Freshman Orientation with Haley Huard

It was the biggest adult-sized decision of her life, and Haley Huard nailed it. At least we can say that now, as we look back with the benefit of hindsight, after everything played out like it was somehow scripted to be, like she knew it all along and everyone else just wasn't able to see what she saw.

What she deep down just knew. "I will go on record saying her dad and I were wrong and she was right," says Molly Huard, Haley's mom, who seems to be quite happy about having been so wrong.

But back then, at the time of her decision? Leap of faith is one way to describe it and even that might not quite do it justice.

Imagine the scene, back in the spring of 2020. Missoula, in the early stages of statewide stay-at-home orders, was a ghost town. Campus? The students had been sent home mid-semester, the buildings were locked, people were told not to congregate, to essentially stay away.

The extensive landscaping, the university's hallmark, was springing to life but the grounds were deserted, desolate, with no one there to enjoy it. Except for the Huards, who were self-touring campus, looking in every window they could that might help Haley decide where to play college basketball.

They had come over from their home in Washington for an unofficial visit, filling one of just two rooms being occupied at the nearly DoubleTree, and not even the Lady Griz coaches, their hands tied by the NCAA, could join the Huards on campus for a meet-and-greet.

The family had to go off intuition as they strolled around. They had to imagine what their visit would have been like in more normal times. "There was no one walking through campus at all, but I just loved it," says Haley. "You could still get the feel of it. I could still tell that it felt like home."

(Insert: the sound of her parents clenching their teeth.)

"Both Brock and I had serious reservations," says Molly, but those had nothing to do with the school or the campus or Grizzly athletics in general. Quite the contrary.

Luke Huard, Brock's younger brother, was the offensive coordinator for the Sacramento State football team a few years ago, and the Hornets made a visit to Missoula during livelier times.

"He was like, 'We couldn't even hear our play calls.' He told me the atmosphere at Montana and the fan base is so much different than anything he's ever experienced," says Haley.

Brock and Molly's concerns came from a different source, from a single word that had been attached to Montana's coaching staff: interim.

Molly, then Hills, played basketball at Washington. Brock played football at the same school before going on to play in the NFL. He makes his living these days talking about sports, as a high-profile and well-respected color commentator for Fox and on sports-talk radio.

So no matter what they were told, no matter what they saw, no matter what their daughter felt walking around campus, it all came back to that scarlet letter, the one pinned to the chest of last year's staff: I for Interim. They know how all this works.

"We knew an interim head coach is a scary scenario," says Molly. "We've been around sports long enough to know there was a good chance (Mike Petrino) would not be the head coach the next year.

"We thought there was another program that would be a better fit for her. Brock and I were kind of set on that."

They wanted the stability, the comfort of knowing who the coach would be that would guide their daughter through four important years of her life. Haley? She was fine following her heart, taking a flyer, that leap of faith, believing everything would work out for the best.

They slept on it. She slept on it. They met after they returned home, at the kitchen table, both sides believing they stood on the right side of the issue. The parents were ready to offer their advice. Then Haley Huard began to speak.

"She had 100 percent conviction. She had to make a decision and make her voice heard, the first time just growing into young adulthood," says Brock. "We had reservations about the situation but she did not. She could not have been more clear of thought."

Her mom will never forget the moment, when her oldest of three stood on her own. "That was probably her first really big decision she truly made on her own. When she got done talking to us, we just said, 'You know what, Haley? This is your decision and we fully support you.' And she never looked back."

Today? She's on a 6-1 Lady Griz team that is surging under first-year coach Brian Holsinger. Huard is averaging more than 13 minutes and 6.1 points as an impactful 3-point shooter off the bench.

"It's pretty cool looking back now," says Molly. "She's got a pretty strong faith and she prayed about it. She said, this is where I'm supposed to be.

"The fact that Brian was who they hired, I truly felt the Lord's hand was on it. It's a perfect fit for her. She knew she was supposed to be there. Now it's kind of a joke between us. Yep, you were right and we were wrong. All things said, she is in the right spot. And she was right."

