The Hall of Famers :: Skyla Sisco

There will never be another one like her, not with that kind of resume. Skyla Sisco: sui generis.

Four years playing for the Lady Griz, four Big Sky Conference regular-season championships, four tournament titles, four trips to the NCAA's Big Dance.

(Make it five for each of those if you count the 1993-94 season when she redshirted, one of the players on a Lady Griz team that was all-Montana and still just five points from making the Sweet 16.)

In her four years in uniform, she went 12-0 against Montana State, sweeping the season series each year, then four times knocking the Bobcats out of the Big Sky tournament, a nice little coda to the end of each season, a little bonus to remind everyone just who it was that owned the state.

"Point of pride," says Sisco, who will be inducted into the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame on Friday night. "That's cool. I like that."

The first Lady Griz to four times be named All-Big Sky Conference, an achievement only Hollie Tyler and Mandy Morales have accomplished since.

A four-year record of 64-4 against Big Sky opponents, all four losses on the road, all by 10 points or fewer, three of the losses to the team that would finish runner-up in the standings.

It was the defining characteristic of Montana over so many years and decades. If the Lady Griz were expected to win the game, they almost always did.

They were always prepared, always ready to go, whether the opponent was top-ranked Tennessee or it was an early November game against Simon Fraser.

That came from their head coach and trickled down to his players. And in those years he found his on-court doppelganger in his fiery point guard.

"She was just a competitor, a fierce competitor who always wanted to win," said Sisco's teammate Megan Harrington, "and that set the tone for all of us.

"She had athleticism and gifts that you could only dream about. She had talent, but she complemented that with working hard. She set the tone for others, that we would earn every moment out there."

She finished her career with 1,238 points, then seventh in program history, now 16th, and 587 assists, a point guard with hops -- she high-jumped 5-foot-8 in high school -- a handle and a soft touch.

It was the complete package.

"She was really good from the start," said her coach, Robin Selvig, "a point guard who could score the ball along with everything else demanded of them.

"One of the best players at being able to create her own shot, and she was a good finisher, and that's a valuable tool. You run things to get the shot you hope to get, but if you don't, she could create her own."

She did the night Tennessee, ranked No. 1 in the nation, came to town, in mid-December 1994.

There Sisco was, at the free throw line, having come to a jump stop in a tense moment, and she did what Del Fried had taught her as an M-ette. She executed a crossover step, right over left, to create space, then let it fly with her left hand. (Okay, maybe that part of it wasn't taught.)

Both coaches were livid, Selvig at the shot selection, Pat Summitt at the traveling violation (in her mind) that wasn't called.

Selvig turned cheerleader when the shot went in and the near-capacity crowd erupted. Summitt ripped off the jacket she was wearing, unable to be convinced that the girl who couldn't bench press the 45-pound bar when she'd arrived in Missoula the year before was getting the better of her Lady Vols.

Her jacket and her team survived, 66-61. She never scheduled the Lady Griz again.

She was a four-time Academic All-Big Sky selection. As a senior she was the Big Sky MVP, Academic All-District and the NCAA Woman of the Year for the state of Montana. Oh, and she was one of 48 finalists for the Kodak All-America team.

And with all that to her name, Skyla Sisco still isn't convinced she is worthy of being the sixth former Lady Griz to be induced into the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame.

She's honored, don't get her wrong. She just wishes she could bring to the stage everyone who made it possible, who made her look good all those games for all those seasons. Because she was never on the court by herself.

"I wasn't a skilled or talented or gifted enough player to do this on my own," she says. "There is no way I'd be here without some insanely good teammates.

"A lot of me making the Hall of Fame is really about team and timing. I had an incredible opportunity coming in when I did."

She redshirted in 1993-94, which gave her a front-row seat to watch Kelly Pilcher lead Montana to a 25-5 record and a near second-round upset of Stanford in the NCAA tournament.

The next year, Carla Beattie was lost for the season just three games in, opening the door for the redshirt freshman from Malta.

She didn't move into the starting lineup, but she still ranked fourth on the team in scoring while playing 23 minutes off the bench, finishing second behind the great Sherri Brooks in assists.

It was the same season Brooks had 115 steals, a total that is still 21 more than any other player in program history. To hear Sisco tell it, she was the beneficiary when it was Brooks who was doing the heavy-lifting.

"Sherri picked my pocket every day in practice for all of my redshirt year, and then for the next two years almost single-handedly made me a good point guard," she says.

"Half my points are probably from Sherri stealing the ball and sending it up the court so I could fast break. So I understand that this is more a reflection of timing and team than anything."

