhelmed, thinking this isn’t for me. I went to the coaches office and bawled my eyes out saying I was done. I’m not sure that was a decision I was ready to make at 19 years old. I took about a month and a half of a break. I wasn’t feeling like myself, like a part of me wasn’t there. I had a series of events happen to me and I felt completely flattened with no idea what I was doing. One day, I was sitting in class and I got a phone call from the head coach at Clackamas Community College. He told me that he was prepared to offer me a scholarship and I will play every day as a catcher. I walked back into class, picked up my bag, went straight to the registrar’s office, unenrolled myself, went to Clackamas, signed my scholarship papers, and went to practice the next day. Another problem that I faced was when I got an email saying I wasn’t eligible for graduation. I had no clue that I wasn’t close to graduating so I ran to the registrar’s office. They basically said none of my transcripts had been received and that was the first they were hearing about it. They rush reviewed my transcripts then determined that I was about 70 credits away from my associates degree. I was about a week away from graduation. I was told that I’m going to need to red shirt so I called the college coaches recruiting me asking what to do. They all said they couldn’t red shirt me. That was a whole wrench in the plan. That opened up the door for NAIA ball. I had a couple of offers but I was set on going to be a part of division one baseball so I had previously turned them down. I reached back out to them and Shawnee State in Ohio took me. When I transferred to my last school, I ended up gaining back some of the credits that I lost. I originally had 3 minors but I cut it down to 2 to be more realistic. I plugged away, played some baseball, then CoVid hit. I finished my junior season online at home. On the drive home from Ohio to Oregon, I called the boss at Costco that I worked for in college during the summers and he got me a job. I started working and that’s where I landed.
Q: What made you decide to go into working instead of finishing your degree?
A: I started to kind of plug away. I have about 30 credits left in the degree I’m pursuing. It is in political science with a double minor in philosophy and history. Numbers aren’t necessarily my strong suit but I plugged away some numbers for what careers my degrees would set me up for and it wouldn’t be paying much. It was a hazy future that wasn’t really set. I had a graduate student program along with publication co-authorship to Penn set up. When Covid hit, they cut the funding to that. So that was a blow to my future plans. Right around the fall when I was supposed to go back, it was still peak pandemic. My parent’s said “we don’t know if you should drive 2,500 miles away from home. Continue to go to school but go to Portland state here at home”. I was already making livable wages at Costco. I realized I could make a good amount of money and make it sustainable with this. If I go back to school, I would be doing what I love and enjoy but I’m going to struggle in the real world. Looking back on it now, what I want to do I my free time now requires money. If I ever want to not eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the rest of my life, I need to make this decision.
Q: Would you go back to school or pursue a career that required different training if you could?
A: I don’t think I would. I really enjoy what I learned and am still learning. I have a real big itch for reading, especially philosophy. I love doing that without the monetization of making that a career. I don’t lose much out of that. I have very intellectual friends and we have those conversations on a daily basis. Me not teaching still puts me in a place where I can still engage with it.
Q: How did playing competitive sports shape who you are today?
A: I have thought about that more after my career ended than I ever did as an athlete. I have always been undersized and I was never the best player on my team growing up. That put me in my place. I always had my nose to the ground to grind it out. Going into my freshman year of college. Zak Taylor is a guy that I played in the same club program with who won a national championship and I realized I’m going to have to work my butt off just to share the field with these guys. That kind of competitive nature really drove me into how competitive I am. I love the competitive aspect of it and finding your shortcomings, finding a way to work out of those and make it a strength.
Q: Did you consider being a full time team coach?
A: I did it as a summer job coaching 12 year olds for 3 summers. It was a blast and a lot of fun. It was so much more frustrating than I thought it would be. Being competitive as I am, I wanted to win and we did not have as much success as we expected to. Half of them absolutely love the game as much as you do and the other half sees a butterfly go by and they want to chase it. With that, coaching isn’t for me. I wanted a little more than every single kid did which is tough to manifest. This spring I was the varsity assistant coach at the high school I graduated from. I was much more tame, which was pretty intentional since I’ve been trying to get away from being outright competitive. My job at Costco starts at around 2am, and the baseball practice is at around 6pm. That was tough for me. For about 4 months I slept in 4 hour increments. I really enjoyed being around those high school athletes, though.
