Meet Jaylyn Agnew, a potential WNBA player (Juszyk / WBR)
Every so often a player comes along that possesses an indescribable ability to captivate an audience to the point where years, even decades later, the people who came to watch them play in person exude a sense of gratitude for being taken along for the ride. The Creighton men’s basketball team has produced that opportunity for the city of Omaha on a few occasions in the last 20 years with NBA veterans Kyle Korver and Doug McDermott, and even local stars Justin Patton and Khyri Thomas, to a lesser extent, for the one season they spent at CU together in 2016-17.
Whether they know it or not — and judging by the D.J. Sokol Arena attendance numbers so far this winter, they don’t — Omaha sports fans have another shining star in their own backyard in Creighton women’s basketball senior Jaylyn Agnew. And with Big East action already underway, local sports fans only have a handful of chances left to watch her play.
For the uninitiated, the curly-haired, super-skilled, 5-foot, 11-inch position-less performer nicknamed “Boogie” came to Creighton as a top 100 basketball recruit out of Andover, Kansas in the fall of 2015 after etching her name all over the Andover High School Athletics record books. She was a conference MVP as a junior in volleyball and ended her career as the school’s all-time leader in kills and solo blocks. She was a four-time Class 5A champion in the high jump, and on the basketball court she was a four-year starter and a three-time conference MVP.
She redshirted her first year as a Bluejay. During that developmental season, she sharpened her skills and improved her perimeter shot with assistant coach Chevelle Saunsoci while also serving as the scout team’s primary defender in practice against fellow top 100 recruit Audrey Faber. She was named Big East Freshman of the Year the following season, was a Second Team All-Big East selection as a sophomore, and has helped Creighton win 69 games, including a Big East regular season title, and qualify for two NCAA Tournaments as an at-large team in her three seasons since the redshirt year.
Playing Defense is just one of Agnew’s talents (Spomer / WBR)
After reaching the Big Dance and winning a first round game in 2017 and 2018, Creighton had high hopes for a third straight postseason run in 2018-19 on the shoulders of an Faber-Agnew tandem. Fate had other plans, unfortunately. A knee injury robbed Agnew of any semblance of a preseason camp, and then late in the first half of the second game of the season she sustained injured ligaments in her right hand when she got it caught in the jersey of a North Dakota State player.
Agnew missed nearly a full month before returning to action with a clunky, blue brace wrapped around her shooting hand to support the still healing ligaments. She went 9-for-18 from 3-point territory in her first two games back with the brace and seemed destined to pick up where he sophomore season left off with a 24-point performance in an NCAA Tournament win over Iowa. However, three months of inconsistency followed as she shot 28.7% from beyond the arc over the final 21 games of the regular season and even went scoreless on two occasions despite only doing so four times as a freshman and never as a sophomore. That led to visible frustration, both on the court and on the bench, along with a dwindling belief in her own abilities.
“She’s just one of those kids who strives to do her absolute best and she’s so hard on herself,” her mother, Traci, said. “She just wanted to contribute. I think that injury in a way really helped her grow and mature a lot, because she realized it was just for a little bit and she was going to be able to come back and help her team out.”
Agnew starred early in her Creighton career (Spomer / WBR)
At the Big East Tournament last March in Chicago, “Boogie” got back to being “Boogie.” She scored 13 points, grabbed eight rebounds, blocked four shots, and hit two of her six 3-point attempts in an upset of a Butler team that had beaten the Bluejays by a combined 52 points in two meetings earlier in the year. Although their season came to an end the next night against eventual tournament champion DePaul, Agnew had by far her best game of the entire injury-riddled campaign, scoring a season-high 27 points on 12-of-15 shooting, including 3-of-4 from long range, to go along with six rebounds and three assists.
Performances like those have since become the norm again for the smooth-shooting wing in the No. 5 Creighton jersey. If you take those two do-or-die games in Chicago and add them to the senior season she has put together thus far — despite now being the top focus of every opposing defense’s scouting report — the Bluejay superstar is averaging 19.8 points, 6.8 rebounds, 3.0 assists, 1.2 steals, and 1.1 blocks per game while shooting 44.5% from the field, 36.6% from 3-point range, and 90.6% from the free throw line. What started as a surprising All-Big East Tournament team performance has carried over into a season in which she has won a conference-leading four player of the week awards through the first two months.
“It’s not even the fact that she’s doing so well offensively. It’s more of a sense of I’m really proud of her because she’s come a very, very long way mentally,” Saunsoci said of Agnew’s senior year to date. “I think that was half her battle. She’s always been a good basketball player and she’s always had very high potential being the athlete that she is, and being able to tap into that from a basketball standpoint was the easy part. I think her biggest hurdle that not a lot of people can see is the fact that she came a very, very, very long way mentally.”
A key reason for her growth in the physical and mental realms of her game is her willingness to listen, learn, and apply the advice that has been given to her along the way. It eventually clicks for all great players, but what makes Jaylyn Agnew unique is how quickly she is able to enhance her game.
At the start of her sophomore season, Creighton head coach Jim Flanery laid into her during a film session after she took just two shots in 35 minutes against Wichita State. She ended that year with the fifth-most made threes in school history for a single season. Later that same season, Flanery felt as if she had more potential to be a better rebounder after grabbing six in 44 minutes of action in a road game at Xavier. She went on to average 10 boards a night over the next six games.
