One To Watch: Jessica Shepard, Nebraska
Jessica Shepard gave a small laugh when I told her I enjoyed watching her play. It was Saturday afternoon of Thanksgiving weekend, and her Nebraska team had just lost to Connecticut, 88-46.
“You get the opportunity to play them, it’s a great opportunity,” Shepard said, standing courtside, as the last few fans filed out of Hartford’s XL Center. “It exposes our weaknesses, tells us what we need to improve on.”
But what’s striking about Shepard, a 6’4″ center who was the lone freshman named to the Naismith Award watchlist, is how many strengths she possesses already within her game.
Her ability to score is otherworldly already. Even matched up against Breanna Stewart one-on-one, Shepard consistently found ways to get her shots in the post, finishing 5-for-9 in 26 minutes of play. And this was her worst game of the season—for the season, she’s averaging 19.5 points per game in just 23 minutes per game. Her Cornhuskers are 7-1.
“My moves were getting me open shots,” Shepard said. “It was just my legs, which comes back to conditioning.”
The points/40 minutes rate of 33.5 is the best in the nation this season, reflecting the fact that if Shepard could get her shot against Stewart, it means she can do so against anyone in the country. It’s early, but that points/40 would be, over a full season, the best mark since Odyssey Sims put up an even 34 in 2013-14 for Baylor.
Sims, of course, did it as a scoring guard, and a senior. Shepard is just getting started.
Accordingly, her concern was conditioning when we spoke— she wants that 23 to inch up into the 30s. She suffered a knee injury last December that ended her celebrated high school career, and though rehab is over, the process of getting to ideal game shape is ongoing. But in a tight game against Creighton on December 6, Shepard hit 30 minutes for the first time as a college player.
And while teams are focused on trying to stop her, that’s merely allowed her to unfurl some of her other skills. She’s tallied ten assists in her last three games after a total of nine in her first five games, passing out of double teams with flair, as she did here against Evansville.
Her next big test comes Saturday night at both ends against Cal’s Kristine Anigwe, a fellow freshman big who just scored 43 points against Sacramento State. But as Nebraska, a team with only one loss all season, enters Big Ten play, it seems pretty clear Shepard’s only begun to show the world what kind of player she can be. The results are impressive already.