It's a delightful daisy chain that connects the basketball elements in this story, of Haley Huard playing in the program that Robin Selvig built into a champion, the one that got under the skin of former Washington coach Chris Gobrecht, the very coach that recruited Molly Hills to the Huskies.

"For my generation, I was very aggressive, a very physical, scrappy player and 3-point shooter," says Molly, who played at Edmonds-Woodway High. "I got my minutes playing very intense defense. She had a very suffocating man-to-man defense, and she saw me as a player who was willing to do that."

But before that, Gobrecht, the coach who put Washington women's basketball on the map, had to build it, starting in 1985-86. After opening her coaching career that season with wins over UCLA (sweet!) and Washington State (even sweeter!), she took her team to Missoula to face the Lady Griz.

Final score: Montana 63, Washington 51. It was her first loss as head coach.

The Huskies would follow that loss with six straight wins, including victories over Stanford and Duke, and eventually go 24-6 and make the NCAA tournament.

She returned with her team two years later, with a team that would go 25-5, win the then Pac-10 with a 16-2 league record and advance to the second round of the NCAA tournament.

The Huskies were 6-1, their only loss to Louisiana Tech, the team that would go on to win the national championship that season. They were ranked 14th in the nation.

Final score: Montana 78, Washington 57. The attendance: 5,254. The Washington coach: livid. She was given two technical fouls during the game from officiating she thought was a bit one-sided.

"Montana is a very good team, but they carry a rap, and nobody will come here to play (because of it)," she said after the game. "We're one of the few teams that will."

Selvig, told of Gobrecht's comments, said, "It's very irritating. They never, ever can give credit. Anybody watching the game who thought we weren't the better team tonight wasn't watching the game."

Even more than 30 years later, Selvig stands by his words: "All I can say is, the game's on tape."

Gobrecht didn't know it at the time, but she may have gone up against the best Lady Griz team ever that day. Montana opened the season 26-0 before losing a two-point game at Montana State on the final day of the regular season.

Two weeks later the Lady Griz ended a 28-2 campaign with a 74-72 home loss to Stanford in the NCAA tournament. The crowd that day, 8,709 strong, is the second-largest ever to see a Montana home game.

Washington would exact its revenge on Montana with an 80-47 victory over the Lady Griz in Seattle in 1988-89, a season both teams would make the NCAA tournament.

Same thing in 1989-90. In a game between teams that would combine to go 55-6 and both make the NCAA tournament, the Huskies won 67-58 in Missoula.

The two programs would not face each other again for nearly 30 years -- call it a mutually agreed-upon détente -- which skipped right over the Molly Hills era as a Husky (1995-96 to 1998-99).

Hills played for Gobrecht for just one season, before the coach left for Florida State. June Daugherty, who had had her own epic battles against Selvig and the Lady Griz as the coach at Boise State, was hired to replace her.

Hills and the Huskies went to the NCAA tournament her sophomore and junior years, the WNIT her senior year. And they became a big thing on campus.

"In most of my years at Washington, the boys' program was not as strong as the girls' program, so there was a time when we outdrew the boys' program," says Molly, the pride still evident in her voice. "That was a big deal to us as players back then."

She learned what it was like to run onto the court in front of a faithful, loud fan base. And there were enough road games in front of mostly empty bleachers for her to learn and appreciate the difference.

"What I told Haley was, you work so hard as a student-athlete in all the time you put forth, when you run out to an empty gym, it's really hard," Molly says.

As part of her daughter's recruitment, the family watched "The House That Rob Built," the documentary by former Lady Griz Megan Harrington that tells the story of the program Selvig built at Montana, from overlooked to standing-room-only, from novelty to dynasty.

With the Montana-Washington rivalry of the 80s put on hold, Hills had no idea what had been built just two states over. She played at Montana State as a sophomore, an 80-58 Washington win, but it wasn't Montana. Few places were.

"We were not really familiar with the whole Selvig era. When we watched the movie, it gave me goosebumps. It was so cool to see what he did with women's basketball so long ago," says Molly.

