Photo by: © Derek Johnson 2019
The price she’s paid
2/26/2021 1:23:00 PM | Women's Basketball
It's Friday, and it's also Madi Schoening's 23rd birthday. And tomorrow is Senior Day for the lone player on this year's Lady Griz team to reach that endpoint.
We'll celebrate, from a distance this season, as life and protocol demand. We'll give our tributes, shed some tears, and send Madi, flowers in hand, on her way, the latest to nearly complete the journey from current to former.
It's been five years, and she's bridged the most volatile period in the program's history, the lone player able to make that claim.
She committed to play for Robin Selvig. He retired the month before she arrived on campus. She played four years for Shannon Schweyen, one of them wiped out by injury. Imagine that.
Then there was Schweyen's dismissal, COVID-19, a major turnover in the roster, the daily threat of cancellations, a season without fans. And here we are, one day away from Schoening's final home game.
"You don't realize how much you're going to miss it until you don't have it," she says, revealing fully that she's not in any sort of denial. Next month will be it, no matter how it ends. She knows that.
"It's going to be sad, not being surrounded by my teammates every day. That part will be a bummer."
What few will know is the toll it's taken on Schoening's body, her wellbeing. The former Sandpoint Bulldog has aged like one. Because it's impossible to compete like she does and come out unscathed.
This is no ride-off-into-the-sunset fairytale. This is a bruised and battered warrior stepping foot out of the octagon for the final time. It's why she'll be remembered and remembered so fondly by those who got to see her compete.
She brought it, daily, in games, at practice. If all foes were not defeated, at least they knew they had been in a battle and have the scars to prove it. She does. "My body feels like it's 40," she says.
Just about everything hurts. After last season ended, she took a month off from basketball, from lifting, from the daily grind that few see and even fewer appreciate. Only then did her body begin to reset.
Given the NCAA's grace period for all current student-athletes, she could come back next season for year No. 6, for the second year of her master's program in educational leadership.
In the abstract that sounded like a gift. Oh, yeah, I'm doing another year, she thought. "I was totally prepared," she says. Then the season started, and reality set in.
"It gets to the point where I can't sleep and can barely walk. I want to be able to pick up my kids one day, is what I'm thinking," she says.
"Mentally I would 100 percent love to but the body is just not there. The body is what is stopping me."
She talks about her body as if it's a separate thing, as if there is a disconnect between the two, she and it. It's possible they split up years ago, at least emotionally, one leaving the other under the guise of irreconcilable differences.
But that's how she plays. And what she puts her body through. She has one gear and is not wired with the ability to downshift. It's taken a toll, a big one. She'll be paying for it for the rest of her life.
It's the Michael Jordan mentality, one that can't just be turned on and off. It is who I am. That's how I play the game. That was my mentality. If you don't want to play that way, don't play that way.
After her sophomore year, she had a piece of her kidney removed. She has constant back issues and will forever. She has literally given a part of herself to be a Lady Griz. Let's honor that.
Selvig knew what was coming, even if he never had a chance to coach her. He said all the right things when Schoening signed. When the recorder was off, he opened up.
The man who was told by his college coach that he played like a girl and didn't realize until later how much of a compliment it was, said of Schoening, she plays like a guy. And it was high praise. He said it with a bit of awe. And anticipation.
Schoening laughs when she hears it. One of her current coaches, Jace Henderson, who was a teammate of Schoening's, does the same thing when she recalls her official visit.
"She came in for open gym and was tearing it up. She was just playing hard, like Madi always does, which is physical. It was so Madi," Henderson says.
It was supposed to be a low-key meet-and-greet on the basketball court, the competition secondary. But that's never the case with Schoening.
"A lot of the girls were like, who is this girl? Who thinks they can just walk in here and play super physical with all of us?"
Schoening did. She says it comes from wrestling with her dad when she was a toddler. Combine that with a high motor and Ross and Charity knew they had to find their daughter an outlet.
Soccer it was. And she would have been a fantastic college soccer player had basketball not come along and grabbed her heart. She went from grass to hardwood but kept the mentality.
She arrived on campus in August 2016, right as current head coach Mike Petrino was settling into Missoula, Schweyen's first outside hire as she began filling her staff after she was chosen to follow Selvig.
"I distinctly remember meeting her the first time in the fall. Here's this sweet girl, just a personable kid," he says.
