Joe Cook grew up in Lincoln, Illinois, a small city of fifteen thousand people in central Illinois about thirty miles north of Springfield, in a basketball family of remarkable accomplishment. His older brother Norman Cook had been Lincoln Community High School's all-time leading scorer when he graduated in 1973, had been named the Big Eight Freshman of the Year at the University of Kansas in 1974 after taking the Jayhawks to the 1974 Final Four, had left Kansas after his junior year for the 1976 NBA Draft, and had been selected sixteenth overall by the Boston Celtics. Norm Cook had played 27 games over two NBA seasons before his playing career ended. Lincoln Community High School is the kind of Illinois prep basketball program whose all-time scoring records get rewritten every fifteen or twenty years and whose alumni list reads like a state-level basketball almanac. Joe Cook walked into that gym in the fall of 1983 with the family name on his back, the family tradition of competitive basketball in his lungs, and four years to add his own line to the all-time scoring ledger.
He added it. By the time Joe Cook graduated in the spring of 1987, he had scored 1,237 points at Lincoln Community High School — thirteenth all time when he left — and had averaged 18 points, 5 rebounds, and 6 assists per game for a Lincoln team that won the Big 12 conference championship his senior year. He was a 6'2" guard with the kind of three-point range that would become a Duke roster asset, the kind of defensive instinct that Coach K's program prioritized, and the academic profile that would let him into the Duke admissions class as a recruited basketball player and not as an exception. He chose Duke over Purdue, Marquette, and Evansville — three legitimate D-I programs with their own histories of recruiting Illinois guards. Mike Krzyzewski told the Lincoln Courier Herald & Review at the time of the commitment, in April 1987, that Joe Cook was a competitive person and an excellent defensive player, intelligent and well-spoken. Decades later, the same WAND-TV retrospective on the all-time Lincoln Community HS basketball lineup would slot Joe Cook into a second-team role on the franchise's all-time five, behind his nephew Brian Cook — who was twelve years away from being born when his uncle Joe signed with Duke.