New London ― It was a short night.

Coy Spooner and his U.S. Coast Guard Academy teammates got back to campus at 1 a.m. after wrestling against Stevens Institute in Hoboken, N.J. Spooner got up at 5:45, had breakfast at 6:15 and eased into a workout ― mostly “cardio stuff” meant to elevate his heart rate ― at 8.

His first class of the day, “Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean,” would start at 9:25.

So began Dec. 7, a day like many other days Spooner has relished during the semester that just ended, a semester that seven months earlier seemed like it might be in jeopardy.

In May, Spooner was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system, part of the body’s germ-fighting immune system.

It was reasonable to think the disease could upend Spooner’s pursuit of his goals, which included graduating with his class this spring; leading the academy’s corps of 1,100 cadets as regimental commander; captaining the wrestling team; and winning an NCAA Division III national championship at 197 pounds, a title that eluded him in March.

But as Spooner and those around him will tell you, the cancer, though formidable, never had a chance.

“I feel like I’m ready now,” Spooner, a two-time Division III All-American wrestler, said that day in early December, as he contemplated resuming intercollegiate competition in January. He had recently begun practicing and traveling with his teammates, but had yet to grapple with an opponent from another school.

The instant he does, he will be ranked No. 2 in the country in his weight class, according to Kevin Bratland, the academy’s head wrestling coach.

The wrestler who upset Spooner in last season’s national championship match, Massoma Endene, of Wartburg College of Waverly, Iowa, figures to be ranked No. 1.

“Wrestling is my passion. It’s what keeps me going,” Spooner said. “I took off seven months, the longest break I’ve had since I was 4 years old.”

Standing tall

As he moves about the academy campus, the slender, 6-foot-4 Spooner is easy to spot.

But it’s his status as regimental commander and his confident, affable air that have made him especially familiar to his peers and superiors alike, all of whom exchange acknowledgments with him as they pass.

“Cadets don’t salute each other, but the deference is there,” Cmdr. Aaron Casavant, the academy’s assistant commandant of cadets, said of much of the corps’ obvious respect for Spooner. “He’s well liked.”

In his role as regimental commander, Spooner, who heads a leadership team that includes 10 other cadets, is responsible for the corps’ functioning, Casavant said. When the corps receives marching orders, it’s Spooner’s duty to ensure cadets get to the right place at the right time, wearing the proper uniform.

Casavant and Capt. Arthur Ray, then the commandant of cadets, named Spooner regimental commander last spring, choosing him from among more than a dozen applicants to serve when school resumed following summer break. After initial screenings, they interviewed several finalists.

“He performed fantastically,” Casavant said of Spooner. “He absolutely stood out.”

Soon thereafter, Spooner was diagnosed with cancer.

He weathered an upper respiratory infection in November 2022, and had a swollen lymph node in his neck during the semester break. In January, back on campus, he got sick, which was unusual for him. Then a couple of nodes swelled.

“I’ll usually have a beat-up face during wrestling season,” Spooner said. “I asked a doctor at the academy, and we thought the swelling could just be a reaction to that.”

Wrestling with great success, Spooner deferred a more thorough assessment of his health until after the season. At the Division III nationals in March in Roanoke, Va., he felt good, but ended up losing the championship match, a defeat he called “heartbreaking.”

After multiple rounds of antibiotics failed to produce results, Bratland, the wrestling coach, took Spooner to an urgent care facility off campus. Blood tests and a chest X-ray detected no sign of cancer. More antibiotics were prescribed.

Near the end of April, Spooner, growing worried, saw Dr. Thomas Lesnik, a Norwich ENT-otolaryngologist, who scheduled a CT scan and a biopsy.

“He said, ‘We’ll get you in for a biopsy on Tuesday,’ ” Spooner recalled. “I had a final (exam) Tuesday, so I asked if I could reschedule the biopsy. The scheduler said, ‘No, you’re coming in Tuesday.’ I knew it was serious.”

He took his final early, and had the biopsy May 2.

His mom, Dionne Spooner, called the next day, and said she was flying to Connecticut from the family home near Phoenix to accompany him to his doctor’s appointment that Friday, May 5.

Lesnik had called Mrs. Spooner with the biopsy results.

“He didn’t want Coy to have to deal with that diagnosis alone,” she said. “On Friday, Dr. Lesnik and I gave him the news.”

“I remember waking up that day,” Spooner said. “I didn’t sleep good, and I felt so bad. At the doctor’s office, the receptionist seemed kind of sad. Then the doctor comes in and says the reason my mom was there was because it was cancer. He said, ‘We don’t know the extent yet, but you have some kind of lymphoma.’ ”

The pronouncement left Spooner speechless.

