Overview:
Charlotte Cooney, granddaughter of Hall of Fame coach Lou Panizzon, pitches, catches and plays infield for her father Pat and grandpa Mike
Charlotte Cooney knew baseball was the family pastime as soon as she was big enough to drag a rake.
“One of the first things I remember is being out on the field with all these big guys,” said the daughter of Carpinteria High School baseball coach Pat Cooney. “I started raking the dirt with them when I was just a little girl, and I wanted to be just like them.
“I’d sit on a bucket in the dugout, watching the game with the guys, and they’d tell me, ‘Some day, you’re going to get to play.’”
Little Char took that to heart.
She’s now competing in the man’s world of varsity high school baseball as a junior second baseman, catcher and pitcher. She entered this week with Carpinteria High’s third-best batting average of .326.
“She holds her own, absolutely,” said her dad, who doubles as the high school’s athletic director. “It’s not too surprising because she has such a great support system.
“She’s got friends and people in the community backing her, and great teachers and coaches at the school supporting her through the challenge of being a three-sport student-athlete.”
Charlotte’s web of support includes three generations of family.
She sees them in every corner of John Calderwood Field.
Grandpa Mike Cooney, her pitching coach, mans the first-base coaching box. Her dad coaches the runners from the third-base box.
“I’ll get a base hit or something and make it to first, and it’s my grandpa who knocks knuckles with me,” Charlotte said. “I really take that in.
“And if I make it around the bases to third, I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m playing baseball with two of the biggest people in my life!’”
Family Affair
Charlotte’s other grandpa, former Carpinteria High football coach Lou Panizzon, operates the scoreboard.
Her mom, Christie, a longtime community fundraiser and volunteer, runs the concession stand and is on call as a driver for out-of-town games.
Charlotte’s 13-year-old sister, Caroline, an accomplished youth soccer player, serves as the public address announcer for Warrior baseball games.
“I know I’m super-lucky every time we have a home game, having all that family at the field,” Pat Cooney said.
Kate, the eldest of the three Cooney girls, handed the mic over to Caroline four years ago when she enrolled at the University of Oregon.
Kate is now a senior and a paid intern in the Ducks’ sports information office.
Pat Cooney notes that his mother, Michelle, completes the family circle at Calderwood Field by “sitting on a permanent bench in centerfield.”
He admits that the pressure that piggybacks onto such family tradition can be “a super-burden” for a 16-year-old student-athlete.
“We probably practice reverse-nepotism,” Cooney said. “And her granddad is Lou Panizzon, so the legacy is there before he or I even show up.”
Panizzon’s coaching prowess earned him induction into the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table Hall of Fame in 1992 and the California Interscholastic Federation Hall of Fame in 2002.
He was a multisport star at Carpinteria High before coaching the Warriors to five CIF championships — four in football and one in baseball.
“You feel proud walking around with him because he’s the guy to know in Carpinteria,” Charlotte said. “His former players come up to shake his hand all the time.
“I’ve always wanted to be like him … to have others want to be around me like that.
“And then there’s my other grandpa who is well known, as well, in Santa Barbara.”
Mike Cooney became the right-hand man for Santa Barbara High baseball coach Fred Warrecker when his son, Pat, donned the catcher’s gear for the Dons in the early 1980s.
He remained there until the last of Warrecker’s 43 seasons at the school in 2015.
“My dad has been coaching with me here ever since then,” Pat Cooney said. “So Char’s got that — and her dad as the AD and her dad as the coach — and layers and layers of pressure before she even steps on the field.
“She’s got a tough go of it.”
And yet, Charlotte relishes every minute of the challenge.
Woman for All Seasons
Cooney is one of the first females to play varsity baseball for a Santa Barbara-area high school.
Ghazaleh “Oz” Sailors became the first when she pitched and played second base for San Marcos High during the spring of 2011.
Sailors and Marti Sementelli of Van Nuys’ Birmingham High School made history that spring as the first females to ever oppose each other as starting pitchers in a high school varsity baseball game.
Cate School had two females play on its varsity baseball team in back-to-back seasons.
Emma Cordova pitched two-thirds of an inning in 2017, while Emily Burns earned All-Frontier League honors as a first baseman during the 2018 season. Burns continued on to play rugby at UCLA.
Cooney actually excels in four different sports at Carpinteria High.
She’s helped lead the girls tennis team, coached by Charles Bryant and Sara Scott, to three consecutive Citrus Coast League championships.
Charlotte and her partners have won the league’s Most Valuable Player Award for doubles in all three of those fall seasons — as a freshman with senior Ariana Lounsbury, and the last two years with Keyla Manriquez.
“Ariana was probably just 5-feet tall but she was not going to let us lose,” Cooney recalled. “She taught me how to strategize and how to mentally play tennis.
“And Keyla always wanted me to be at my best and I wanted her to be at her best, so that was a good partnership the last two seasons.”
Family is at the nexus of her tennis career, too.
“My mom definitely impacted that because she played the sport, but it was more my grandma, Michelle, who got me started,” Charlotte said. “I picked it up when I was pretty little.
“She’s my dad’s mom and she played at Knowlwood (Tennis Club), so during the summer we’d do those little summer camps there.”
Charlotte put her tennis racket away in the fifth grade to concentrate on baseball and basketball, but then “picked it back up my freshman year.”