"Then we got on the court and she didn't just embrace contact, she created it, she encouraged it. Madi only knows one speed, and because of it, she's made the other players in our program better."
Everyone had their fingers crossed and was hoping the new era in Lady Griz basketball would look just like the old one had under Selvig.
For that to be the case, the 2016-17 team needed the veteran leadership of Kayleigh Valley, who had scored more points than any player in Lady Griz history the season before, and Alycia Sims. They would shepherd the newcomers along, show them the way to the promised land.
Instead it got these two headlines:
October 12, 2016 -- Valley out for the year
November 18, 2016 -- Sims lost for the season
It's why Montana, in its second game of the season, against South Dakota State in Iowa City, started two freshmen, two redshirt freshmen and an upperclassman who entered her junior year with 137 career points, or what Valley might score in five or six games.
It was something Lady Griz fans had never experienced before.
Montana, inexperienced and through little fault of its own, trailed 43-16 at the half and was down 67-20 late in the third quarter. The Selvig era would not be continuing. "It was kind of eye-opening," said Schoening. "Here's Division I. Welcome to the game."
Four days before that bloodletting, Montana hosted Great Falls. Schoening became the first true freshman to start a season opener for the Lady Griz since Katie Baker seven years earlier.
She played 14 minutes and finished with seven rebounds. Five of those came on the offensive end. Because of course they did.
On Thursday night she became the 36th player over the last four decades of Lady Griz basketball to reach 500 rebounds. And then she rolled her ankle. Because of course she did.
"It's fitting that the first thing I remember is how well she rebounded for her size," says Petrino.
We'll remember the backdoor cuts, the ones so difficult to guard against unless her defender opted to match the speed at which she plays. That rarely happened.
We'll remember the drives to the basket, so often to her left hand, and the sweeping finishes that at first seemed unorthodox until they became a matter of routine.
Her teammates will remember the two sides of Schoening. "Madi was not about to take it easy on anyone coming in," says Sophia Stiles. "I found that out really quick."
The coaches have come to rely on it, an intra-squad proving ground for newcomers. If a freshman can keep Schoening off the boards, they can box out anyone the Lady Griz will see on an opposing team.
"She makes her teammates better by pushing them all the time at practice," says Henderson.
But off the court? "She's nothing like that. She's very goofy, laughing all the time, the biggest smile on the team. It's actually quite interesting to see the two different sides," says Stiles.
Call it the Tao of Schoening, the yin and yang, or how contrary forces can be complementary for the greater good of the whole. Or maybe just say that's Madi being Madi.
"My teammates know I'm a different way on the court than off the court. I may get after them but I love them," she says.
She wasn't going to change the way she played for anyone, even for the sake of her own body. She had a solid freshman season but nothing has ever been the same.
At the start of her sophomore year, the kidney issue came up. She played through pain and discomfort that would have had most of us on the couch, complaining. She kept a heating pad courtside and played on.
After the season, they drained the infection and lopped off a piece of her kidney. They stitched her up, sent her on her way, and she was back to playing all out. And you were none the wiser.
Third year? An early-season ankle injury. She started the opener at Gonzaga. A few days later, she twisted it again. It felt like there was a fire inside her left Nike.
The ligament that runs down the outside of a person's foot just up and tore off a piece of bone from her fifth metatarsal, an avulsion fracture. That can happen on a rolled ankle, when you push your body past the breaking point again and again. The body can only withstand so much.
In the battle of determination versus physiology, the latter almost always has the final word. One will always break and give in before the other. For most players, the former taps out first. For Schoening it was body as governor.
She attempted to play through it. She's tough, but she does not suffer from analgesia, as much as she seems to. She feels pain, just like the rest of us. "The bone was just kind of floating around. It wasn't connected," she says. Remember that the next time you're overwhelmed by the ravages of a hangnail.
She had surgery in January of that season, the one that was lost.
You might consider her unlucky. But that would discount the way she plays, what she puts her body through. It can only absorb so much before it starts to break down.
Last year "the back stuff started happening," she says. "Vertebrae rubbing against each other and squeezing the discs out," which doesn't seem compatible with a functional life much less Division I athletics.
It was partly genetic. Her dad had it. Her grandpa, too. But it's not supposed to arrive when you're 21. "It could have been expected. Athletics probably sped it up."