To continue the daisy chain, Daugherty would coach at Washington through the 2006-07 season before being unceremoniously let go, right after a second straight NCAA tournament appearance, the ninth time she took her team to a national tournament in her 11 seasons in Seattle.

Washington State couldn't believe its good fortune and didn't waste any time hiring the former coach of its rival. One of her first moves was to bring on as an assistant a little-known coach who had spent the previous two years at Montana Tech: Brian Holsinger.

But before we get to that guy, we need to first start with another guy: Brock Huard, son of a high school football coach, younger brother of Damon, who would play at Washington and spend 12 seasons in the NFL, and older brother of Luke, who played at North Carolina and is now on the staff at Texas A&M.

And one can only imagine what kind of household that was like to grow up in. "Male, testosterone, competition," Brock says when asked for three words to describe his upbringing, which he could only do after laughing, perhaps at the memories that come flooding back.

In the fall of 1995, after being named the national high school player of the year as a senior at Puyallup High, he was a freshman quarterback at Washington, watching from the sideline while his older brother led the Huskies to a 7-4-1 finish and a tie for the Pac-10 title.

They were heady times, as more than 70,000 fans flowed into Husky Stadium for every home game that fall, including a stadium-record 76,125 for Washington's 21-13 win over Army.

They bumped into each other from time to time, Brock and Molly did, mostly in the training room, theirs a unique connection. Both were freshmen with older siblings holding senior roles on their teams. Brock had Damon, Molly had Heidi.

Brock, as so many did during those years, would head over to The Hec to catch the women's basketball team play. Part of it was his devotion to all things Huskies. Part of it was being quite smitten.

"She was feisty," he says of Molly. "She was tenacious, a great defensive player. She was an undersized wing, so she had to play great defense and shoot the three. She kind of carved out that role."

It was the coaching change, from Gobrecht to Daugherty, that gave the Huards their real and legitimate trepidations about Montana's coaching uncertainty while their oldest offspring was looking at programs with which to commit to.

To wind up on a team coached by someone who didn't recruit you is to see any ties of loyalty come easily undone.

Molly fit with Gobrecht's program and style of play. It was never quite the same her last three years, under a coach who didn't recruit her. "Her career would have been different with Chris there," says Brock. "It's a tough situation when a new staff comes in."

But before the story can get to the here and now, Brock Huard had to take a chance back then, sitting in his dorm room in the spring of 1996, looking over the questionnaire he'd been asked to fill out by Washington's sports information director, Jim Daves.

"I turned to my roommate and said, 'Dude, I'm going to do it. I'm going to write Molly Hills as my favorite athlete to watch," he recalls.

He wrote it, then forgot about it. Until that summer, when the Washington football media guide returned from being printed. On Huard's bio page, Daves had taken the liberty of not just putting down Huard's answers to the questionnaire, he'd thrown in a photo of Hills shooting a jump shot.

Daves had done his job. He'd set everything in motion. "That was the icebreaker. That was the turning point from me pursuing her and watching her games to let's really go after this. That spurred a lot of conversation and kind of spurred the relationship," Brock says.

Brock followed Damon as a starting quarterback for the Huskies, then was selected in the third round, 77th overall, in the 1999 NFL draft by the hometown Seahawks.

In 2000, on a Sunday in late November, the Huards became the first brothers in NFL history to both start an NFL game on the same day.

He would spend two seasons in Indianapolis backing up Peyton Manning, then re-signed with Seattle for the 2004 season before retiring.

The family settled in the Seattle area, where Brock stayed in the public eye, which brought with it a set of complications for the kids, first Haley, then Macey, then Titus.

The Huard name was both unique enough and well known enough in the area that every time one of the kids did something on their own, sports or otherwise, the question was always, "Wait, are you …?"

Yes, they were, and because of it they were looked at a little bit differently than most of their classmates. Even if it was unintentional, the expectations were set a little higher, because if they were a Huard, they must be pretty good at basketball, at soccer, at volleyball, at whatever.