“You’ve just been told you have cancer at 21 years old. I didn’t know what to say,” he said. “I didn’t even know what to think about it.”

Without delay, Spooner and his mom put his affairs in order at the academy and made arrangements to return to Phoenix, where he would meet with an oncologist at the Mayo Clinic. Before leaving, he got some encouragement from Dan Rose, the academy’s athletic director.

Rose also faced cancer as a young man. In his second year at the academy, where he was hired in 1996 as a track and field coach, he developed a lump in his neck. It was Hodgkin’s.

“Six months of chemotherapy, and I never looked back,” Rose said in an interview. “Here we were, Coy’s a national runner-up, and he has a lump in his neck. I asked to speak to him before he left, and when he came in, I told him it was a very beatable thing. I’m living proof.”

Back home, Spooner fretted that his parents and his two younger siblings were being overly attentive.

“I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me,” he said. “I told myself I wasn’t going to let it (cancer) be an excuse for not living the life I wanted to live. It was just something that happened to me …”

Spooner allowed that he’s “a stoic person” who reads a lot of stoicism, including the writings of Marcus Aurelius.

In Phoenix, a PET scan detected active cancer cells in lymph nodes in Spooner’s neck and chest and in “a speck” on his spleen, evidence that the disease had spread enough to warrant a Stage 3 classification in the estimation of Dr. Allison Rosenthal and her team at the Mayo Clinic, Spooner said.

His case would require six months of chemotherapy, with treatments ― a total of 12 ― delivered every two weeks via an intravenous needle and a chemotherapy “port” inserted in his chest

His first treatment was scheduled for May 26.

Stuff of legend

Spooner’s response to his treatments already has become academy lore.

The morning after his first treatment, which he told a teammate felt like being stabbed in the chest with a knife, Spooner ran eight miles, a feat in keeping with his penchant for outlandish physical challenges.

In recent years, he has hiked for 24 hours without sleeping; “bear crawled” on his feet and hands for a mile; and hopped a mile on first one leg and then the other before running a mile for time.

Two weeks after his first treatment, he decided to attempt something that had occurred to him before his diagnosis. He would run a marathon, then row a marathon.

With his father, Nolan, trailing behind him with a supply of drinks and snacks, Spooner set out to run 26.2 miles though he had never run more than 10 miles at a time. At 18 miles, with his hip flexors tightening, he downed Pedialyte and kept going. He jogged and briefly walked a bit thereafter, struggling at the 24-mile mark but ultimately finishing at a gymnasium. There, he sat down at a rowing machine and cranked out another 26.2 miles.

At the academy, it’s now known as a “Spoonathon.”

The wrestling coaches, Bratland and his assistant, Dylan Foley, have completed Spoonathons, as have some of Spooner’s teammates. Foley estimated close to two-dozen people have done one.

By July, Spooner was itching to return to the academy. He wanted to wrestle, graduate on time and fulfill his duties as regimental commander. He told his teammates what he had been going through. He posted an account of his Spoonathon on Instagram.

Academy brass, however, had to be persuaded that it was best for Spooner to return to campus in the middle of his treatments.

“Given his particular diagnosis, I didn’t want to put him in a position where he would not get better,” Casavant, the assistant commandant of cadets, said. “I wanted an Ensign Spooner (upon graduation from the academy) more than I wanted a Regimental Commander Spooner. I was a cautionary voice.”

Casavant offered Spooner the option of taking a year off to fully recover at home, an option he said Spooner turned down “in no uncertain terms.” Spooner, he said, was steadfast in his belief that he could accomplish all that he intended.

“Remarkable is the perfect word to describe him,” Foley, the assistant wrestling coach, said of Spooner.

After Spooner and his family arranged for him to undergo a half-dozen chemotherapy treatments at Smilow Cancer Hospital Care Center in Waterford, Spooner returned to school in August.

His mom temporarily moved near the academy to see him through the remaining treatments.

On Nov. 9, a PET scan showed Spooner’s cancer was in remission. Three days later, on his 22nd birthday, a surprise party his girlfriend and his mother had arranged “floored him,” his mother said. Every member of the wrestling team was there.

Spooner said his experience has left him more mature, with a better understanding of who he is.

“When I came here, I was very focused on results, not on people,” he said. “I wrote down goals and worked to achieve them. … My perspective about what’s real, what’s important has changed. We stress out about things that are small, like having to do five pages of reading before a class.”

“Knowing I pushed others to do something they wouldn’t have done makes me feel proud,” he added. “I did it to show you can do a lot more than you think.”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com