On Christmas night, Grand Canyon women's basketball head coach Molly Miller made a 9:30 p.m. run to the GCU Basketball Practice Facility to pick up scouting reports from her office that overlooks the courts.
Thump, thump, thump.
The percussive sound of a basketball hitting hardwood was as unmistakable as the culprit.
"I didn't even have to look to know who it was," Miller said.
GCU senior guard Alyssa Durazo-Frescas did not become the national leader for 3-pointers by taking days off — or holidays or birthdays. Her sweet shot became as compact and consistent as it is by rehearsing her stroke for thousands of hours like a symphony violinist.
Basketball seemed to come naturally when Durazo-Frescas, as a third-grader who had never played, used picture-perfect form for a layup on her first try.
Now, as the national 3-pointer leader with 68 makes amd four 3s per game this season, the years of work and the dedication from her mother had Durazo-Frescas noticing that she was doing the same shooting drills this week as a GCU Basketball Facility visitor – WNBA phenom Caitlin Clark.
"That was insane," Durazo-Frescas said. "It fueled my fire to keep doing this and be like that."
Her shot already is torching teams, putting GCU (15-2) on a 13-game winning streak that ranks as the nation's fourth longest active streak behind only LSU, UCLA and Ohio State. She not only has sank more 3s than any other player in the nation this season, but the 5-foot-7 gym rat does it efficiently with 46.3% accuracy despite seeing box-and-one defenses, double teams, face guarding and zone defenses that shade her way.
"It's almost unbelievable," said her mother, Monica Durazo. "I was telling my friend, 'Dude, my daughter that lived in this little house is No. 1 in the country. That's weird.' It's just a surreal, awesome, incredible thing.
"I got lucky with a very good kid. I can be a little wild and off the charts, and she's even-keeled, understanding, confident, sensitive, wonderful, athletic. I'm just blessed."
Beyond Durazo-Frescas, nobody is more responsible for empowering her confidence and enabling her growth than her single mother.
When Durazo-Frescas was 15, Monica Durazo appeared on "Deal or No Deal" as a contestant picking case No. 12, Durazo-Frescas' uniform number, and telling host Howie Mandel that her daughter was going to playing Division I and pro basketball.
"We win in everything we do," her mother said on the NBC show, where she accepted a deal of $7,000 and a new car because her goal was to give her car to Durzao-Frescas.
She was a shooting star by that point. A year after being introduced to basketball with a second-nature layup, Durazo-Frescas began firing away from deeper.
"She took to it like a fish in water and blossomed," said her mother, a healthcare account executive who has attended every home game then and now. "She competes against herself because she wants to get better and better."As a fifth-grader, Durazo-Frescas stood he same 5-7 height as now to be jumping center and positing up. By middle school, she was becoming a version of the shooting guard who now stars for the Lopes.
"I remembers the day I woke up thinking, 'I'm going to do everything I can so that she doesn't have to pay for college,' " Durazo-Frescas said.
Meanwhile, her mother was doing everything she could to get her there. She drove her at 6 a.m. daily in high school so that she could play for an athletic powerhouse, Mater Dei in Santa Ana, California, and then took her to Anaheim three nights a week to work with a shooting coach.
At Mater Dei, Durazo-Frescas looked up to Katie Lou Samuelson, now Clark's Indiana Fever teammate after becoming a 2019 WNBA first-round pick. When Samuelson's dad shared that she took 500 shots per day, that became Durazo-Frescas' routine during high school.
"My mom made sure that I never put my head down, and that I always worked hard," Durazo-Frescas said. "If I was studying for eight hours and I got a C or if I was in the gym eight hours and I only made four shots, she told me, 'If I don't put my head down and keep working hard, God will reward me.' That's how she raised me. The hard work paid off, and I never stopped because she worked so hard.
"Everything she did was for me. She wants to be there for me in any way she can. That is a debt I can't repay. That's a love that is unconditional. It's why I do what I do and why I work so hard."
Durazo-Frescas was a key part of three Mountain West championship teams that made three NCAA tournament appearances at UNLV, where her teams went 87-13. But with most of her family in the Phoenix and Tucson areas, she wanted relatives to be able to watch her senior season in person more often and entered the transfer portal.
GCU was the only Arizona program that sought her, having seen Durazo-Frescas' sharpshooting in a 2023 preseason scrimmage against UNLV at GCU Basketball Practice Facility.
"The prior knowledge was there," Miller said. "We're pretty good defensively, but she was a problem to guard."
And she remains one for opponents.
Playing in Phoenix has allowed as many as 20-plus relatives to be at a game, including when she set a GCU record by making nine 3-pointers in a game. But it was GCU's win at Arizona last month that was extra sweet for the family. Her uncle is a U of A engineer/scientist. Her great-grandmother was an avid Wildcats fan. Her grandfather worked at Tucson newspapers.
"If you're not going to play there, you're going to beat them there," her mother told Durazo-Frescas, who made the go-ahead 3-pointer for Arizona's only home loss this season.
With 265 career 3s and 1,028 career points, Durazo-Frescas already has scored more points in 17 Lopes games than she did in 33 games at UNLV last season.
A loaded Lopes lineup also starring Tiarra Brown, Laura Erikstrup and Trinity San Antonio frees Durazo-Frescas to fire away for 15.1 points per game or be a decoy who opens driving lanes and post-up positions for teammates.
"I've never seen a quicker release," Miller said of Durazo-Frescas' shot. "When she gets it in her hands, it's coming out. And she has to because people are flying at her at rapid speed. There's not a lot of motion. It's a very compact stroke. She doesn't have to bring the ball down to go back up."
Durazo-Frescas has played in the NCAA tournament previously, but she wants to see it happen for the first time for GCU this season. Faith connected Durazo-Frescas to her teammates quickly and proved to make GCU's Christian culture an ideal fit.
"Once we share that bond together, there's no breaking anything and then there's no breaking us on the court," Durazo-Frescas said. "It's something that I'd never experienced before.
"I want it so bad for them. It's such a surreal fan climbing up on that ladder and cutting down the nets and going to the NCAA tournament. The talent we have on this team is unstoppable. I see a pro in every single one of them."
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