It's just human nature to put those who we feel like we know under a microscope, taking them from outsized and putting them under more intense scrutiny, even if they're in elementary school.

"There was a pressure our kids felt with that. (Living in) Washington was kind of hard in that sense. They felt a lot of expectations when they were young and put a lot of pressure on themselves," says Molly.

That all changed when the family moved south of Denver in the summer of 2020.

"We moved to Colorado and I really think it's been healthy for all three of our kids to shake a little bit of that focus on them from people who recognize the last name," adds Molly.

"There was a freedom last year with all of our kids to kind of be their own person and not carry that weight. It's been freeing. A lot of people down here don't even know how to pronounce Huard, which is nice."

But that's not to say there aren't some perks. Last week Brock worked the Colorado-Utah game for Fox on Friday, then jetted over to California for Saturday's Notre Dame-Stanford game.

After Montana defeated Nicholls State last Saturday, the team was enjoying a postgame meal in the hotel. Playing in the background was the Fighting Irish-Cardinal game and that familiar voice, the one she's had talking to her since birth.

"We were sitting there and I heard my dad's voice and I was like, Oh, that's cool," says Haley. "I'm kind of used to it because he's been doing it for so long, but it's still kind of cool. I like to hear his voice, especially when I'm missing him."

Even though they were an important part of the family's life, sports were never the be-all, end-all for the kids. At least their parents tried not to make it so.

Haley did ballet and dance. "I never really liked it that much," she says. She played soccer, volleyball, did track and cross country. Even gave band a shot in middle school. "I hated it. I'm not musically inclined at all. I would just pretend to blow into my flute because I had no idea what I was doing."

But genetics and blood typically win the day. "I grew up with competitive parents, so I'm sure that had a lot of influence on me. My parents were like, do whatever you're passionate about, and it was basketball since I was in kindergarten."

She won a Washington Class 4A state championship as a sophomore at Eastlake High, was voted the MVP of the Rising Stars Game at the 2019 Puget Sound Throwdown and later earned a spot at the Adidas Gauntlet All-American Camp.

You might think she got a head start, the daughter of two college athletes, and she probably did, but her dad wants you to know, in his self-deprecating way, that she is here, in her first year as a Lady Griz, mostly from her own doing.

"The only thing I passed down was her length and height, and that was it," he says. "Maybe our own careers gave her the inspiration she could do this, but it is 100 percent hers.

"Her mom passed down the basketball and the toughness and determination, and Haley has taken that and molded it into her own journey. It's been pretty fun to watch.

"All the sacrifices she's made year-round and the pressure that came with the recruiting process, she persevered and gave herself the opportunity to have some choices. At the kitchen table, when she made the decision she was going to Montana, that was the start of her trailblazing her own journey."

She says her dream was to play at Oregon State when she was little. She's told that the Beavers were not very good when she was little. No, not that little, she explains, when she was in high school. When she was really little, she wanted to go to Stanford.

She did go to Oregon State, the day before her dad called the Oregon-OSU football game a few years ago. They stopped by the women's basketball practice. An upbeat, energetic assistant coach named Brian Holsinger hurried over and introduced himself.

"I remember meeting him and I was like, Oh my gosh, he's the best assistant coach ever," Haley recalls. "I loved how Oregon State did things and ran their practice. It's crazy, because that's how Brian runs it here now."

The family moved to Colorado 18 months ago, because of COVID and its impact on Washington high school sports, because it's easier to fly to places from Denver than it is from Seattle and because Brock wanted to become more involved with Compassion International, which is based in Colorado Springs.

The Huards have sponsored a child through Compassion and went as a family to El Salvador on a mission trip. And Compassion International has long been a sponsor of Brock's Faith in Sports podcast.

The move allowed the Huard girls to have a full basketball season in 2020-21, something they wouldn't have had in Washington, and what a memorable one it was.

Valor Christian went 17-0 and won the Colorado Class 5A state title. Blue Star Media Elite ranked the Eagles No. 12 nationally after the season.