She would be the recipient of the Outstanding Sixth Player award that season, the first time the Big Sky awarded it. She also was named All-Big Sky, becoming just the second freshman in league history to pull that off.

She had eight points and three steals off the bench as Montana defeated San Diego State 57-46 on its home floor, the last of Montana's six NCAA tournament wins.

She had made quite an impression as a redshirt freshman, this jack-in-the-box with the dynamic athleticism. She was one of those players you would never dare take your eye off while watching the game. You just couldn't risk missing anything.

The what could she possibly do next? unpredictability she played with was just too much to look away from.

Prior to Sisco's sophomore season, then Lady Griz sports information director Linda McCarthy wrote in the team's yearbook, "Skyla is a crowd favorite who plays with a style comparable to no other." That about sums it up.

It was a team led by Brooks, Sisco and Greta Koss the next year, in 1995-96, and don't let that Hi-Line connection slip by you.

Koss was inducted into the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame in 2016. Five years later it's Sisco's turn. Both are from Malta.

The only other Lady Griz inductees have been Cheri Bratt (1995), Marti Leibenguth (1996), Shannon Cate (1998) and Lisa McLeod (2011).

"One of the coolest things about this is that Greta and I are from a town of 2,000 people," Sisco says. "We're two of six and that's just a huge source of pride for me.

"I still have an enormous amount of pride for being from Malta."

She is the daughter of Dan and Marla, the younger sister of Paul, now an electrical engineer in Dallas, who has three kids. One of those, Cooper, is a 6-foot-5 freshman shooting guard at Virginia Military Institute of the Southern Conference.

"He's the tallest and probably the most skilled of any of us," Sisco says. "He's so fun to watch."

Malta did its thing on Sisco, like so many small towns in Montana tend to do on its youth, with everything centered around school activities, where the high school athletes become gods to those who look up to them, who want to be them one day.

"Kids looked up to other kids playing sports. I remember looking up to the high schoolers when I was in grade school and junior high. That was the dream," she says.

"And there wasn't a whole lot to do in Malta, so it became athletic-heavy. I just wanted to be an M-ette. That was the epitome of sports success."

She ran Del Fried's team to the Class B state title in 1991, a runner-up finish in 1992, two seasons with Sisco and Koss when Malta would go 50-4.

She would become an all-state volleyball player, a 5-foot-8 high jumper. That she would become a Lady Griz was probably the easiest coupling imaginable, both sides gaga over the other.

"I had the opportunity to watch the Lady Griz when Shannon (Cate) was a senior, and I was sold. The fans were incredible, the team was incredible," she says.

It was like being a kid again, when she looked up to her idols on the M-ettes and held firm the dream of one day. Now that she had become one, it was the Lady Griz who took on that role, the thing to aspire to become.

"I remember getting recruiting letters from Shannon, and I hung them up all over my walls. It was such a big deal for a small-town kid," she says. "Then the epitome was to be a Lady Griz."

Selvig didn't need much convincing. "The thing that stood out going and watching her play in Malta was she had just a beautiful dribble-jumper, a really elevated dribble-jumper," he says.

"She was a real good player, athletic, but that stood out to me. That was at a time when there weren't a lot of people with a dribble-jumper. That was a great weapon for her in college."

It was a late February night in that 1995-96 season, the one headlined by the two former M-ettes and Brooks, when Sisco's season came to an end at the worst time in the worst way.

With the Lady Griz on a 12-game winning streak and playing at Boise State, Sisco would be lost for the rest of the season with a torn ACL suffered just four minutes into the game.

"I tried to put a brace on and play. They ran me through some drills on the court and it didn't work. I ended up hurting it a little worse and fractured my femur, so that was a no-go," she says. "Kind of crushing."

Even without Sisco, Montana would win the Big Sky tournament but fall to North Carolina State, 77-68 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in the opening round of the NCAA tournament, despite Brooks' 27 points and 11 assists in her final collegiate game.

With Sisco braced up as a junior, in 1996-97, Montana went 23-3 through the regular season, won the league at 16-0, then hosted and won the Big Sky tournament.

In an 8-9 matchup against Texas Tech in the first round of the NCAA tournament in Palo Alto, Calif., Montana lost 47-45.

And when you lose only 22 games your entire collegiate career, those defeats tend to stick with you.

"I'll never forget that game. I missed a last-second shot. It was a bit of a desperation, but I could have taken a better shot," she says.

"If we would have won, we would have played Stanford at Stanford, so that one still gets me." Even more than 23 years later.

As a fifth-year senior in 1997-98, Sisco was a Lady Griz in full. She led the team in scoring and assists while shooting 45.5 percent from the field, 81.9 percent from the line.

