If Napheesa Collier never takes another shot for the University of Connecticut women's basketball team, she'd rank No. 3 on the school's all-time list in field-goal percentage at 61.8.

Of course, barring anything unforeseen, that's not going to happen. The Huskies' forward is looking forward to a big senior season in Storrs.

But though she could finish with numbers that would put her alongside some of UConn's greats, some of the things she's done have not been good enough in her mind.

"There are a lot of things I want and need to improve on for next year," Collier said. "My shooting, my outside shot, every aspect I want to improve."

One of the things she has done is change the release on her jump shot. She's been working with Alex Bazzell, an NBA/WNBA skills trainer with whom she has trained since her junior year at Incarnate Word Academy.

Collier shot 34.3 percent from 3-point land as a junior when she took as many shots from behind the arc (64) as she did her first two years combined. At 6-foot-1, she knows the 3 must be a part of her game in order to be effective in the WNBA.

In late May, Bazzell posted a video on Twitter of Collier making 20 treys in a row with former NBA great Kobe Bryant as a witness.

"Before my shot was above my head, and it would get messed up a lot because it would move a lot," Collier said. "Now I'm trying to lower it so that it will be more consistent. When it was so high I was moving my arms a lot and it would be a different shot every time."

Collier was named to the all-American Athletic Conference first team for the second straight year and was a third-team Associated Press All-American as a junior. She ranked in the AAC's top 15 in scoring (ninth at 16.1 points), rebounds (seventh at 7.4), assists (15th at a career high 3.3), assist-to-turnover ratio (fifth at 2.2), field-goal percentage (fifth at 58.3), free-throw percentage (eighth at 78.6), steals (14th at 1.6) and blocks (third at 1.7).

In five NCAA tournament games, she averaged 20.8 points on 67.7 percent shooting, 7.2 rebounds and 4.0 assists. Her 24-point effort in the overtime loss to Notre Dame in the national semifinals at Columbus, Ohio, earned her a spot on the all-Final Four team.

"Pheesa had a great year last year," UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. "The only problem was that the kind of year she had the year before was one of those magical years. So she set the bar pretty high.

"She is kind of in the same situation that Lou (Katie Lou Samuelson) is in. I think in order to win championships, your leaders can't be one-dimensional. You can't just say, 'OK, Pheesa, when you catch the ball, go get a bucket.' She had a great game in the semifinals last year, and she knows there is a whole lot more that she has to get better at. It also involves improving on the defensive end and being more assertive instead of just kind of going with the flow, which she tends to do a lot of times. But the two of them are obviously two of the best players in the country. If you're starting the season with those two you are automatically starting with a chance to win an awful lot of games. So whether or not it goes as far as it can go it is going to depend upon those two."

Collier has had a busy offseason.

In April she played in USA Basketball's 3x3 national championship tournament in Colorado Springs, Colorado -- one of her teammates was Notre Dame's Arike Ogunbowale, who sank the shot that ended the Huskies' season -- and then traveled to Seattle to take part in a USA national team camp. She spent some time in Los Angeles working with Bazzell, then in the end of May, returned to campus for the five-week summer session that ended last Thursday.

"Being with the older girls at USA camp, it's just so different," Collier said. "Competing with them and seeing how physical and smart they are is something I can bring back to our team. It was a great learning experience."

She's also had some time to relax. A video Samuelson posted to Twitter of her falling awkwardly into the water while paddle boarding has more than 13,000 views.

"I'm good at it. That video was misleading because someone pushed the board," Collier said with a shake of her head.

The Huskies are counting on her to stand tall as a senior.

She'll enter her final season with 1,609 points, 808 rebounds, 239 assists, 174 steals and 187 blocks. If she can reach 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, 200 steals and 250 blocked shots, she'd join her former teammate, four-time Final Four Most Outstanding Player Breanna Stewart, as the only Huskies to reach those plateaus. No UConn player has 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds, 250 steals and 250 blocked shots. Collier's career best in steals for a season is 64.

She'd be satisfied to win a second national championship to go with the one she was a part of as a freshman.

"It feels strange being a senior. It seems like yesterday that I was out here for the first time," Collier said. "It's gone by fast."

But she's not done yet.

All that Jas

When UConn visited DePaul last Dec. 8, Jasmine Lister did the scouting report for the Blue Demons. It was the logical choice. After all, Lister had been the graduate assistant for two Huskies national championship teams.

UConn led by as many as 50 as it coasted to a 103-69 win in Chicago.

"It worked for five minutes," Lister said with a smile.

Lister can laugh about it now, as on April 19 she returned to UConn as an assistant coach after Marisa Moseley left to take the head coaching job at her alma mater, Boston University. It marked the first change on Auriemma's staff since 2009 when Moseley replaced Jamelle Elliott, who left to become head coach at Cincinnati.

Samuelson and Collier are the only players left that were at UConn when Lister was a graduate assistant.

"It's awesome. It feels like we picked right back up," Samuelson said. "Losing Marisa was huge. But it doesn't feel like we lost anything. Jas knows how things work here. She knows what is going on. She does my workouts with me now and it feels normal."

Lister spent a year at the University of Washington and last year at DePaul after receiving her masters degree from UConn.

The call to bring her back to Storrs was a no-brainer.

"When you spend two years with somebody you get a sense of who they are as people," Auriemma said. "She is incredibly hard working. She is really, really smart. She is very thorough, and she is really engaged with all the players and the coaches. With the experience she gained at two completely different places in Washington and DePaul, when Marisa got that opportunity to go to BU it was a pretty easy decision. It took about five seconds, and we knew we were going there all along."

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