Valor Christian defeated Regis Jesuit 67-42 in the state title game in March, that after downing Highlands Ranch 66-45 in the semifinals. It was in that game that Huard matched up against Lady Griz signee Alex Pirog, who back then was still uncommitted.

"I had to play a bit of post this past season at Valor, which I did not like because I like being on the perimeter and shooting," Haley says. "We went at it. We battled."

It was about the time Huard was celebrating with that trophy that Montana was in the initial stages of finding its new women's basketball coach, the unknown to whom Haley had committed.

After Selvig retired following the 2015-16 season, taking his 24 conference championships and 21 NCAA tournament appearances with him, the Lady Griz floundered. They would be an un-Lady-Griz-like 16 games under .500 the next five seasons, with a single postseason win.

Holsinger was named the new head coach on April 13 and given a daunting task: get the Lady Griz back where they belong.

"When Brian first called me and told me that he was going to be the head coach and that he wanted me to be here, it was total excitement," says Haley. "I honestly was more excited than I was before because I know what he's about."

Her excitement was matched with hearty sighs of relief from her parents. For all their concerns, about the uncertainty of the coaching staff, it had worked out better than they could have imagined.

"We've jumped on the Lady Griz bandwagon," says Molly. "It's a fun team to watch. You get the sense these coaches are doing it right and that this program is going to make big waves. To see Haley doing well in the game that I love is just a lot of fun."

Her husband has climbed aboard and found a seat as well. "They love their Griz. They have the type of community that none of the other schools that offered her were able to bring to the table. She had that intuition and insight, and she is loving that Grizzly community."

Holsinger got to work about two minutes after he accepted the job. He had a staff he needed to put together. He had to evaluate the roster, determine what changes needed to be made, what additions had to be brought in.

He started working with some of the returners in May. Huard arrived in June for a crash course in Division I basketball.

"Brian is so detail-oriented that it was shocking for me. It was a huge adjustment, and the speed of the game was so much faster and physical," she says. "I'd never experienced the intensity of practice like that."

It brought out the best in her, as heightened competition can for someone wired a particular way, the Huard way. "I've never loved playing basketball as much as I do now. The pressure and expectations have helped me, if that makes sense. It's given me so much confidence in who I am as a player."

Ah, that confidence. "There is just another level of confidence when you've seen your parents play at a high level that's unique," Holsinger says. "The hard things don't bother you as much because mom and dad went through some hard things too. That perspective is invaluable.

"Coming from a family like that, there is a different level of stability when it comes to really being coachable. Haley is so coachable and just wants to get better, so she's improved dramatically. She improves every day."

Her role as a freshman is to come off the bench and shoot it, which she has no problems doing. That she is a 3-point shooter and 6-foot-1 is because she was playing in a guard-sized body until she shot up four and a half inches as a high school freshman. She welcomed the size while keeping the guard skills.

"One of the greatest things is that she has a confidence level in her shot that is unique," says Holsinger. "We laugh about it as a team. Shoot it like Haley does. She doesn't think about it, she just lets it go, which is fantastic. I want her to do that."

She's here because she earned it, through years of sacrifice, of hard work, not because of her name. She's here because when everyone said to take one fork in the road, she took the other and never looked back.

And now she is on a team that is 6-1 and looking more Lady Griz-like, the fun, winning kind, by the day.

"I'm just super thankful for the opportunity to be here and to play on a team where greatness is expected. I could not imagine a more perfect place for me. Being here checks every single box," she says.

She knows she'll never escape her surname and all that comes with it, just like her cousin Sam won't, another Huard playing quarterback for the Huskies, the son of Damon. More will follow as the next wave comes through.

But they are a new generation, ready to break through and make their own mark. They don't want to erase the legacy or make people forget about it. They want to add to it. "I just kind of want to make my own name for myself," Haley says.

She's still the daughter of Brock and Molly, that will never change, but it won't be long before the script will have been flipped, before they're the ones being asked, "Wait, are you …?"

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