She sounds at peace with it all, like she's come to accept that she is who she is as a competitor, and that she is okay with whatever the cost of that may be. Not like she has a choice.
She was on-again, off-again through November and December last season, then got a back injection that allowed her to return to the starting lineup. She took one for the team, literally.
She's had so many injuries, she forgets some of them. "Oh yeah, I broke a finger that season."
It's the ring finger on her left hand. She holds it up and the end of it dips down at an awkward angle. It's unsettling. But she keeps going hard to the basket with that hand anyway. "It needs to be fixed, so that's in the plans," she says.
She's still dealing with her back that requires occasional injections. She had an ankle sprain earlier this season that had her on crutches. It's the one she re-aggravated on Thursday night.
Because she never really gets over her injuries. It's more about managing them, deciding which of them take priority on any given day, triage and the modern basketball player, at least this one.
If practice lasts two hours, she needs four to pull it off, with both pre-practice and post-practice trips to the training room. There is a reason she says athletic trainer JC Weida and she are "besties."
It's a sad truth.
Pre-practice: There is time in the hot tub, time with a hot pack on her back, stretching, getting taped. Weida pulls on her ankles until they pop. Pops her hips, pops her back. Just to be able to practice.
"Got to get it all back in place," she says.
Post-practice, after all of it has gotten back out of place: Ice, compression, stretching, more adjustments.
"She has invested her whole body into this program," says Petrino. "She puts a lot of time in right now just to get her body ready for practice."
But it's done nothing to dampen her enthusiasm, either for competing or celebrating her teammates or for just having Montana stitched across her uniform front. It's always meant something, always will.
"My favorite memories are the passion she shows when she cheers her teammates on. She wears it on her sleeve out there," says Petrino. "She's loved being a Lady Griz," which has inspired the same feelings in us, toward her.
The reward for all of that has always been Senior Day. It's a sendoff, an appreciation that at Montana goes two ways, from player to fans, from fans back to the player, a mutual affection, an acknowledgement that both sides made it better for the other over four or five years.
It's a thankfulness for what each gave the relationship, the thrills from one, the unconditional support from the other, and an underlying sorrow that it can't go on forever.
Thus the tears, of what was and what will never be again.
Of all the things that have happened in the last year, of the things that have been taken away, that one has hit Schoening hard. The seats inside Dahlberg Arena on Saturday will be 99.9 percent empty.
"Eighteen years of basketball, you don't see it coming to an end with nobody there," she says. She's earned more, but she won't get it.
By summertime, she'll be living back in Sandpoint, perhaps for good, elementary education degree in hand, with coaching on her mind, her way of staying in the game.
Her body will have started healing, at least those injuries that can. The rest will stick with her, reminders of a former life.
She is asked what she might get into for post-collegiate activities to stay active, to remind herself that she was who she was. You expect something low-impact, something she can carry into the years ahead. You assume she is done with all this competing, this battling. And you are wrong.
"They have the Lady Monarchs, a soccer team," she says of Sandpoint. "All the graduated alumni and older ladies play." Oh. My. God.
Somebody better update the league's indemnity clause.
I acknowledge that Madi Schoening might be playing on any given night and that I subject to this willingly, holding no one but myself responsible should I find myself between her and the ball.
That's just Madi being Madi, something we've come to love over the years, a career now marked by days. "I gave it everything I had," she says, as if she even needed to. Her body of work speaks for itself.
We'll celebrate, from a distance this season, as life and protocol demand. We'll give our tributes, shed some tears, and send Madi, flowers in hand, on her way, the latest to nearly complete the journey from current to former.
It's been five years, and she's bridged the most volatile period in the program's history, the lone player able to make that claim.
She committed to play for Robin Selvig. He retired the month before she arrived on campus. She played four years for Shannon Schweyen, one of them wiped out by injury. Imagine that.
Then there was Schweyen's dismissal, COVID-19, a major turnover in the roster, the daily threat of cancellations, a season without fans. And here we are, one day away from Schoening's final home game.
"You don't realize how much you're going to miss it until you don't have it," she says, revealing fully that she's not in any sort of denial. Next month will be it, no matter how it ends. She knows that.
"It's going to be sad, not being surrounded by my teammates every day. That part will be a bummer."
What few will know is the toll it's taken on Schoening's body, her wellbeing. The former Sandpoint Bulldog has aged like one. Because it's impossible to compete like she does and come out unscathed.
