How Columbia’s Riley Weiss reached 1,000 career points — while learning when to pass

Message received: Weiss’ first three shots in the third quarter were 2-pointers. They all went in, which helped Columbia extend a 1-point halftime lead to 12 — and pushed Weiss over 1,000 career points in just her 74th career game.

Weiss is the 16th Lion to reach 1,000 points and just the fifth to do so as a junior. In the locker room after Columbia’s 63-44 win, her teammates doused her with water and chanted her name. She finished the game with 24 points on 10-for-24 shooting, giving her 1,008 career points.

“Took her too long,” Griffith joked postgame about a player who scored nearly 2,900 points in six seasons of high school basketball.

“I thought I was in that region,” Weiss told The IX Basketball postgame about approaching 1,000 points. “But it’s not really something I focus on, obviously. I’m more focused on team stuff.”

The IX Basketball, a 24/7/365 women’s basketball newsroom powered by The Next

The IX Basketball: A basketball newsroom brought to you by The IX Sports. 24/7/365 women’s basketball coverage, written, edited and photographed by our young, diverse staff and dedicated to breaking news, analysis, historical deep dives and projections about the game we love.

Weiss didn’t waste any time getting on the scoreboard on Monday, making a contested baseline jump shot for the game’s first points. Her first 3-pointer came late in the quarter, followed by one to open the second quarter, followed by one midway through the second quarter.

“Our game plan was to deny [Weiss] the ball. Now, I will tell you what: She is really good,” FGCU head coach Raina Harmon told The IX Basketball postgame. “She plays with good pace, good tempo. They bring her off a lot of screens, so we were chasing her for however many minutes she played. … She just got the better of us.”

In the second half, Weiss again began her scoring with a baseline jumper, ticking her career points total up to 999. About 90 seconds later, she handled the ball on the perimeter against two defenders, saw one leave, and then drove hard to the rim with her right hand. She jumped into the air about halfway down the lane and made a right-handed layup through contact to give her 1,001 career points.

That shot showed not only how dangerous Weiss is off the bounce, but also the strength she added in the offseason.

“She would have fallen last year,” Griffith told The IX Basketball postgame. “… Now she can absorb contact, finish and keep playing.”

But Weiss didn’t give anyone much time to register that she’d surpassed 1,000 points. She made another layup just 40 seconds later, forcing Harmon to call a timeout. And less than a minute after that timeout, Weiss hit her fourth three of the game.

Weiss’ accomplishment reflects 2.5 years of hard work and steady progress since she arrived at Columbia in fall 2023. As a first-year, she came off the bench behind future WNBA draft pick Abbey Hsu, who like Weiss is one of the top shooters Griffith has ever coached. Weiss averaged 7.1 points per game, mostly from behind the arc, and got to learn from Hsu as she led the team to its first Ivy League regular-season title.

The following season, with Hsu gone, Weiss took on a much larger role and diversified her shot chart to score from all over the court. She became the Lions’ leading scorer at 17.8 points per game and was named first-team All-Ivy League. Her year-to-year increase of more than 10 points per game was the second-largest of any player in the conference and the largest by a Columbia player since at least 2008-09.

However, Weiss generally shared the offensive load last season with then-seniors Kitty Henderson and Cecelia Collins, who each averaged more than 13 points per game. Now that they’ve graduated, Weiss is doing even more. When Griffith was asked in October who would take more 3-pointers to make up for the 232 that Henderson and Collins took last season, she quipped, “Riley’s gonna take 400.”

Weiss isn’t quite on pace for that number, which only two college players since 2009-10 have reached. But Griffith’s comment shows how important Weiss’ scoring is to the offense and how much of a green light she has. This season, she is averaging 18.5 points per game on 40.6% shooting from the field, including 50.4% on 2-pointers.

“She is one of the most talented scorers in the NCAA,” Griffith told reporters on Nov. 13. “And I’m putting her right up there with a player like a JuJu [Watkins at USC], I’m putting her up there with a player like a Paige Bueckers [at UConn] last year — some of the most talented guards in our game. She can literally do everything with the basketball.”

Want even more women’s sports in your inbox?

Subscribe now to The IX Sports and receive our daily women’s sports newsletter covering soccer, tennis, basketball, golf, hockey and gymnastics from our incredible team of writers. That includes Basketball Wednesday from founder and editor Howard Megdal.

Readers of The IX Basketball now save 50% on their subscription to The IX.

