Lady Griz open season hosting Nighthawks

Tuesday, November 9

Missoula, Mont.

5 PM

Montana

Northwest Nazarene

Photo by: Derek Johnson

11/8/2021 1:42:00 PM | Women's Basketball

By: Montana Sports Information

The Montana women's basketball team, under first-year coach Brian Holsinger, will open its season on Tuesday evening hosting Northwest Nazarene at Dahlberg Arena.

The Lady Griz and Nighthawks, teams that will be playing for the first time, will tip off at 5 p.m., the first half of a doubleheader with the Montana men's team, which hosts Dickinson State at 7:30 p.m.

Montana will conclude its short season-opening home stand on Sunday with a game against Gonzaga at 2 p.m. The Lady Griz won't play at home again until early December.

Coverage: Tuesday's game will mark Montana's debut on ESPN+. Riley Corcoran will call both games of the doubleheader. The Lady Griz game also will air on KMPT (99.7 FM/930 AM) in the Missoula area.

Seating note: Fans who have a ticket to the women's game are invited to remain for the men's game but are asked to move to general-admission seating or an open seat in the upper bowl.

Ticket note: Fans can gain general-admission entry by bringing five or more canned goods to support the Can the Cats campaign.

COVID note: Fans are asked to wear masks this season at Montana's home basketball games.

Notes to aid your Tuesday viewing experience:

* Northwest Nazarene is an NCAA Division II school located in Nampa, Idaho. The Nighthawks were picked to finish third in the 10-team Great Northwest Athletic Conference behind Alaska Anchorage and Western Washington.

* Tuesday's game will be an exhibition for Northwest Nazarene, which opens its season on Friday in Turlock, Calif., at the GNAC-CCAA Crossover with games against Cal State East Bay and Stanislaus State.

* The Nighthawks played an exhibition game at Washington State on Friday night and lost 113-46. The Cougars, who shot 52.4 percent and hit 13 3-pointers, put up 34 points in the first quarter and never looked back.

* Junior forward Erin Jenkins and sophomore forward Nyalam Thabach were voted to the 15-player preseason all-league team.

* Jenkins averaged a team-high 12.9 points last season on 50.4 percent shooting. Thabach, who began her career at UC Santa Barbara, averaged 12.1 points on 49.3 percent shooting and a team-leading 6.2 rebounds per game.

* Northwest Nazarene went 7-7 last winter playing an abbreviated 14-game schedule that began in mid-January and ended in early March.

* One of those games was a 76-51 win over College of Idaho, a few weeks after Montana defeated the same team in Missoula, 61-33.

* Northwest Nazarene was formerly named the Crusaders. The school changed to Nighthawks in October 2017.

* NNU is coached by Steve Steele, who is in his sixth season and enters 2021-22 with a record of 92-37. His teams have gone 63-17 in GNAC games.

* Northwest Nazarene held a No. 1 Division II national ranking during the 2018-19 season, a campaign that opened with 17 straight wins.

* Steele was hired in August 2016 to replace Holsinger, who had been hired in March of that year and spent four months at the school before Oregon State came calling.

* Holsinger spent eight years at Washington State (2007-08 to 2014-15), then took a year off from coaching, when he and his family moved to Boise.

* NNU Director of Athletics Kelli Lindley convinced Holsinger to return to the sideline. Four months later Scott Rueck at Oregon State convinced Holsinger to return to the Pac-12. Now he's at Montana and Steele is doing good work at Northwest Nazarene, so it worked out for everyone involved.

* Tuesday will be Step 4 for Montana, which had the Maroon and Silver scrimmage on Oct. 27, a closed-door scrimmage against Northwest College on Nov. 1, then hosted Rocky Mountain in an exhibition game on Friday.

* Montana trailed for just one possession in the game on Friday, in the second quarter, but needed some defensive stops and made free throws in the fourth quarter to hold off the Battlin' Bears, who never got any closer than four in the final period.

* Carmen Gfeller led Montana with 16 points on 6-of-9 shooting, a good start for the player who led the Big Sky in shooting last season at 52.9 percent, the eighth-best single-season percentage in Lady Griz history.

* Abby Anderson added a double-double, with 12 points and 10 rebounds. She also blocked five shots. She takes 144 career blocks into her senior year, a total that ranks seventh in program history.

* She sits 13 blocks behind No. 6 on the list, Katie Baker, who was an assistant coach with Holsinger at Oregon State and is in her first season as an assistant at Washington under first-year coach Tina Langley.

* Gfeller and Anderson both were voted third-team All-Big Sky last season. It marked the first time since 2015-16, when Kayleigh Valley was first-team, McCalle Feller second-team, that Montana had a pair of players voted all-league.

* Sophia Stiles had 11 points, Kyndall Keller added 10 off the bench. Both went 2 for 3 from 3-point range.

* Montana played without seniors Sammy Fatkin and Kylie Frohlich, and freshmen Lisa Kiefer and Lamprini Polymeni. Senior Nyah Morris-Nelson started but only played seven minutes of the first quarter.

* Personnel shortages had starters Anderson (38), Gfeller (34), Stiles (34) and Katerina Tsineke (32), a first-year junior who transferred from East Carolina, all playing 32 or more minutes. Not ideal for an exhibition game.

* Freshman Haley Huard played 13 minutes off the bench and grabbed five rebounds.

* Montana is 29-14 in season openers in the modern era of Lady Griz Basketball, defined as when it came under the Department of Athletics umbrella with the hiring of Robin Selvig prior to the 1978-79 season.

* Over the last 12 seasons, Montana is just 4-8 in its opener. Seven of those eight losses came on the road or in neutral-site games. The season-opening home loss came to Seattle, 58-44, in 2015-16, Selvig's final season.

* In that same 43-year modern-era period, Montana is 37-6 in its home opener, with losses to Western Kentucky (twice), Washington, Oregon, Kentucky and Seattle.

* On Tuesday night, Holsinger will be on the sideline as a collegiate head coach for the first time since his second Montana Tech team lost 73-62 to Carroll on March 1, 2007.

* On Sunday, Montana will host Gonzaga, which went 23-4 last season and made the NCAA tournament. The No. 5 Bulldogs lost to No. 12 Belmont in San Marcos, Texas, in the first round.

* Gonzaga is two spots out of the top 25 in the preseason USA Today/WBCA poll. The Bulldogs return two starters from last year's team that defeated Montana 58-51 in Spokane.

* Gonzaga, which opens the season with a home game against Montana State on Thursday, was picked second in the West Coast Conference preseason coaches' poll behind BYU. The Cougars received eight first-place votes, the Bulldogs the other two.

* Next week Montana will travel east to face North Dakota and North Dakota State. The Fighting Hawks, who the Lady Griz defeated 86-72 in Missoula last December, were picked ninth out of 10 teams in the Summit League preseason poll. The Bison were picked a strong third behind mid-major heavyweights South Dakota and South Dakota State.

* Over Thanksgiving weekend, Montana will be in Phoenix for Grand Canyon's tournament. The Lady Griz will face Houston Baptist and Nicholls State.

* Both opponents compete in the Southland Conference. Houston Baptist was picked second in the preseason poll behind Southeastern Louisiana, Nicholls State was picked fourth.

* Montana's next home games won't be until Dec. 2 and 4, when the Lady Griz open their Big Sky schedule with home games against Sacramento State (Dec. 2) and Northern Colorado (Dec. 4).

* Nine Big Sky Conference teams open their schedule on Tuesday, with the highlight game, from a league perspective, being Idaho State, the preseason favorite, going on the road to face Oregon, which is ranked ninth in the USA Today/WBCA preseason poll.