Drew Cook could not have drawn up a much better junior year.
Cook, who attends South Allegheny High School, has followed up a breakout season on the football field in which he led the WPIAL in receiving yards with an equally outstanding basketball season in which he is the leading scorer for one of the top Class 3A teams in the state.
“Tremendous,” South Allegheny basketball coach Tony DiCenzo said of Cook’s play.
South Allegheny has never won a WPIAL basketball championship, but Cook and his pals are doing their best to change that this winter. The Gladiators are 16-2, their only losses coming to New Castle and Baldwin, teams from larger classes who are a combined 31-4.
Cook is a driven teenager who wants to win not only for himself but also for his family and community. His family includes his mother and father, Diana and Bilal, and brothers Ty, Alijah and Abel.
But it’s a family member who is no longer around who inspires Cook the most. You see, Cook actually has four brothers. The second oldest, Tony, battled illnesses his entire life before passing away from cancer in 2021 just weeks before his junior year of high school. Tony Cook was just 16 years old, one year younger than Drew is right now.
“It was the hardest on Drew when Tony passed since they were so close,” said Diana, whose family resides in Glassport.
Tony Cook loved basketball, his parents said. Despite the obstacles he faced, he had a big goal, that goal being to play high school basketball. It unfortunately never happened, so little brother has made it a mission to make big bro proud.
“That’s who I do it for,” Drew said. “That was his dream and passion, so it has to be one of mine. He wasn’t able to do it, but I can. I definitely need to take advantage of that.”
Tony Cook was born on April 14, 2005. While his strength and positive demeanor would ultimately define who he was, this was a kid who was an underdog pretty much right from the tip. Tony was born with neurofibromatosis, a painful disorder of the nervous system that often leads to tumors growing in different parts of the body.
Tony was dealing with a cough when he was 9 months old, so his parents took him to see their pediatrician. After a round of antibiotics didn’t do the trick, Tony was given an X-ray, on which a small, button-sized tumor was found on the back of his lungs.
“We thought he swallowed a button or penny,” Bilal Cook recalled. “So we took him in for an MRI, and they told us they were 99.9% sure it was neuroblastoma [a type of childhood cancer]. When that’s found in baby’s that young, like he was at 9 months, the baby usually doesn’t make it to 2. Getting that information was a gut punch.”
Tony had surgery within two weeks of doctors discovering the tumor. Luckily, when the tumor was biopsied, it was found to be noncancerous.
The diagnosis gave the Cook family hope moving forward, but Tony still had a long road ahead of him. The neurofibromatosis made pretty much everything he did more difficult than it would be for an ordinary person. Tony, though, was more than willing to put in the work. He might have not been this huge, hulking child with big muscles, but the strength and determination he showed inside was remarkable.
“This kid was amazing,” Bilal said. “They gave us so much doom and gloom when they said he wouldn’t live to be 2. After it came back as neurofibromatosis, they told us he would be developmentally slow, he would be legally blind, he would not have a good quality of life. A lot of negative things. But he was a 4.0 student, a member of the National Honor Society, a black belt in taekwondo.”
Tony played on the middle school basketball team, so his dream of playing on the high school team wasn’t far away. However, Tony got sick again when he was 13, and this time the diagnosis was especially disheartening. He had developed malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor, a rare cancer that affects the peripheral nerves. Tony underwent chemotherapy and radiation before undergoing a six-hour surgery at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York.
The tumor dissolved, and the surgery was a success. Now in remission, Tony was again taking aim at his goal of playing high school basketball.
And then the cancer came back in the fall of 2020.
“He was getting ready to start training to go out for the high school team when the tumor came back,” Bilal remembers. “He was a sophomore. He wanted to try out as a junior, but then he got sick.”
The cancer spread aggressively. Diana Cook said her son had maxed out on radiation and that chemotherapy was not helping combat the specific tumor that he had. The family had consulted with doctors from as far away as California, but none wanted to operate on him, Diana said.
“They told us he was going to die,” Diana recalls. “They did say he could try a different type of chemo, but Tony said, ‘I do not want to do this to everyone. I know I’m going to heaven and be with Jesus. I don’t want to spend the rest of my time here struggling with chemo.’”
That’s when his parents made the difficult decision to put their child on hospice care. Still, somehow, some way, Tony kept a positive attitude and continued to smile as he neared death.
“I don’t think you would ever see another kid going through what he did have a smile on his face,” Drew said. “He was in pain every day, and nobody knew what he was going through. He’s the strongest kid I’ve ever seen.”
Drew remembers Tony’s final weeks and days vividly.
“That was the hardest,” he said. “I was just walking around knowing my brother was about to die. It was so hard on me. I was crying every day. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening.”
Tony Cook died on Aug. 8, 2021.
