Emma List transferred to Florida Gulf Coast in 2018, and in her very first team practice, the guard did something she saw as unremarkable: She put up a midrange jumper.
Her shot was good. But the scrimmage came to a screeching halt. “Ooooh,” a few veteran teammates chorused. Their coach, Karl Smesko, blew his whistle. List was briefly confused: Before she transferred, she’d done her research, and she knew the offense here focused in the paint and beyond the arc. But surely that didn’t mean no midrange shots at all. Did it?
It did. (Or, at least, it meant: Only under a few specific exceptions.) List was about to learn: The midrange jumper does not really have a place in Florida Gulf Coast women’s basketball.
