The last pass of practice had already been thrown.
It was an early morning in Provo, the kind where the dry mountain air still holds onto the cold of the night, and the BYU women’s lacrosse team was wrapping up its final practice before a long weekend road trip to compete in the Cactus Classic Tournament in Tempe, Arizona.
Cleats scraped against turf. Sticks dropped into bags. Players moved with quiet efficiency toward the sideline, already shifting from athletes to students, both physically and mentally, going from practice to the rest of their day on campus.
At the center of it, Abigail Hooper — a team leader who, at the time, was also running for student body president — had just finished speaking to her teammates. Her voice, steady and direct, was the last one the team heard before breaking.
Then, just as quickly, the moment had dissolved, and practice was over. Most players simply walked off.
Hooper didn’t.
Instead, she turned and jogged toward two teenage girls waiting near the sideline.
Without hesitation, she picked up a stick and started passing with them. With quick, clean motions, she was fully engaged. Their parents lingered nearby, talking with coaches.
A recruiting visit, maybe. But it didn’t feel nearly as transactional. There wasn’t a means to an end in this interaction. In fact, it felt like something closer to instinct.
For several minutes, Hooper stayed there, completely locked in. Not on the looming election, or the campaign that had consumed the past several months of her life.
Just on them.
This was days before the results, with the outcome still unknown.
And still, she stayed.
That same instinct of being present in smaller, quiet moments has defined Hooper’s past season in a different kind of arena.
This was Feb. 18. The election was still eight days away.
Just a week earlier, at the first interview with a Daily Universe reporter, a slightly rushed but composed Abigail Hooper sat down ready to talk. Faint imprints from lab safety goggles still marked Hooper’s face, a subtle but telling reminder of a schedule that rarely pauses — further evidence of a hurried transition from one arena giving way immediately to the next.
A student, an athlete and a leader. And often, all in the same hour.
By Feb. 26, Hooper and her running mate, Jayne Jonas, would be elected BYU student body president and vice president. But the path to that moment stretched across months and responsibilities that rarely overlap so completely.
“I keep getting asked, how are you going to be president and play lacrosse next year?” Hooper said.
Her answer is simple: “You can do both … don’t let someone put you in a box.”
That attitude isn’t new to Hooper. Long before the campaign, Hooper’s teammates and coaches said her leadership was already well-established.
“Day one of tryouts, I was a brand new coach,” said first-year head coach Melissa Nash. “In 30 seconds I knew that she had been a captain before, or will be a captain … Immediate leader.”
Her teammates, on the other hand, often see it in the details.
“She gives 100% effort in all our practices and all of our lifts, she’s never cutting corners,” Medeline Larkins said.
Mia Chambers added, “I can count on one hand the amount of times she’s not been in a good mood … She’s always working so hard, it makes me want to work hard.”
Even when she’s not directly in the game, coaches say, she remains engaged.
“I think about our Santa Barbara games, she showed up and played out of her mind,” Nash said. “But when she was off the field as a sub, she was still just as involved, just as engaged, cheering on her teammates, asking us questions, getting the team excited … That's quintessential captain and president material.”
When asked to describe Hooper’s leadership in one word, the answer came quickly: “Example.”
That idea of being an example and always getting others involved connects directly to why Hooper decided to run for BYU’s student body president in the first place.
Her main motivation traces back to one of her own brother’s experience at BYU.
“It's hard seeing someone you love go through four years of school and come out of it and feel like they didn't have the experience that they wanted, and they didn't receive the love that they deserved,” she said. “I don’t ever want a student to feel that way.”
That became the foundation of Hooper and Jonas’s campaign message: “Be the One.”
“Belonging doesn’t come from waiting for it,” Hooper said. “It comes from actively reaching out and serving others.”
Hooper’s family sees that same pattern in her.
“She’s always been super passionate about helping the student body,” her brother Troy said.
Her sister Madison added, “She really wants to make sure people feel like they belong.”
When Hooper and Jonas initially decided to run back in November, they weren’t even particularly close. They had known of one another through their time volunteering with BYUSA (BYU’s Student Service Association), but weren’t close friends by any means. As Jonas put it, “We were kind of set up.”
But the partnership developed quickly, built on complementary strengths. Jonas herself is a former athlete. She played golf and volleyball in high school, before her career was derailed from an ACL injury.
“That’s something that really drew me to Abigail in a weird way … her sports background,” Jonas said. “You can tell she’s an athlete when you talk to her, and I admire the way she leads.”
The contrast between Abigail’s many different responsibilities and roles became even more visible as the campaign went on.
Just a day before the Cactus Classic Tournament in Arizona, there was a campus-wide Q&A where the entire student body could attend and ask all of the candidates whatever they desired. Obviously, attendance from the candidates was mandatory, but Hooper’s role as captain on the women’s lacrosse team complicated things (as it so often does).
So, Hooper arrived briefly, fully-clad in athletic gear donning the “COUGARS LACROSSE” logo, suitcase at her side, while Jonas looked more akin to, well, a politician.
Hooper had technically “attended” the Q&A, doing her duty. Then, she had to promptly catch a flight, leaving Jonas behind to man the ship alone.
Luckily for them, Jonas “actually found it easier … I didn’t have to share my 45-second answer,” she said.
Their biggest public moment, however, came on Feb. 11, the night of their sole rally.
