It was raining threes at the Pavilion in Davis, Calif. Wednesday night.
The ASU women’s basketball team made a school-record 14 shots from 3-point range, propelling the No. 25 Sun Devils (4-2) to a 73-59 win against UC Davis.
The 14 connections from behind the arc broke the previous record of 10 last accomplished on Jan. 20, 2006 against Stanford.
“We’re a better perimeter shooting team [than last season], and we know it,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said during her postgame radio interview. “We’re living a little too much off the perimeter for me, but [UCD] said, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to beat us from the outside,’ and we did.”
And no other performance was bigger than senior guard Briann January’s, as she tied a school record with seven 3-pointers en route to a career-high 25 points. She connected from long range on four straight ASU possessions, helping the Sun Devils pull away in the second half.
“[January] was just amazing on both ends of the floor,” Turner Thorne said. “She is playing with an amazing sense of urgency, and it’s just fun to coach and fun to watch.”
The Sun Devils came out of the gates on fire, making six of their first eight shots to jump out to a 14-0 lead.
UCD’s first field goal did not come until freshman guard Hana Asano made a 3-pointer at the 8:10 mark of the first half, but that sparked a 9-2 run to cut ASU’s lead to 19-14.
The Sun Devils responded with a 7-0 run to extend their lead back to 12, but then the Aggies (3-2) answered with a 9-1 spurt to close that gap to 27-23.
But ASU closed the half on a 10-2 run, initiated by back-to-back 3-pointers by junior guard Danielle Orsillo, to take a 37-25 advantage into the locker room.
UCD scored the first nine points of the second half to slice the Sun Devils’ lead to 37-34, but then January made her back-to-back-to-back-to-back trifectas to put ASU up by 13 with 14:41 to play, and the Sun Devils were never threatened again.
Junior guard Dymond Simon also added 20 points for the Sun Devils while making four of her seven 3-point attempts.
Reach the reporter at gina.mizell@asu.edu.
