Iowa had one final spot in its 2022 recruiting class and it wanted a shooter.
The Hawkeyes are getting the best one from Nebraska.
Taylor McCabe, who set a Class A single-season record for three-pointers as a sophomore, announced her commitment to the Iowa women's basketball team Monday morning.
COVID-19 led to several recruiting restrictions in the spring and summer, including no on-campus visits. But luckily for McCabe, she started building relationships with Iowa's coaching staff prior to the pandemic.
Iowa topped the list for McCabe, who wanted to play for a future hall-of-fame coach in Lisa Bluder and find a school that fit her game.
"They're a great program, they're well-established and they're going to be really good coming up," the 5-foot-9 McCabe said. "Their style really fits me just because I'm a bit of a smaller guard and they've had success with smaller guards before, and they like to play fast.
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"They needed a shooter, and I was like, 'Yeah, I can do that.'"
McCabe will play for Bluder, one of 10 active head coaches with more than 700 career wins. She'll also play for a team that reached the Elite Eight in 2019, and was ranked No. 19 in The Associated Press Top 25 before the 2019-20 season was stopped.
"I definitely wanted to go play for a program that likes to win and is super-competitive and has fun while doing it, and they definitely do that," McCabe said.
McCabe averaged 20.3 points per game as a sophomore and made 107 three-pointers (at a 42% clip) to set the record. She became Fremont's top defender, too, but defense remained a priority on McCabe's improvement list for the summer.
McCabe, who had multiple offers including Nebraska and Creighton, said she became a better on-ball defender playing AAU ball for All Iowa Attack this summer.
Extremely excited and blessed to announce my committment to further my education and basketball career at the University of Iowa! Go Hawks!!🖤💛
— Taylor McCabe (@_taylormccabe)
"A lot of my teammates are good at that, too, so even at practices we were all pushing each other, just being around them honestly helped me learn from them, which is what I wanted when I was going to Attack," she said.
Playing with All Iowa Attack, which has multiple future Hawkeyes, also gave McCabe an idea of what college could be like, and that played a big factor in her decision.
"(It) helped with this summer; I was able to play with some of my teammates but also play against other people and get a feel for who was committed where," said McCabe, who was a first-team Super-Stater as a sophomore. "That is definitely a factor that a lot of people don't think about in recruiting is you have to think about who you're going to be playing with. You're going to be spending a lot of time with them, so I was fortunate enough to be spending time will my future teammates."
Now McCabe can turn her focus to shooting away in the gym.
"I still have two more years for it, but it's relaxing for sure," she said of having her college decision out of the way.