LAST OF 3 PARTS

While most of his Hawaii teammates packed up and headed off to play summer baseball around the country, Matt Cooper simply headed home.

He woke up for his first day of the summer in Marysville, Wash., took one look around, and immediately got confused.

"I was like, ‘now what do I do?’" he said. "It was weird. It was the first summer I hadn’t played (baseball) in my whole life."

UH’s best pitcher last season took the summer off as part of a new game plan Hawaii coach Mike Trapasso put in place for a few of his guys.

It came following a 2013 season in which half of Trapasso’s pitching staff sat out the entire fall. Three different pitchers had major surgeries in the spring, prompting the 13-year UH coach to limit his pitchers’ innings in the summer, so he’d get a chance to work with them come fall ball.

"What we were able to do by resting him this summer is we built him up, he pitched in all of our scrimmages this fall, where we would have normally shut him down, and rather than shut him down at the end of fall, we started an aggressive long toss right away," Trapasso said.

As a result, Cooper will take the mound Friday night as UH’s opening-day starter against No. 6 Oregon. It’s his first game of any kind in 265 days. It’s also the one he has anticipated the most in his entire life.

"It’s definitely the most exciting game I’ll ever pitch up to this point," Cooper said. "When I heard I was going Friday, I was really, really pumped, because it’s the first game and getting to start the first game is really a special thing and a great opportunity."

Cooper did everything he was asked in the fall to earn the starting nod, but where he really excelled was when he moved into the starting rotation a month into last season.

He earned UH’s first home win of the season with a three-hit shutout against Gonzaga and allowed only one earned run in his first 29 innings pitched at Les Murakami Stadium.

His pitch-to-contact mentality works perfectly in a park like the one UH plays in and he finished the year with a 3.14 ERA in 86 innings, striking out 69 with only 15 walks.

What’s scarier is that Cooper thinks the time he spent resting in the summer has made him an even tougher pitcher in his second year with the program.

"I definitely feel better this year," Cooper said. "To be totally honest, it was a nice mental break. It made me miss the game and I’ve been counting down the days."

Count no more. The 2014 UH baseball season begins Friday.