“I was like, ‘Let’s try this again,’” she said.
She competed simultaneously for two Carpinteria High squads during the fall, joining the first Warriors’ team to ever compete in Southern California’s Scholastic Surf Series.
Charlotte claimed the team’s first-ever individual victory in October when she won the girls longboard division in an eight-school meet at Malibu’s Zuma Beach.
The Warriors capped the surfing season in January in the five- to eight-foot swells off Carpinteria’s own Rincon Point.
Cooney took second in the girls longboard and third in the shortboard in the hometown surf.
“I’ve always loved the beach, ever since I was little, and Rincon is close to our home,” she said. “During COVID in 2020, I had school on Zoom for only about an hour, so I’d go down there every single day to surf after school.
“That’s when I got super into it.”
Basketfull of Awards
Cooney also has been a three-year star in varsity basketball. She won All-Citrus League First Team honors as a both a freshman and junior, and was a second-teamer as a sophomore.
Her basketball coach, Henry Gonzales, was the star quarterback for her grandfather’s CIF finalist football team of 1979.
“Coach Henry is a good guy who’s definitely impacted my sports and my life outside of school,” Charlotte said. “He has the same type of mentality as my grandpa Lou.
“He played for him so he kind of passes on the same messages. He’s hard on me because he wants me to be the best I can be.”
Panizzon served Carpinteria High in nearly every capacity, from teacher to coach, and principal to athletic director.
He had earned his master’s degree in education at UC Santa Barbara after returning from his service in Vietnam as a U.S. Army infantry officer.
He earned a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart for the wounds he suffered.
Panizzon’s influence at the school endures even though he retired from coaching in 1989. He led an effort to raise $1.25 million to augment the construction of Carpinteria Valley Memorial Stadium in 1999.
“He still comes to the school on Mondays for what we call WOW Talks — Words of Wisdom,” Pat Cooney said. “He brings snippets from coaches like Pete Carroll or Whitey Herzog.
“Today it was Mia Hamm. It even might be from someone like Nelson Mandela.
“He’s one of these amazing jewels.”
Panizzon and his wife, Susie, a longtime community leader and retired teacher, live just around the corner from their daughter’s family.
“I see him almost every day,” Charlotte said. “I’m always going over there to watch the Dodgers with them — they’re big Dodger fans.
“His perspective is more about all of my sports and how I handle myself as an overall leader.
“During basketball season, he’s always sending me a quote before the game or after the game, and telling me what I need to work on.”
Her Grandpa Cooney is also a source of motivational messages. She said he’ll mix them in with instructions on “how to throw a curveball.”
She actually roots for his team and not the Panizzons’ beloved Dodgers.
“We always talk about the Yankees,” she said. “Derek Jeter is one of my idols. I’m always reading his books and all that.
“I’m No. 2 because of him. I really love the way he plays the game and the way he acts off the field, too, which is a big thing.”
Family Values
The Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table honored Charlotte’s leadership this year with the Phil Womble Ethics in Sports Award.
The late Phil Womble originated the award 20 years ago to acknowledge the qualities of “accountability; respect of teammates, opponents and officials; honesty, positive attitude, reliability, loyalty, sportsmanship, others above self and team above personal interest.”
Cooney’s sister, Kate, a soccer player as well as a track and cross-country athlete, won the Womble Award for Carpinteria High in 2020. The award is sponsored by Dave Pintard and the Pintard Group.
“That’s probably our favorite award out of all of them,” Pat Cooney said. “It speaks to their accomplishments as well as their ability to handle stuff and to lead and those sorts of things.”
Charlotte admits that her many activities sometime leave her “a little short on hours.”
She has nevertheless maintained a grade-point average of 4.67. She has made the Carpinteria High Dean’s List in each of her semesters at the school.
She’s resisted the suggestion of switching to girls softball ever since her Little League days.
“I’ve gotten so much support in what I’m doing, so I’ll tell them, ‘No, I play baseball,’ and move on,” she said.
Nowhere does Charlotte get more support than from her Warrior teammates, many of whom have played with her since Little League.
“They’ve all kind of grown up together, so it’s not unnatural at all,” her father said. “It’s not like Charlotte’s pushing her way in and we’re not forcing anything on anybody.
“She just wants to be a regular kid on a good team, and the teammates around her have been fantastic.”
Those teammates, Charlotte pointed out, are also “my best friends.”
“They’ll ask me to come eat with them or whatever,” Charlotte said. “I’m their teammate during practice and games, but outside of baseball we’re also part of the same friends group, so it’s pretty cool.
“They’re super, super good about it. It’s not like anything unique to them because we started playing baseball together.”
They stick up for her whenever she’s heckled about being the only girl on the field.
That turned one of Charlotte’s worst moments as a Warrior into one of the best.
“I had a big error toward the end of a game that cost us a run and led to the other team winning,” she said. “The other team started saying some stuff.
“The guys on my team could’ve been like, ‘Oh, c’mon Char, you’re better than that … That can’t happen.’ Or they could’ve said something about me being the coach’s daughter, and stuff like that.
“But no, the guys came over and just lifted me back up because they really do love me, and they show me that in really cool ways.”
Family is about love, after all. And Charlotte Cooney is playing for a big one in Carpinteria.