“I think she has a very, very good ability to pay attention to details,” Saunsoci said. “If you tell her something, it translates instantly. Not every player is like that. A lot of players have to go through a lot of experience in order to make adjustments and improvements. Whereas with Jaylyn, as soon as you tell her something, or as soon as you show her something on film, from that point on she’s going to make that change and be able to apply it to her game. She’s really good with translation and she’s spent a lot of time in the gym.”
Streur / WBR
On top of the individual brilliance that has escaped from what was at one point a case of fractured confidence, Agnew has also emerged as a leader in ways that not even Korver or McDermott were even at the height of their impact. She’s as likely to lock down the best player on the opposing team as she is to light up the scoreboard for her own, and she radiates an enthusiastic vibe that her teammates have fed off of, which has led to an 11-4 start to the season and a No. 17 ranking in the NCAA’s official RPI. It’s not just the newcomers like freshman forward Mykel Parham or veterans like junior guard Temi Carda who follow her lead, but even redshirt senior guard Olivia Elger, who has played with Agnew all five years she’s been at Creighton while also being her roommate for four of them.
“Her willingness to do what’s best for the team is what makes her special,” Elger said. “She’s not worried about herself. She’ll take charges, she’ll shut down the other team’s best player. She does everything. I think that is very rare. To have that from a leader and from your best player really sets a tone for the rest of the team. You’re always confident. Even if you aren’t playing the best or something’s not going well, you still have a chance to win the game because she’s on the floor.”
That ego also is non-existent when the lights are off of her as well, whether it’s in the locker room during halftime or in practice preparing for their next opponent. If she deserves a butt-chewing, she’ll always make eye contact, nod, and listen. Both for her own good and as an example to her teammates. It’s the “eyes on me” approach that was instilled in her by her father, Jay, a former high school football coach and veteran of the United States Air Force.
“Whenever my dad would raise his voice at me or my brother he might have been doing it to get on us, but he’s also trying to teach us something,” Agnew said. “With Flan, he likes to raise his voice a little bit and we’ve talked about that in the locker room — don’t listen to the volume, listen to the message. I try to display that throughout the locker room. I like when Flan gets on me to keep me focused and not put me above anyone else. It’s especially important for the freshmen to see that so if they are ever getting chewed out they can know it’s not just them.”
Juszyk / WBR
Her leadership also comes in the form of the appreciation she has for where she is and how she got to that point. That’s why she starts every practice on the white team as opposed to blue, which typically consists of the starters and main rotation players. It serves as a reminder to herself that no matter where she’s at in her career, everything she gets is earned, not just given.
Like Korver and McDermott before her, Agnew has used her work ethic and attitude to transform her raw skills as a freshman into pro potential as a senior. Creighton Hall-of-Famer Connie Yori believes Agnew has much ability to play in the WNBA as any of the six players she sent there from her days as the head coach at Nebraska. She’s not alone either. Current DePaul head coach Doug Bruno, who has produced 11 WNBA players out of his program over the years, also believes that Agnew has “stuff” to play in the big leagues.
“She’s got the game for the next level,” Bruno said. “I’m not sitting her saying she’s a lock to unequivocally make it, but her game is really made for it. She’s got the length, she’s got the size of a guard in the WNBA, and she’s got the quickness to play at the next level. Now it’s going to come down to her strength up the middle, which is her head, heart, and guts.
“When you go to any professional training camp — I hope this is not politically incorrect, I hope this is not something I could get fired for, but basically when you go to a camp it’s 12 dogs fighting for one piece of meat to make a team. I hope that’s not politically incorrect to say, but that’s how hard it is to make a WNBA team. But I think Jaylyn has the right stuff and the game for it.”
As special as Korver, McDermott, Patton, and Thomas were for the men’s basketball program at Creighton, they weren’t the first players from the program that landed themselves in the NBA. Should Agnew’s potential lead her to that WNBA path, she would be first Bluejay to make it there. The only unfortunate part of the rare company she has put herself in is that the community has dropped the ball on the opportunities they’ve had to see her play thus far.
835 people were in attendance she scored 27 points, grabbed nine rebounds, and hit an absurdly contorted, nothing-but-net shot to beat the shot clock late in the final minutes of against Marquette, a play that landed her at No. 2 on SportsCenter’s Top 10 plays of the day.
A crowd of 842 was announced at D.J. Sokol Arena two days later when she put up 18 points, 10 rebounds, four assists, four blocks, and two steals in an epic, down-to-the-wire game against a top 15 DePaul team.
In her last four true road games during non-conference play this season, she played in front of crowds of 2,805 at Drake, 3,967 at Nebraska, 2,146 at South Dakota, and 2,002 at Arizona State. In the seven games she’s played this season in Omaha, six of which have come at her home arena, she has yet to play in front of a crowd that numbers in the thousands and only one time has one even exceeded 900. And beginning with an 11:00 a.m. tip-off against Providence on Saturday, January 11, there are only seven more guaranteed opportunities for local fans to her in person.
If Creighton fans and people in and around the city choose to miss the boat on the last handful of chances to see a one-of-a-kind player, she can at least take the court every night knowing her parents will always be there sitting halfway up section 102 behind the Bluejay bench, watching with pride and cheering her on through the end of her playing days in Omaha.
“I can’t express how proud I am of her,” her father, Jay, said. “She’s just been beyond expectations. She’s just a good kid and then when you see other people talk about her, and when you see her on these billboards and park benches, and her name is in the newspaper and people talk about her on social media — you just can’t express how proud that makes you feel.”