Outing etched senior in history

Not long ago, she was lost on the depth chart.
She didn’t play a ton of minutes and she didn’t score much either.
In fact, 12 times as a junior she didn’t score a point.
She averaged just two points a game, and her career high was nine.
Her role was to come in off the bench to give the starters some rest.
Game after game.
All the while scoring the occasional point here or there.
“Last year … she could score but she didn’t look to score,” JCHS senior Abby Wendel said. “This year with Catherine (Dunn) and Bri (McIntire) being gone, they were two of our top scorers. We needed someone to step up and start scoring more.
“I think she took it upon herself to go out there and look to score more.”
As a senior, she was given more of a role on offense.
Kirk Comer knew she had a great shot, but finding the best way to utilize it was the challenge.
She has often been first or second player off the bench, but her minutes went up, too. She stayed on the court longer.
Her scoring also increased. It took three games into the season to set a new career-high with 13 against Union City on Nov. 17.
Four days later, she beat that mark by four.
Six times this season she has reached double figures. Just once in 12 games has she gone without a point.
She is now tied with the team’s leading scorer — Wendel averages 16.9 points per game — with 105 field goal attempts, but Wendel has missed three games because of injury.
Only two players, freshman Shelby Caldwell (51.6 percent) and Wendel (54.3 percent), have a higher shooting percentage this year. She’s made 44.8 percent of her shots, up from 33 percent as a junior.
But there’s one thing she has that none of her teammates do: a place in the school record book.
Tuesday against Blackford, she lit up the scoreboard by tying the single-game scoring record of 40 points to destroy her previous career high while leaving the 8.6 points per game she averaged heading into the contest in the dust.
She is now second on the team with 11.3 points per game.
With 5 minutes, 23 seconds, remaining in the third quarter, she tied Cassandra Huelskamp’s record for 3-pointers in a game by hitting her seventh.
Sixty-two seconds later, she hit her eighth to stand alone atop the leaderboard.
“It was awesome,” Wendel said. “She would shoot the shot and we would all tense up.
“Is she going to make it or not?” she asked rhetorically.
She had 32 points after three quarters.
Most coaches would take out a player who has lit up the scoreboard when his or her team is leading by a bunch so as to not add insult to injury.
Midway through the fourth quarter on Tuesday, fans in the crowd started to realize Shannon Freeman’s record for points in a game was in jeopardy. When Comer — his team had a comfortable lead by then — caught on to how close she was to the feat, he called a timeout and walked over to Blackford coach Jack Norton to tell him his plan.
“Knowing the record was 40, I was sitting on the bench keeping track of her points,” said Wendel, who is expected to return to the lineup Saturday when the Patriots host South Adams. “I wanted her to reach that goal.”
Yes, she had 35 points. Yes, the Patriots had the game well in hand. But Comer was going to keep her in.
He wanted his player, a senior, to chase the record. That’s why he told Norton his intentions. He wasn’t trying to run up the score. In fact, she was the only starter still on the floor at that point.
And Blackford — it did a poor job defending most of the night until that point — stepped up on defense to try to prevent her from reaching 40.
The Bruins, who weren’t even able to score more than her in a 64-39 defeat, lost track of her with 1:19 remaining as she drained her 12th and final 3-pointer from the right corner to push her total to 38 points.
Then, with 0.1 left on the clock, she took a shot from in front of her bench and was fouled.
Hard.
A pair of free throws put her in elite company.
Freeman is the program’s all-time leading scorer with 1,458 points. Freeman’s single-season scoring record of 602 points is more than she has for her entire career.
But now, they are equals.
All it takes is one game, one stellar performance to make memories that will last a lifetime.
And become a school record holder.
Tuesday was that game.
“It was definitely exciting,” Wendel said. “I know that she’s always been able to score that much. Being able to see her go out there, play and shoot all those and to make them, it was awesome.
“It is definitely an accomplishment as a team getting her to do that, but her to be able to do it on her own it takes a lot to be able to shoot that much.”
Comer was just as amazed as Wendel.
“In 21 years of coaching I have never seen anyone shoot like that,” he said following the win Tuesday. Five more 3s and she’ll have 40 for the season, one more than Huelskamp’s record of 39. “It was neat to watch. She was in the zone.”
A dozen 3-pointers to obliterate a school record.
Forty points in a game to tie another.
Have yourself a day, Lyla Muhlenkamp.