EUGENE -- She could have, and maybe should have, shot bricks.

The laces of

's black Nikes were untied. She hadn't warmed up. The only basketballs scattered across Matthew Knight Arena's practice court were sized for men, not women -- slightly larger, slightly heavier. She was just emerging from a rare shooting slump.

In sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt Wednesday morning, Bando began the shooting session she repeats nearly every day. Programming a rebounding machine with a tap of her finger, she took her spot in the right corner for her first midrange jumper.

Sixty-seven shots later, she stopped to look at the shooting percentage on the rebounder's display: 76 percent.

She smiled and shrugged her shoulders, but didn't appear surprised. Nor should she have been.

Bando, the

' 5-foot-9 senior guard, is the most accurate three-point shooter currently playing in Division I women's basketball. Her career 45.6 shooting percentage on 529 attempts from beyond the arc is second-highest for any active NCAA woman -- DI, DII or DIII. The mechanics of her shot are quick, easily replicable and natural.

"But the only reason I have that," she said, "is because of the time I've put in the gym."

For all of Bando's gaudy statistics, they show only her performances in games, omitting the thousands of attempts she has shot before, during and after practices, since she was a girl growing up not far from the UO arena she's called home the past four years. All those reps have created a safety blanket of muscle memory and turned her into a floor-spacing weapon ideal for this era of basketball, where three-point shooting is a necessity for teams with title-raising dreams.

And UO, for the first time since 2000, has Pac-12 championship aspirations. Just 13-17 in Bando's freshman season, the Ducks (13-2, 2-0) are ninth in the AP Top 25 entering this weekend's key matchups against the Los Angeles schools, matching the program's highest ranking.

UO has made 50.7 percent of its shots overall this season and 40.8 percent from three-point range, the country's fourth- and fifth-best percentages, and to coach Kelly Graves those numbers are the byproduct of good shooters taking good shots.

And few shots are as good as often as a Bando three.

"A wide-open three for Lexi," Graves said, "is like a layup for some other players."

As a senior at Willamette High School in Eugene in 2014, Bando made

of her three-pointers and had mastered every shooting drill her coach, Paul Brothers, offered. By the end, he'd put five stations around the three-point arc and require she make five consecutive shots at each before moving on.

One miss and the drill started over. Bando made 25 consecutive three-pointers, as required, numerous times, Brothers said.

At Oregon, she has shredded the record for Graves' "red light, green light" drill. It works like this: A shooter traces the three-point arc from seven spots, moving to the next only after making two consecutive shots. The goal is to move to as many stations as possible in five minutes. Reaching fewer than 17 means a player will be stopped from shooting threes in upcoming games -- a figurative "red light." A score of 18-23 is a "yellow light," where a specific play might be drawn up to get the shooter free. But 24 and above is a green light to shoot anytime.

Graves has put some of the country's top players through "red light, green light," as a coach with USA Basketball. He's spread the word about the drill on social media and solicited scores from other coaches. A score in the high 20s, he said, is extremely rare.

Bando's personal best is 39.

"It gives you pressure," she said. "I love the drill. It comes down to confidence."

Her father saw an inkling of this in grade school.

As Joe Bando, Lexi's older brother by two years, practiced with his youth-league team, his sister often shot off to the side or found her way into a drill. The boys were bigger, and Lexi Bando fought back with an aggressiveness unusual for elementary school basketball. But she could only beat up the boys so many times on drives that often were blocked.

At the same age she was learning cursive, Bando began stepping away from the hoop, little by little, until she'd begun to "drain deep threes" on 10-foot hoops, Dave Bando recalled. He knew it was frowned upon in some hoops circles to allow children to shoot from such a distance. He knew that without much strength to get the ball to the rim, kids' future shooting form might suffer.

But seeing was believing.

"When she hit five in a row at that," he said, "you'd be like, 'shoot it.'"

She knew she was good. But she wanted to get better, arriving for her first camp at the U.S. Basketball Academy in Blue River, east of Eugene, in third grade when the cutoff was fourth grade.

She'd worked a connection. Brothers, then a coach at the academy, had coached her father in football in high school, and remained close with the family.

"All she wanted to do was compete against older kids," Brothers said. "'Let me compete against fifth graders, sixth graders.' She had an innate sense of wanting to compete all the time."

They didn't stop formally working together on her shot until she graduated from Willamette High School in 2014 and followed Graves, who'd recruited Bando to Gonzaga, to Oregon.

Bando was unusually devoted to basketball. One childhood friend has continued to needle Bando about how often she left sleepovers early in the morning to train.

Hearing the story "kind of made me feel bad, like really, did we disrupt some of that stuff?" Dave Bando said. "But she was gung-ho about it."

Brothers knows as well as anyone. Before Bando's freshman season at Willamette High, he started older players during a summer tournament. He didn't think much of it, until after the game.

"She was on the phone with me afterward: 'What do I have to do? How much do I have to work?'" Brothers said.

That work created a shooting routine she still follows.

Bando begins close to the basket, shooting in a half circle on all sides of the rim, her eyes focused on the back of the rim. Her left elbow is always underneath her wrist at a 90-degree angle through her motion, and her left hand always above her eye on her follow-through afterward. She gradually steps deeper until she's taken sometimes 500 shots. Though that volume is more typical of an offseason workout, she estimates she still shoots at least 100 a day outside of practice during the season.

In a climate where reducing demands on players' time has become one of the NCAA's top priorities, why do this?

"It came down to me having such a big heart for the game and just wanting to be that person that the team can rely on that they'll make a shot," she said.

Brothers has called Bando the best shooter he coached in 21 years.

"She's just always had that desire to be the absolute best," he said. "We're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours (of practice). We're talking an unbelievable amount of hours."

In high school, off shooting nights were followed by morning trips to the court at a Springfield gym. To prevent off nights in college, Bando and sophomore point guard Sabrina Ionescu lobby coaches on every road trip to arrive at the arena 1 hour, 45 minutes before tipoff, so that their shooting routines can begin, unhurried. Graves prefers 90 minutes.

"We always argue," Bando said, "But every court is different. All the rims are different to me."

Bando made 44 percent of her three-pointers as a freshman, 45.3 as a sophomore and 47.5 last season as Oregon advanced to its first Elite Eight in the NCAA Tournament. Among all NCAA divisions, only 16 women have finished their careers shooting 46.1 percent or better on threes, and Bando entered her final season close to joining that company before a December slump.

At one point during a five-game stretch last month, she'd made 1 of her last 11 threes. Bando compensated with drives and jumpers off the dribble, a reminder to defenders that her skillset works inside the arc, too.

The eventual fix was physical. Before Oregon faced Hawaii on Dec. 22, Bando was alerted that her elbow was no longer underneath her wrist but cocked ever so slightly to the side. That night, she made four of her six threes to bust a slump that had weighed on her.

But what she didn't do was panic. Instead, she trusted the form she has honed through thousands of repetitions.

"The only way to get out of a slump," she said, "is to keep shooting."

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com