MORGANTOWN — Lauren Fields has connected on 140 3-pointers in her college career.
That spans three teams located in three different time zones and two conferences.
The one she hit on Monday, as West Virginia took down No. 25 Penn State in front of 2,061 fans inside the Coliseum, will be one she’ll never forget.
The situation: There was 5:47 remaining in the second quarter and WVU was clinging to a 26-24 lead at the time.
Fields was somewhere near no-man’s land and next to the middle of nowhere.
“Yeah, I knew where I was,” she said later. “Then I was like, ‘Well, I can’t do nothing else but shoot.’ So, I shot it.”
She shot it just as the shot clock was literally tenths of a second from going off and probably around 40 feet away from the basket.
“When it left my hands, I could tell it was going to go in,” said Fields, who also played at Oklahoma State and Arizona, before transferring to WVU for her final season.
It was, indeed, good and barely hit the rim if it hit it at all.
“The kid just has a knack to hit those shots,” WVU head coach Mark Kellogg said. “That got the crowd into it. There was some energy behind that. I don’t know if I call it luck, but maybe there was a little luck involved. We needed it, too. That was a big one.”
As the story goes, Fields said she found herself in a similar situation during a team scrimmage earlier this season.
“It was the same thing then, too,” Fields said. “When it happened again, I was like, ‘This must be my spot.’ Maybe I need to start doing it more, but coach Kellogg would kill me.”