The challenge for Weiss as a junior is not only adjusting to her new role, in which she has to score every night for the Lions to succeed and is getting face-guarded at times. Griffith is also pushing Weiss to increase her efficiency and her assists by reading the defense and recognizing where the biggest advantage is.

In a sense, that ask is building on last season, when Weiss had to improve at understanding what the defense was giving her and taking the best shot she could get. Now, she’s tasked with reading how the defense is playing all five Lions and knowing where the ball needs to go. (Often, it should stay with her, but not always.)

“The best part about coaching a scorer like her is she literally just sees the rim,” Griffith said postgame. “So … you’re just teaching her to see the game now and the whole court.”

That tunnel vision isn’t selfishness — instead, it’s how Weiss is wired as a scorer and the role she has always played. In her sophomore and junior years of high school, she averaged 40.8 and 39.9 points per game, respectively.

 “She’s so good that … all [shots] feel great to her,” Griffith said. 

“You could think she’s selfish because she scores and she does this and all that, but she’s probably the most unselfish person I know,” junior forward Hilke Feldrappe told The IX Basketball in October. “And she’s so down to earth, and really she’s a great teammate. You know she’ll always have your back.”

So when Weiss is hot, like in a 31-point performance against South Dakota State on Nov. 28, Griffith wants her to take every shot she sees. But when she isn’t — like on a 7-for-25 night against Richmond on Nov. 15 — Griffith wants her to shift gears. Weiss should still take the open looks, both because she’ll likely make them and because the predictability of her shooting those makes offensive rebounding easier. But instead of taking contested shots when she’s struggling, Griffith wants her to use the ever-present defensive attention to make her teammates better.

“I think it’s finding balance between being aggressive and also taking the right shot,” Weiss said after the FGCU game. “So we’ve watched a lot of film on all my individual shots [and discussed] what’s a good shot? What’s a bad shot? Why? So just grasping that and getting a better understanding of that, I think, and just growing my IQ in that sense has helped me a lot.”

Weiss said knowing when to pass instead of shoot is becoming more natural for her as she watches more film and tries it out in games. She is averaging a career-high 2.2 assists per game, nearly a full assist more than last season, and her assist rate of 14.7% puts her in the 66th percentile nationally. Meanwhile, her turnover rate has stayed low, at just 10.4%.

“She’s … embracing the hard,” junior guard Fliss Henderson told The IX Basketball in October. “Even being her roommate, we’ll go home and I can tell she’s so driven about, ‘OK, this happened today. What can I do better? What did I do well today?’ Stuff like that. …

“That’s something I’ve always looked up to with her. I literally will be like, ‘How can I be like Riley?’ Riley is so switched on all the time with how to improve her game and how to make her teammates better.”

Griffith sees clear progress in two-on-one situations, where Weiss is increasingly comfortable making touch passes to a teammate. Sometimes, she even catches that teammate off guard. And when Weiss drives into the lane and help defenders converge, she’s gotten better at recognizing where they’re coming from and who’s open as a result.

Listen now to The IX Sports Podcast and Women’s Sports Daily

We are excited to announce the launch of TWO new podcasts for all the women’s sports fans out there looking for a daily dose of women’s sports news and analysis. Stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts, and make sure to subscribe!

The next layer for Weiss, Griffith said, is being more vocal — not in the sense of encouraging her teammates, which she already does, but in demanding what she needs on the court. If Weiss is shooting well, she should demand the ball. If she’s trying to shake a defender, she should demand that her teammates set screens where and how she wants them. She’s working on making that feel more natural, too, but she already understands how it will make the whole team better.

“That’s obviously gonna help myself, but also it’s gonna help my teammates get open,” Weiss said. “Obviously, the defense is pretty focused on me, but just using my voice more will get them even more focused on me [and] get my teammates open as well as myself.”

Her teammates have also encouraged her to hold them accountable in that way, even in preseason.

“We’ve been feeding into her,” Henderson said in October. “Like, ‘Tell me what to do there. Tell me to set your fade [screen] there.’ And she’s realizing we need her so much. So if she starts doing that, we’re responsive, and we’re with her.”

Getting more vocal leadership from Weiss was a point of discussion in the locker room after the FGCU game, before the water bath. So the Lions’ debrief balanced learning and celebration — perfect for a player who’s raring to do so much more in the next year and a half.

“She continues to prove to me how bad she wants to be good,” Griffith said. “… I love that about her.”