The event, a silent disco, drew a noticeably large crowd. Students filled the space wearing wireless headphones, dancing and moving between conversations. Other rallies that night ended early due to low turnout. Hooper and Jonas’s event stayed open late, eventually having to turn people away.
“To really interact with the student body, I was like, this is why I’m doing it,” Hooper said. “It brought so much light to my life.”
Support came from across campus, including many of Hooper’s lacrosse teammates.
“Out of anybody I know to run for student body president, Hoop is at the top of the list,” Chambers said. “It made the most sense. Hoop is good at everything she does.”
Even those outside of Hooper’s immediate circle noticed something different about her and the campaign.
“You can just feel their passion,” one attendee said. “You can tell that she’s in it to make people feel like they’re known.”
As the campaign moved forward post-rally, however, the timeline seriously tightened.
A week after was the campus-wide Q&A, then immediately after that the tournament in Arizona. Instead of flying back to Provo from Tempe, Abigail flew straight to Washington D.C., for the Big 12 on the Hill Conference, representing BYU at the nation’s capitol in front of congressmen and women. Then there were more meetings, and even more lacrosse practices and games. Did anyone mention that she’s a full-time student and TA?
And always, there was the awareness that everything would come down to a single day — Election Day, Feb. 26.
“I was nervous,” Jonas said. “But it felt like the 26th was game day. I was so locked in.”
For Hooper, that kind of pressure felt all-too familiar, but this time, the stakes were entirely different.
“It’s nerve wracking, realizing that everything you’ve worked for comes down to 10 hours,” she said.
Hooper as well as Jonas’s biggest fear wasn’t actually losing itself.
“My biggest fear was disappointing the people that had supported our campaign,” Hooper said.
In fact, Hooper had already imagined what that would look like.
“The scariest thing for me would be to text my lacrosse group chat and say that I lost," she said.
Those fears would have to wait, as election day came with another challenge.
Hooper was sick, running a fever of 102, and spent most of the morning at an Urgent Care before eventually returning to campaign efforts. Meanwhile, Jonas organized their volunteers to keep everything moving.
By that point, the campaign had already reached hundreds of students, including Hooper and Jonas texting more than 800 people on voting day alone.
Later that night, the results were finally announced.
“I was so shocked,” Jonas said. “I still kind of am.”
Hooper described the moment as overwhelming.
“Every hour I was like, we need to work harder … This seven-month journey came down to this one moment.”
Against all odds, the stresses of seemingly dozens of responsibilities, and literal sickness, they had won.
But, instead of staying and celebrating with her current campaign team, Hooper had left to find her lacrosse teammates, who were playing an intramural basketball game, and tell them the news in person.
In some ways, it reflected what those around her (especially her coaches) had been saying all along.
“Our team is just cheerleaders,” coach Nash said. “Every practice, ‘Hoop for president’ is said at least three times.”
Still, Hooper couldn’t celebrate too much afterwards. That 102 fever had yet to dissipate.
Just as it apparently did physically, the campaign came with other mental and emotional trade-offs.
“It cost time. A lot of time,” Hooper said. “And relationships.”
Hooper and Jonas both described the difficulty of asking for help.
“It’s hard asking people for favors … that was one of the hardest things,” Hooper said.
“At the end, I don’t want people to feel like I’m using them,” Jonas added. “I just didn't want them to think that our friendship is for this moment.”
But these challenges also reinforced something Hooper now says without hesitation.
“You can do both … If I love lacrosse and I love serving our student body, why can’t I do both?” she said.
Her coaches agree wholeheartedly.
“You can do it all when you have your foundation set in the right place, and Hoop is in the right place," Nash said. "She does it all, and she does it all really well.”
They’ve also seen the growth.
“Her confidence has shot up," Nash said.
Now, Hooper describes her identity not as one role or another, but as a balance between all of them.
“When I play lacrosse, it’s the only thing I think about … When I’m in my student body role, that’s what I think about … They all represent me, but kind of giving them the time and space that they need in their specific space and times.”
In his now iconic speech titled, “Citizenship in a Republic,” Theodore Roosevelt said, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”
The arena, as Roosevelt described it, is where effort is visible. Where outcomes are eventually decided and some names are even remembered.
For Hooper, one of her many arenas would come to include a campaign stage, a ballot, and ultimately, a win. But the clearer picture came several days earlier, before any result had been announced.
On that cold February morning just a week after the rally, with the campaign still unresolved and the conclusion still uncertain, the indoor practice facility began to empty like it always did around 8 a.m.
Teammates grabbed their sticks and bags. Practice had ended. And while everything she had been working towards for the past year still hung in the balance, Hooper stayed — passing a ball back and forth with those two girls right off of the sideline, fully present, and fully engaged.
The two girls she passed with that morning weren’t recruits in any formal sense. They were just visiting for spring break — daughters of one of the program’s extended connections, but still unfamiliar faces on the sideline.
Hooper said of the moment simply, “I just wanted to make them feel like they had a good experience with the lacrosse team.”
No outcome had been secured. No title earned. Just the metaphorical and literal blood, sweat, and tears required of sacrifice, without any guarantee.
Fortunately, the election would later give her the desired result.
But in that quiet moment, amid much uncertainty and endeavors unseen, it revealed the kind of person who had already made the choice to step into yet another arena, long before anyone knew how it was really going to end.