Q: You’ve had lots of injuries. What were they, how did they set you back, and how did you recover from them?
A: I think the most notable ones for me have been concussions. My senior year of high school I got knocked out by a pitch that hit me right under my helmet and hit my skull. I woke up at first base and my coach asked me if I was alright. I said yeah, I’m alright. I wasn’t alright so I ended up calling time and pulled myself out. That one put me out for about 3 or 4 weeks. By about the first or second week I couldn’t form a sentence that was coherent. I’m a big writer and I’m trying to get back into school and none of my sentences were making sense. It was horrifying. That was a big blow to my confidence in myself. I was wondering if it would go away and I would get healthy and it did. So I come back and get cleared to play baseball again. We were in the beginnings of conference, I’m feeling really pumped and I was catching the pregame bullpen and I end up dislocating my knee. My trainer and the other school’s trainer thought that I basically blew out my knee. I’m sitting on an apron just watching the game back in that hole one hundred percent sure I just blew out my knee. After the MRI’s, I got the call from the doctors that my knees were fine. Just basically the meniscus flopped, which created extra space which is why there was extra wiggle in my knee. They told me that I was going to be healing fine. With that news, I called my college coaches and told them the whole thing. I made full recoveries from that and played ball that summer. Going forward, my junior year I tore my MCL jumping and touching the ceiling in the store. I go through the whole situation again. MCL’s aren’t super necessary for the structure of your knee. I ended up PT’ing my way through that and played my junior season. My knees are shot but I haven’t had any surgery. The last one that I had that was pretty detrimental was when I pinched my sciatic nerve on a deadlift. The pinched nerve was pushing my spine into a curve so the PT thought I had scoliosis. They do some scans and found out there’s just a lot of tension. I spent a lot of time in the training room just trying to get myself mobile to play again. It did just end up working itself out.
Q: What was the transition out of playing competitive sports like for you? What did you do in your newfound free time?
A: Coming out of sorts, I came into the Covid world. I was playing video games in quarantine. I moved back home to Oregon and I had the itch to be outside. I bought a kayak, got into hiking, and got into camping. As weird as it sounds, I got into solo camping which is something I still do to this day. I got a new truck and outfitted it to camp in and started road tripping. I saw a bunch of stuff and kept myself outdoors.
Q: What was one of your favorite moments while competing?
A: I have very few memories from actually playing. I have more memories just hanging out with the boys. One of my favorite ones was when we were on a road trip to Alabama in early February rolling through the snow. I found out two of the freshmen (that were roommates) hated each other. I found out that the bus had a microphone so I decided that we’re doing karaoke. The two that hated each other sang a duet. It was a 14 or 15 hour bus ride and we were doing things the whole time. Another memory is when I played on the Portland Pickles team. We were playing in front of 2,500-3,000 people. There was another guy there that had the last name Cooper. When they announced my name to go hit, the whole stadium started chanting my name. I ended up going 2 for 3 that day with a double. It was surreal and was the closest thing to feeling like I’m playing in the big league.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who is recently done playing a sport?
A: I kind of alluded to it earlier but spend some time to yourself. A lot of your identity goes into your sport and becomes a part of who you are. When you stop playing, it’s not necessarily no longer who you are. Who you are is changing and adapting. Understanding and being your own best friend is important. At some point you need to close the yearbook and re-identify yourself. Be open to hobbies and things that you might never have tried before.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who is currently playing a sport?
A: Not dwelling on the downs, especially playing baseball and softball where you’re not having success every time you step on the field. That is part of the journey. Go to other peoples games, go out and get dinner with your teammates, make yourself available and enjoy those moments. What I miss most about college is the culture. Engage with them, have fun with them, don’t say no to hanging out.
If you have any more questions for Cooper, please leave comments below or contact me. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call the Suicide Hotline. It’s toll free and available 24/7 at 800-273-8255.
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