While Tony Cook has now been gone for 3½ years, his memory lives on. The Cook family created the Tony Strong Foundation, which helps fund sports camps, equipment and, of particular significance to Tony, shoes, for local student-athletes.
“Tony’s favorite things in life were sports and shoes,” Diana Cook said.
Among the events the foundation holds is a Christmas shoe drive in which 100 new pairs of shoes were given out this past year. There have also been golf outings, concerts and even a basketball event that featured South Allegheny graduate and former NFL tight end Jesse James. Former Clairton star and current NFL wide receiver Tyler Boyd has given a helping hand, as well.
Drew Cook honors his brother in other ways, as well. Prior to football games, Drew leads his team onto the field while carrying a “Tony Strong” flag. He also brings a jersey to games with “T. Cook” and the number “1” on it that the team had made for Tony when he was battling cancer.
“It speaks to his character,” South Allegheny football coach Brian Hanson said. “Every interaction I’ve ever had with him, he’s been a mature young man who represents his family really well. He doesn’t forget about his brother or his legacy.”
Last week was a special one for Drew, who continues to play with a heavy heart. Akron delivered him his first Division I football scholarship offer last Wednesday. And two nights later, Cook scored his 1,000th career point in basketball while leading South Allegheny to a win. Afterward, Drew’s brother Alijah, a freshman on the team, held a sign with a picture of a smiling Tony on it that read, “Your biggest fan #TonyStrong.”
“It was very emotional for us,” Diana Cook said. “I think that when you lose a child, and now that our other children are still here, everything they accomplish is magnified. We don’t take it for granted. We know tomorrow is never promised.”
Drew Cook has developed into a Division I football recruit just like his dad a few decades ago. Bilal Cook was an outstanding athlete at old Duquesne High School, which he graduated from in 1996 before going on to play football at the University of Kansas, where he was a defensive back. Bilal is an assistant coach for both the South Allegheny football and basketball teams. The Cook family briefly lived in the Elizabeth Forward School District, and Drew played football there his freshman season before the family moved back to South Allegheny.
What’s interesting about Drew’s football success is that he did not play his sophomore season, saying that he wanted to focus on playing basketball. He decided to play again this past fall, and despite dealing with a broken wrist leading up to the season, he went out and put up some massive numbers while becoming one of the WPIAL’s top receivers seemingly overnight.
“He was excellent, and he really surprised me,” Hanson said. “I expected him to be pretty good, but he got me into a situation where I started to game plan around some of his skills. He got better as the year went on. He picked up new things, and just had a great season.”
Cook (6 feet, 160 pounds) finished his junior season with a stat line of 80 catches for 1,490 yards and 17 touchdowns on his way to all-state recognition. The yardage mark led the WPIAL, and only one player had more catches. Cook also had a team-best four interceptions as a defensive back and finished with 18 touchdowns overall for a South Allegheny team that had one of the best seasons in program history, as the Gladiators went 9-3 and reached the WPIAL Class 2A quarterfinals.
“He gets open, he’s got tremendous hands and a great catch radius,” Hanson said. “A lot of the catches he makes are way outside of his frame, and he routinely comes down with them. He’s very slick with his route running. But the most impressive part is his IQ. He has a natural feel for the game.”
Hanson said that Cook’s performance his junior season made colleges take notice. In addition to the Akron offer, Hanson said that James Madison is recruiting Cook hard and that Penn State will be hosting him for its Junior Day on Saturday.
While Cook said that he will likely play football in college, basketball remains one of his biggest loves. Cook pairs with senior Cameron Epps to give South Allegheny one of the top backcourts in the entire WPIAL. Cook and Epps are best friends, and Epps actually scored his 1,000th point the same night as Cook.
Cook, a point guard, is averaging a team-high 19.9 points per game for a South Allegheny team that has not dropped a game in Section 3 and has not lost to a Class 3A team this season.
“He’s scoring the ball very efficiently,” DiCenzo said. “Now that he’s gotten the rust off from football season and we’re well into basketball season, he’s really been efficient and really good.”
DiCenzo said that Cook is good enough to play that sport in college if he so chooses.
“By the end of his senior year, he’s going to have a choice,” DiCenzo said. “He had a tremendous football season that got a lot of attention, but on the basketball side of things, he’d have an opportunity to be a scholarship-level player for sure.”
Drew Cook has dreams, dreams in athletics and in other areas of life. But he’s also living out someone else’s dream, that being the dream of playing high school basketball held by his late brother.
Just as Tony was strong, Drew is strong, as well. And if this South Allegheny team makes history and wins its first WPIAL title this season, Drew has an idea of how he will honor Tony. It will involve making a trip to Calvary Cemetery in Port Vue.
“That would be so amazing,” Drew said. “I’d take that gold medal and put it on his gravestone.”
Brad is a sports writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at beverett@unionprogress.com.