Jessica Shepard might be the best player on a star-studded Notre Dame team
In the months since Notre Dame won the 2018 national championship, the coaching staff has said multiple times that the Fighting Irish wouldn’t have won without one player in particular.
That player wasn’t Arike Ogunbowale, the team’s top scorer and the player who hit two buzzer-beaters in the Final Four. It wasn’t Marina Mabrey, the natural shooting guard who led the team at point guard due to a rash of injuries. It wasn’t Brianna Turner, the team’s best interior player in 2016–17; she redshirted the 2017–18 season with an injury. And it wasn’t Jackie Young, who is arguably the team’s best athlete, top WNBA prospect, and most versatile player.
The player the coaching staff continually referenced was Jessica Shepard, a 6-4 forward who won a championship in her first season with Notre Dame after transferring from Nebraska. Shepard averaged 15.6 points and 8.1 rebounds per game last season, good for second and first on the team, respectively, and was the interior anchor for a guard-heavy Fighting Irish team.
This season, all five players are back and all but Young are seniors, giving head coach Muffet McGraw a starting lineup that looks like an all-star team. Ogunbowale has received the lion’s share of the attention: she is a finalist for the Naismith Trophy, which honors the national player of the year, and she is averaging a team-leading 21.5 points per game. It also hasn’t hurt that her buzzer-beaters from last season are still replayed heavily during women’s basketball TV broadcasts or that she competed on “Dancing With the Stars” in the offseason, earning her some mainstream recognition. But Shepard has improved dramatically this season and is quietly making a case for being the best player on Notre Dame’s team.
On offense, Shepard has upped her scoring to 16.9 points per game while also being more efficient than a season ago. She is shooting 60.7% from the floor, up from 56.5% last season, and scoring 1.25 points per scoring attempt (PPSA), up from 1.17 last season. Her shooting percentage and PPSA both put her among the top 50 players in the country this season, and she’s doing that while registering the second-highest usage rate of any Fighting Irish player. (Usage rate measures the percentage of a team’s offensive possessions that a player ends with a shot, free throw, or turnover while she is on the court.)
Shepard is also corralling two more rebounds per game (10.1) than she did last season, helping her average a double-double. Her offensive rebounds often lead to put-backs, while her defensive rebounds often lead to fast-break layups. “The way she rebounds has been amazing,” McGraw said in January. “It gets our transition game going. She’s outleting almost to half-court sometimes.”
With Shepard jump-starting many Fighting Irish fast breaks, Notre Dame leads the country in points per game despite playing the nation’s toughest schedule. Shepard has upped her assists from 2.4 per game a season ago to 3.2 this year. She also runs the floor well and often finishes fast breaks that start with her fellow post player Turner getting the defensive rebound.
Finally, Shepard has rounded out her game this season, nearly doubling her steals per game and committing slightly fewer turnovers. She was a unanimous First Team All-ACC selection for the second straight year and one of ten candidates for the Katrina McClain Award, which recognizes the nation’s best power forward.
As the Irish have set their sights on another national championship, Shepard has stepped up her game even more. She had 30 points and 13 rebounds in the ACC Conference Tournament final against Louisville; that win assured Notre Dame of a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and was likely the reason they ended up in the Chicago region, less than 100 miles away. In the tournament, Shepard has been a huge reason why Notre Dame has outscored opponents by 22 on fast breaks, 20 on second-chance points, and 76 points in the paint in three games. Individually, she has averaged 21.7 points and 12.0 rebounds, and she carried the Fighting Irish early in a thrilling Sweet Sixteen win over Texas A&M, scoring 11 straight points in the first quarter. After the game, McGraw called her “unstoppable”; a day later, Turner called her “the strongest player I’ve ever played against or with.”
Shepard, Turner, Ogunbowale, and Mabrey comprise what McGraw labeled “probably the best senior class we’ve ever had.” To cut down the nets, Notre Dame will need contributions from all of its seniors, but perhaps especially from Shepard. Millions of people remember Ogunbowale’s championship-winning shot last season, but it was Shepard who led the team with 19 points that night. This year, Shepard has quietly produced like that night in and night out, and her consistency could be the ticket to another trophy next week.
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