It was the type of season that gave credence to Selvig's recommendation that first-year players redshirt, though he never required it.

"When you're that age, a year sounds like forever and you don't want to redshirt," Sisco says. "But when Rob told you something, you believed it. It was hard but 100 percent the right decision. It made me a way better player."

After opening 5-4, Montana won 19 of 20 and rolled into the NCAA tournament, where the Lady Griz lost 85-64 at Florida in Sisco's final game in maroon. "It wasn't our best showing," she says.

In four years, she lost four games to Big Sky opponents, two at Boise State, one at Eastern Washington, one at Northern Arizona, by a combined 26 points. Yeah, it was a pretty good run.

"Not winning the Big Sky and not making the (NCAA) tournament wasn't an option," she says. "It wasn't a gimme, but it was an expectation.

"It felt like we always had a target on our backs, and it can be harder to be in that position than the underdog position. We didn't know the underdog position from a conference standpoint."

It was the last Montana team to have four-year players who could say they never finished other than first in the Big Sky Conference.

Koss was one year older than Sisco and, using agent (and former Lady Griz) Jean McNulty, got on with the Utah Starzz in the inaugural season of the WNBA.

After finishing her playing career at Montana a year later and earning her degree in exercise science, Sisco gave it her own shot. She went to the WNBA combine but went undrafted.

She got picked up by Phoenix and practiced with the team for a number of weeks, but on the day she was finally awarded a uniform and a locker, she got cut. "Just kidding! That was kind of harsh," said Sisco.

"Cheryl Miller was my coach. She was a tough one. She was not Robin Selvig, let's just say that."

It may have been a blessing. Her ailing body was ready for a break, an extended one. Her knee, the other one, was a mess, having compensated for the injured one for so long.

It required surgery and an even longer recovery than the ACL injury, a full year.

"A nasty, nasty surgery. I don't think they even do them anymore," she said. "A lateral release where they cut away the fascia from your kneecap. It was a brutal recovery."

After healing from that and using McNulty as her agent, she played two seasons in Luxembourg and Belgium. It would be the end of her competitive basketball career.

"It was great, a great experience," says Sisco. "Got to see a little bit of the world, but at that point, my body was like, okay, you can stop beating me up now. Everything in my body hurt, so I came home."

After college, she did some coaching in Stevensville and at Big Sky High School. She worked as a 911 dispatcher, "which was enormously interesting," and she worked as a referee for a number of years, flipping the script, now taking instead of giving.

"It was kind of a self-imposed penance because I was kind of tough on the refs. Boy, that's a tough job," she says, happy to have done it, happy to be done with it.

She rebounded physically and put her boundless energy and athleticism into Ultimate Frisbee. "I was like, what's next? People kind of laugh at it, but it's an amazing sport," she says.

She and the coed Mental Toss Flycoons won the national championship in 2008 in Sarasota, Fla., defeating a team from San Francisco in the semifinals, a team from Seattle in the title match.

That qualified them for worlds in Prague. The U.S. champions won bronze on the big stage.

"I was a cutter. You have handlers, people who are amazing throwers, and you have cutters, people who are quick and fast and can catch, so I spent all that energy running up and down the field," she says.

And anyone who saw Sisco play nods their head and says, yep, I can see that. It was Brooks to Sisco on the break, all over again.

Her professional life found direction -- and she discovered her passion -- in 2003 when some people she met in college started Liquid Planet. She thought it would be fun to get in on the ground floor, so she joined in while completing a master's degree in psychology.

She eventually became part-owner.

A few years ago, they moved Liquid Planet from its original location on Higgins in downtown Missoula around the corner to a spot on Broadway and got to work on what had been their long-time dream.

"Building a bar-restaurant was always our ultimate goal. You've got to sell a lot of cups of coffee to build a restaurant," she says. "So that took a lot of years."

Their dream became Pangea Bar and Restaurant on the main level, Stave and Hoop, a speakeasy, in the basement. "This is my baby," Sisco said this week while giving a tour, pointing out all the details someone might miss.

It's only fitting Sisco is still hanging around the Hoop. What was a lifelong obsession still is.

"We tried to open right during COVID, which was quite poor timing, but we're still here. We're fighting and clawing our way to make this place work."

On Friday night she'll take a break from that to become Lady Griz No. 6 to be inducted into the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame.

First Bratt, then Leibenguth, then Cate, then McLeod, then Koss. Now Sisco.

"I don't know if I deserve to be named in that crew," she says. "It's just a huge honor. I just want to say that I feel very lucky. There are a lot of girls who helped make this happen that should get a lot of the credit."

A great teammate then, an appreciative one now. And a Hall of Famer for life.

University of Montana Athletics

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