[dropcap]Marissa[/dropcap] Janning knows that sooner than later she will have to face the reality of life after college basketball. But now is not that time. As the 22-year-old senior guard from Watertown, Minnesota prepares for her final season at Creighton, all that is on her mind is how she wants the last chapter of her Bluejay career to be written.
“I think it’s going to go by fast no matter what,” Janning said. “I’m not going to necessarily try to slow it down, but just cherish it more.”
If she never plays another second on the court for head coach Jim Flanery and the Creighton Bluejays, she will still finish ninth all-time in program history with 1,499 points, fifth all-time with a 15.3 points per game scoring average, fifth all-time with 221 career 3-pointers made, and third all-time with an 83.04% career free throw percentage. She’s already one of four players in Creighton women’s basketball history to be named First Team All-Conference in three different seasons, and she is also one of only two players in program history to score at least 400 points in each of her first three seasons.
But Janning isn’t chasing individual records in her final season. All she wants this go around is to end things the way they started.
“I want to win a Big East title and go back to the NCAA Tournament,” she said.
As a freshman during the 2012-13 season, when the Bluejays were still members of the Missouri Valley Conference, Janning and her teammates won a share of the program’s first regular-season conference title since 2002-03. A few weeks later they received an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament where they advanced to the second round after an upset win over No. 22 Syracuse.
After that season concluded, the Bluejays moved into the Big East Conference, and they have missed out on a bid to the Big Dance in each of the last two seasons. Watching the team that won the Big East regular-season title go to the NCAA Tournament each year that Creighton has been a member, Janning knows that a return trip starts with a conference title, but it also has an element of unfinished business.
“The thing I’ve always wanted was a conference title, and I didn’t want a tie with [Wichita State] my freshman year,” Janning said. “Even though it was great, we still got to cut down the net, but I want our own thing really bad.”
Step one of that process begins on Sunday afternoon when the Bluejays report to the Championship Center for their first official practice of the 2015-16 season. Janning and fellow senior Tessa Leytem will lead a group of 15 players that includes 10 underclassmen. To illustrate the gap in experience between the 5-foot-8 senior guard and the rest of her teammates, Janning has started a total of 76 games in her career, while the other 14 members of team have combined to start a total of 87 games.
Being the youngest of three siblings, Janning finds herself in an unfamiliar position of being the “older sister” for a change, and it’s a role she understands is very important for a young group that has lofty expectations for themselves.
“I’ve had ups and downs, I’ve had years of success, then times of not having much success, but this year being my senior year you kind of come into with a little bit of a cocky feeling,” Janning said. “But you’re also motivated, and that’s exactly how I feel right now; very motivated and I have a lot of heart into it. Not that I haven’t before, but just having the younger people to influence, I think that means a lot.”
Her first bit of advice for the younger players, and especially the incoming freshmen, is to let the shortcomings motivate you, and let the moments of success fuel your confidence. Which is a mindset that she herself struggled with, even as recently as last year, under the weight of her own expectations to be even better than she was when she won Big East Player of the Year as a sophomore in 2013-14.
“Whenever you have doubts in anything, whether it’s in basketball or it’s in something else, you’re always thinking maybe I’m not good enough,” Janning said. “You just have to think back to all of those times you were successful, and just say, ‘we’re good, I’m good, I’m comfortable, I’m confident.’ I think that was part of the thing I had last year. I thought maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I can’t play, but that was a completely different me.”
That’s the difference between just being a veteran with experience, and someone who is mature and has an understanding of the experience. That mindset has improved her perspective on both life and basketball. She knows she won’t be able to control time and make her senior year last as long as she wants it to, but she’ll appreciate this year maybe more than any other, on and off the court, because she knows it’s almost over.
“I look back at AAU and summer basketball, and I remember bits and pieces, but I don’t remember thinking that this was going to end,” Janning said. “High school basketball ended, but I knew there was a time after that. College basketball will end and there will still be time for me after this, but college basketball is just unreal with the atmosphere, the people that you make connections with, and the way that you kind of find yourself. Whether it’s through basketball or through school, or finding out what you want to do in life, you can’t get that kind of experience anywhere else.
“Playing professionally and going overseas you can’t get that experience anywhere else either, but this experience is me. This is where I’ve shaped my personality, and I think it’ll be about cherishing every moment with my teammates or even talking in interviews or talking with kids, or just trying to make an impact where I can every day. Whether it’s having the mindset of being the best player in practice on a certain day, or going and hanging out with kids even if my community service hours are done, I’m going to go do it because they love it. Or even if that means just going in and talking to Flan — [the coaches] always complain that we don’t come hang out with them enough — so if that means going in and hanging out with them, fine. But I’m just going to try to cherish everything that comes with the collegiate experience, inside and outside of basketball.”
