Senior wing Elle Evans capped off her Kansas career in style on Friday night by winning the College 3-Point Championship at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
Not only did Evans emerge victorious from the eight-player field in the women’s 3-point contest — which also included Ryanne Allen (Villanova), Shay Ciezki (Indiana), Iyana Moore (Notre Dame), Natalie Pasco (Boise State), Sydney Shaw (West Virginia), Haleigh Timmer (Oklahoma State) and Lee Volker (Marquette) — she then proceeded to take down DePaul men’s basketball player CJ Gunn in the Battle of Champions, 24-23, to earn the overall 3-point shooting title.
Throw in the Team Shootout, in which Evans teamed up with Jaylin Henderson of Portland State men’s basketball and Fletcher Loyer of Purdue men’s basketball, and she won three events in total on the night.
The Team Shootout had coed groups of three players competing to make shots from six spots on the floor, including from halfcourt, as quickly as possible. Evans, Henderson and Loyer completed the entire task with 20.7 seconds remaining in the clock, dramatically outperforming their two opposing trios.
The 3-point contest consisted of shooting sets of five balls at a time from five locations around the perimeter (two corners, two wings and straight on). The fifth in each set was a “money ball” worth two points.
In the first round, Evans and Volker tied for the lead with scores of 19 points, and they advanced to the semifinals along with Ciezki and Moore, who had 17 apiece and beat out Pasco on a tiebreaker. The second round saw Evans take it up a notch to lead the remaining four players with a score of 22, setting up a matchup with Ciezki in the final.
Ciezki dropped from 19 to 16 in the last round. Evans reached 14 by the conclusion of her third rack and ended up tallying 22 again to cruise to victory.
Gunn had not experienced such a straightforward path through the men’s competition. He only totaled 13 in his first round and had to advance on a tiebreaker. But he got better as the event progressed and beat Texas Tech’s Donovan Atwell 22-20 in both the semifinal and the final.
He did even better in the Battle of Champions and hit the money ball on every single rack to score 23, setting up a daunting task for Evans.
The Edwardsville, Illinois, native only had 13 points through three racks. But she went 5-for-5 on the right wing to get to 19 before an increasingly excited crowd of 6,802. She drained her first three attempts from the right corner, missed a potential tying shot but then knocked down the final money ball to win outright.
It was a dramatic display of a skill that Evans provided quite consistently during her two years as a Jayhawk. The former North Dakota State transfer finished with a 3-point percentage of 43.6% during her tenure, which tied a school record set by Sandy Shaw. As a senior, she improved from 42.8% beyond the arc to 45.2%.
Evans averaged 8.2 points per game in her final season at KU, down from 14.4 as a junior. She started 16 games but came off the bench beginning in mid-January.
