April 1, 2018
By John Heisler
The phone rang exactly five months ago today.
It was a Wednesday, the first day of November.
University of Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Muffet McGraw was at home, anticipating her team’s opening exhibition game that same night against Indiana of Pennsylvania.
“It was (Notre Dame senior associate athletics director and women’s basketball administrator) Jill Bodensteiner on the phone,” says McGraw.
“She said Jess (Shepard) is eligible.
“I know I was screaming and jumping up and down. I couldn’t wait to get started and retool the offense to accommodate her.
“It was just a great day because really, without her, we would have had six scholarship players, and I don’t know where we would have been.”
One phone call.
Without it the Irish might not be in Columbus, Ohio, tonight playing for an NCAA title.
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Jessica Shepard seemed like a natural to play at the University of Nebraska. In fact, she committed to play for the Huskers before her season as a high school freshman began.
A 6-4 forward, she came from Fremont, Nebraska, a town of less than 30,000 people about 35 miles northwest of Omaha and 50 miles from Lincoln.
One of the most productive players in the history of Nebraska girls basketball (she averaged 33.0 points and 14.3 rebounds as a senior), Shepard was rated the best post player in the nation by ESPN coming out of Fremont High School.
“In Nebraska, there are no pro sports, so college sports are big,” Shepard says. “For me, it was just growing up playing with my siblings starting in kindergarten. I got into club basketball in third grade and I was playing with the boys. I was the only girl in a league in Omaha.
“I would go to my brother’s practices and one day I was sitting on a basketball. The coach yelled at me and made me start running the drills with them and realized I was good enough to play with the boys.”
Her two seasons with the Cornhuskers proved extremely impressive–if not spectacular. She averaged 18.5 and 18.6 points per game in those years, earning the Big Ten Freshman of the Year Award in 2016. She was a second-team All-Big Ten choice as a sophomore in 2016-17.
No Nebraska player had scored as many combined points in her freshman and sophomore seasons as Shepard did.
The Cornhuskers had been to the NCAA Championship four straight years when Shepard enrolled in Lincoln. Then Nebraska finished 18-13 in her freshman season and–after a head coaching change–7-22 in 2016-17 (the worst season in Nebraska history). The Huskers found themselves bounced out of the Big Ten Tournament in their first game both times.
“Going through the two seasons I did at Nebraska helped me grow a lot as a person,” Shepard says. “I wasn’t used to losing. I probably lost five games in all of my high school career. So then to go to a rebuilding program was tough.”
On March 27, 2017, Shepard announced her plans to transfer. On June 8, Notre Dame announced that Shepard was joining the Irish.
“I think initially she was good friends with Brianna Turner, and she knew Arike (Ogunbowale) and Marina (Mabrey) from USA basketball. So she had a level of comfort and that’s probably why she made the initial call to us,” says McGraw.
“Then coming on campus, I think she felt really comfortable with the girls. The transition for her, I thought, was seamless. She really, from the first day of practice, was the one that was encouraging the freshmen. She picked things up really quickly. She has a great basketball IQ, really understood the game.
“She was the one that would always say, `Hey, we’ll be okay.’ She never really got down. She could take criticism, could take coaching. She understood what it was like.
“The hard part for us was we didn’t want to put in a lot of new stuff and run things for her, not knowing if she was going to play or not.”
Transfers normally are required to sit out a season, but Notre Dame applied to the NCAA for a waiver in Shepard’s case in hopes she could be eligible immediately for the 2017-18 season.
That was part of a fall full of headline news in terms of Irish post players:
–In early September McGraw announced that Turner, the Irish All-American who had been injured in the middle of the 2017 NCAA Championship, would not be healthy enough to play in 2017-18.
–On Nov. 28 precocious 6-3 freshman Mikayla Vaughn tore her ACL (one of four Irish players to have that happen this year) in practice and has not played since. Interestingly, she scored 30 points in that 108-40 Nov. 1 preseason game against Indiana of Pennsylvania. Shepard had seven points and four rebounds in 15 minutes of play in that same contest.
