Jordyn Peck’s summer ended with a bang, and thankfully, Wagner College saw it.
In the senior point guard’s last game of the summer AAU season in a tournament in Washington, DC, she couldn’t miss. Her team, The Cleveland Crush, was playing the second seed, a team with four Division I prospects.
She scored 42 points, including six three-pointers and the game-winning layup in sudden-death double-overtime with seven seconds left. She scored 30 of her team’s 36 second half points.
“It was a big girl on me and I thought ‘she’s too slow,’ so I drove right past her,” Peck said of the game winner.
“It was my best game ever,” she said. “Any time I was open I just shot it and it went in. . . It looked impossible to miss.”
Her coaches, of course, were thrilled. “They’d never seen me do it, I had never seen myself do it,” she said.
Wagner, a Division I college on Staten Island, subsequently offered her a full scholarship. Other D-1 schools had recruited her, but hadn’t made scholarship offers because she hadn’t yet taken the ACT.
Her coaches may never have seen her do it, but they weren’t surprised. In Peck’s first game for Shaker, as a sophomore (she transferred from Richmond Heights after freshman year), she made eight three-pointers against Bedford, breaking the state record in women’s high school basketball. In one half.
“That was interesting because she broke the record in half of a game,” said assistant coach Dwayne Morrow, who coaches Peck and senior guard Danae Rock on the Crush.
Then, last year, she tied her own record against Youngstown East. She scored her 1000th point Jan. 25 in a 55-30 win against Euclid. She scored 20 points, compiled nine assists and made three steals.
Rock, Peck’s co-captain and teammate on the Crush, compares Peck’s style to that of LeBron James mixed with Dwyane Wade.
“She has the scoring ability, she has the defensive ability,” said Rock, who will play at Lourdes College next year.“She feels like she’s more like LeBron; I feel she’s more like LeBron with D-Wade’s attributes.”
Rock said that players often tease Peck by comparing her departure from Richmond Heights to James taking his talents to South Beach and the Miami Heat.
Peck said her brother, a guard at D-II Urbana University, taught her the game. “He taught me how to become a very consistent shooter, like I am,” Peck said.
Peck, a lefty, says her one weakness is her right hand. “I’ve been working on my right hand my whole life, but it’s still not as strong as my left hand yet.”
A version of this article appeared in print on 28 February 2012, on page 13 of The Shakerite.
