Williams Field High School senior-to-be uses own battle with cancer to help others in same position

Sometimes the best thing one person can do for another is inspire them.

How one goes about doing that varies, but the end result — that the inspired is better off than before — is always the same.

And that’s where Williams Field High School’s Cooper Posz, this month’s nominee for the Arizona Sports Character Counts contest presented by Parker & Sons Heating, Cooling and Plumbing, comes in.

Cooper, 17, was diagnosed with Wilm’s Tumor, a type of kidney cancer on June 9, 2006. He was eight years old.

He got through it, though, and now serves as an inspiration for others who are dealing with cancer as a Hope Hero for the HopeKids Foundation.

“What I do is I go to hospitals, mainly Banner Desert and Phoenix Children’s…but what I do is I call the parent a couple days before I go and visit the child, and I’ll ask them what their favorite game is or what their favorite toy is or something like that that they are interested in,” Cooper said. “And me and my parents will go and we’ll go buy them a toy or something in that range of what it is.

“And I’ll come and I’ll hang out with them for a couple hours, and that will give a chance for their parents to talk to my parents and get information about what it’s like being a parent of a child going through cancer and me basically tell the child that, like, you can do it, you can survive.”

More than the toys or the games, that is what’s most important. As Cooper knows, believing that you will beat cancer is not particularly easy.

“When I was going through cancer, I honestly didn’t think I was going to live,” he admitted. “It was scary because I was like, ‘I’m going to die.’ I knew what cancer was.”

Of course, Cooper did not die. He not only survived, but has gone on to thrive. Currently finishing up his junior year, he’s entering his senior season of football with the goal of becoming a state champion. A cornerback, he said it would be really cool to play college football, just as his older brother did, but after football he would like to do something in broadcasting or maybe be a firefighter.

Cooper probably would have been forgiven had he decided to take it easy with his life, but that was never really an option. He said the fact that he’s gone through what he has and come out of it all the way he has, playing football in high school, is something he had never really thought his freshman and sophomore seasons.

Last October, when pink is the normal color worn for cancer awareness, his teammates wore green, his cancer ribbon color.

“It made me really emotional. It made me think, I wouldn’t be where I am today if I was never diagnosed with kidney cancer, because I’ve met all these great people, I go to a great school, I have all these friends who support me in everything I do, and my life would not be the way it is now without it,” Cooper said. “As much as it kind of pains me to say that because I went through so much, without all the hard work that I went through to survive and be where I am today, I wouldn’t be the person that I am.”

In other words, while cancer very much is a part of his life and who he is, it does not define him — at least, in a negative way.

Instead, he uses it as an avenue with which to help others.

Along with being a Hope Hero, he has held fundraisers at his school to fill Andrea’s Closet at Banner Children’s Hospital with toys and books so that every kid has something waiting for them when they are done with treatments as well as helped raise funds to send his best friend, Jette Davis, to Disneyworld and Hawaii before he unfortunately lost his battle with Ewing’s Sarcoma and passed away last year.

Cooper also served as a co-host for the Dreams of Summer Gala in February, which raised $100,000 while telling his story. That money went to the Southwest Kids Cancer Foundation to help keep AZ Camp Sunrise going. Having been a camper for eight years, now Cooper is a counselor in training for the week-long retreat where kids battling cancer can go to just be, well, kids.

“It’s just something that you can’t really explain unless you’ve gone through it,” he said of having cancer. “And that’s why it’s another cool thing to go to this camp, because you’re around people who have done the things that you’ve done, who have gone through all the things that you’ve done, where you don’t have to explain it.

“You can just sit there and like talk about them, like, ‘Oh yeah, I went through that stuff too. I went through chemo-therapy for that long, I did all this.’ You compare your scars, see whose scars are bigger. And it’s just another great experience, to be normal.”

It’s a bond every camper shares, and being at the camp gives Cooper an opportunity to talk to kids who are in the same position he once was. The importance of that kind of connection cannot be understated.

“It’s almost like you’re in, I wouldn’t say a brotherhood, but kind of like this club where you can go up to someone and be like, ‘Oh, you had cancer? I had cancer too,'” he said. “Like, I found out this year in my chemistry class this girl had the same cancer as me when she was four years old, and we sat there for the first day of class, like the whole class period, just talking about all the things we went through and all the treatments. It’s a really good conversation starter, if you’ve both had cancer.”

You can imagine how important it is for someone — especially a young person — to have someone to talk to, a sounding board of sorts. Maybe even someone to lean on. That’s what Cooper aims to do, for whoever may need his help.

There was no way he was not going to turn his life, struggles and all, into a positive for others.

“I feel like I was put on this earth for that reason,” he said. “I feel like I was put on this earth to help out other people. Not necessarily help them with their life, but make other people happier with what I’ve gone through and the experiences that I’ve had. Because there are so many other people who have done greater things than me, but I feel like in my own way I can impact this world by what I’ve gone through and going out and telling them, showing them, ‘You can do this, you can fight on, you can do anything that you put your mind to.'”