Meanwhile, Shepard’s participation meant the Irish immediately shored up their inside game with an experienced presence.
Says McGraw, “She’s really come along in terms of what she can do because she’s really special. She can rebound, put it on the floor, she can pass, she can score in a lot of different ways. Her impact has been continual. She’s had six double-doubles in her last seven games going back to the ACC Tournament. We’ve never had that before.
“She didn’t get the attention, I didn’t think, nationally that she deserved. I think she’s one of the best power forwards in the country, and she certainly has played that way for us. We wouldn’t be here without her.”
Shepard averages 15.5 points and a team-leading 8.2 rebounds so far in 2017-18. A first-team All-ACC selection, she has averaged 19.0 points and 10.0 rebounds in five NCAA Championship games. Her overall .559 field-goal shooting percentage ranks fourth in the ACC.
Friday night in the victory over unbeaten and top-rated Connecticut she contributed 15 points and 11 rebounds.
Like McGraw, Shepard sees the Irish glass as full–as opposed to harping on the Notre Dame injury losses.
“We look around the locker room at the seven scholarship players and three walkons who are healthy,” she says. “We feel like we have everything it takes to win a national championship.
“We never felt sorry for ourselves or sat there and thought about what could have been. We focused on the phenomenal team we do have. Each player who is healthy has worked to fill some of the gaps that we lost from injury.”
McGraw sees even better days ahead for Shepard:
“She’s really just scratching the surface. We like her at the elbow in the Princeton offense because she is such a good passer, and that offense is kind of geared to have a center that can really pass. She’s doing a great job there.
“I think she is going to start stepping out and shooting more jumpers next year. This year we really needed her around the basket. When she steps out, we don’t have a lot of rebounding inside, and that offense is not really geared for that.
“She does get in the gym and shoot a lot, but I would like to see her step out and do a little bit more. With Brianna coming back next year, obviously, we’ll have somebody else on the inside.”
Tonight in the NCAA title game against Mississippi State, Shepard takes on maybe the biggest challenge of her career in matching up against 6-7 Bulldog center Teaira McCowan, who had 21 points and 25 rebounds Friday night to help eliminate Louisville.
Says Shepard, “I have seen her play in these tournament games and I have prior experience playing with her with USA Basketball. She is a great player and has improved significantly in her time at Mississippi State. She knows how to rebound, block shots and finish down low. For us, it will be defensively trying to figure out how we can stop her.”
McGraw knows tonight’s result may well depend on how successfully the Irish deal with McCowan.
“I think Jess has the strength, but we’re going to need to bring some help,” says McGraw. “That’s really hard to do with the way they shoot the ball. They’re going to spread you out and make it really tough for us to defend her. But Jess and Coco (6-4 Kristina Nelson) both are going to have that assignment.”
For Shepard it’s a chance to put an exclamation point on a transformational season.
“It’s an unreal feeling,” she says. “If you would have told me last year at this time that I would be here, I would have shaken my head and thought you were crazy. Being here says a lot about this team and these coaches.
“We’re relentless and tough. We know what we have, and we know that as long as we’re playing our game that we should be good.”
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McGraw doesn’t take her first-year addition for granted:
“I would say every game we have a toast to the state of Nebraska and Jessica Shepard for being with us because we wouldn’t be here without her.”
Notre Dame’s Hall of Fame coach won’t soon forget that impactful Nov. 1 phone call.
“Learning she could play at the last minute made it a little bit tougher because we weren’t really geared to throw the ball inside as much,” she says.
To the credit of McGraw, her staff and all the Irish they made it work in a big way.
By late tonight all that work could result in the ultimate prize.
It started with one phone call.
Senior associate athletics director John Heisler has been following the Irish sports scene since 1978.