Lurken goes for 1,000 points today

lurken

Senior guard Larissa Lurken is likely to become the 20th player in Kent State women’s history to score 1,000 points today.

Lurken has 992 points going into the Flashes’ road game at Detroit Mercy. So far this season’s, she’s averaging 27 points a game, tied with Hannah Plybon of Akron for best in the MAC in the early season.

She would become the first KSU player to hit 1,000 since Jamilah Humes, who reached that level in 2011. If Lurken averaged 15 points a game for the rest of the season, she’d end up with about 1,400 points, which would end her career in 13th place among all Kent State scorers.

Lurken almost certainly will become the Flashes’ leading three-point scorer within the team’s next few games. She has 155 three-point baskets; the record is 160, set by Kathy Carroll from 1991 to 1994. Lurken also is 26 shots behind Carroll’s record for three-point attempts with 484.

Lurken has started 82 of the 89 games she’s played since arriving on campus from Park High School in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. She was third on the team in scoring as a freshman, averaging 7.8 points a game, first as a sophomore at 11.1 and second as a junior with 13.9.

I can’t find the number in the record book, but she’s certainly in the top 10 in school history in number of games started. I think she is the team’s first four-year starter starter since Lindsay Shearer, the three-time all-MAC player who graduated in 2006. Humes, I think, was more of a spot starter and first player off the bench her freshman and sophomore years.

Lurken has evolved from a player who was almost entirely an outside shooter her freshman year. She added shot fakes her sophomore year and became a strong driver to the basket last season. At 5-foot-9, she has developed into one of the team’s better rebounders. She leads the team with 9 rebounds a game so far this season; last season she was tied for second on the team with a 4.4 average.

Lurken is a nursing major with a GPA of about 3.7. For the last two seasons, she’s worked games and practices around nursing clinicals, in which she spends one 12-hour shift a week at an area hospital. She worked one of those shifts last season the day before she scored 37 points against Northern Illinois, which tied for the eighth highest total in school history. Lurken was an academic all-MAC selection her sophomore and junior years.

Here’s link to Lurken’s profile page on the team website

(Photo is from the Kent State team website.)