This is no ride-off-into-the-sunset fairytale. This is a bruised and battered warrior stepping foot out of the octagon for the final time. It's why she'll be remembered and remembered so fondly by those who got to see her compete.
She brought it, daily, in games, at practice. If all foes were not defeated, at least they knew they had been in a battle and have the scars to prove it. She does. "My body feels like it's 40," she says.
Just about everything hurts. After last season ended, she took a month off from basketball, from lifting, from the daily grind that few see and even fewer appreciate. Only then did her body begin to reset.
Given the NCAA's grace period for all current student-athletes, she could come back next season for year No. 6, for the second year of her master's program in educational leadership.
In the abstract that sounded like a gift. Oh, yeah, I'm doing another year, she thought. "I was totally prepared," she says. Then the season started, and reality set in.
"It gets to the point where I can't sleep and can barely walk. I want to be able to pick up my kids one day, is what I'm thinking," she says.
"Mentally I would 100 percent love to but the body is just not there. The body is what is stopping me."
She talks about her body as if it's a separate thing, as if there is a disconnect between the two, she and it. It's possible they split up years ago, at least emotionally, one leaving the other under the guise of irreconcilable differences.
But that's how she plays. And what she puts her body through. She has one gear and is not wired with the ability to downshift. It's taken a toll, a big one. She'll be paying for it for the rest of her life.
It's the Michael Jordan mentality, one that can't just be turned on and off. It is who I am. That's how I play the game. That was my mentality. If you don't want to play that way, don't play that way.
After her sophomore year, she had a piece of her kidney removed. She has constant back issues and will forever. She has literally given a part of herself to be a Lady Griz. Let's honor that.
Selvig knew what was coming, even if he never had a chance to coach her. He said all the right things when Schoening signed. When the recorder was off, he opened up.
The man who was told by his college coach that he played like a girl and didn't realize until later how much of a compliment it was, said of Schoening, she plays like a guy. And it was high praise. He said it with a bit of awe. And anticipation.
Schoening laughs when she hears it. One of her current coaches, Jace Henderson, who was a teammate of Schoening's, does the same thing when she recalls her official visit.
"She came in for open gym and was tearing it up. She was just playing hard, like Madi always does, which is physical. It was so Madi," Henderson says.
It was supposed to be a low-key meet-and-greet on the basketball court, the competition secondary. But that's never the case with Schoening.
"A lot of the girls were like, who is this girl? Who thinks they can just walk in here and play super physical with all of us?"
Schoening did. She says it comes from wrestling with her dad when she was a toddler. Combine that with a high motor and Ross and Charity knew they had to find their daughter an outlet.
Soccer it was. And she would have been a fantastic college soccer player had basketball not come along and grabbed her heart. She went from grass to hardwood but kept the mentality.
She arrived on campus in August 2016, right as current head coach Mike Petrino was settling into Missoula, Schweyen's first outside hire as she began filling her staff after she was chosen to follow Selvig.
"I distinctly remember meeting her the first time in the fall. Here's this sweet girl, just a personable kid," he says.
"Then we got on the court and she didn't just embrace contact, she created it, she encouraged it. Madi only knows one speed, and because of it, she's made the other players in our program better."
Everyone had their fingers crossed and was hoping the new era in Lady Griz basketball would look just like the old one had under Selvig.
For that to be the case, the 2016-17 team needed the veteran leadership of Kayleigh Valley, who had scored more points than any player in Lady Griz history the season before, and Alycia Sims. They would shepherd the newcomers along, show them the way to the promised land.
Instead it got these two headlines:
October 12, 2016 -- Valley out for the year
November 18, 2016 -- Sims lost for the season
It's why Montana, in its second game of the season, against South Dakota State in Iowa City, started two freshmen, two redshirt freshmen and an upperclassman who entered her junior year with 137 career points, or what Valley might score in five or six games.
It was something Lady Griz fans had never experienced before.
Montana, inexperienced and through little fault of its own, trailed 43-16 at the half and was down 67-20 late in the third quarter. The Selvig era would not be continuing. "It was kind of eye-opening," said Schoening. "Here's Division I. Welcome to the game."
Four days before that bloodletting, Montana hosted Great Falls. Schoening became the first true freshman to start a season opener for the Lady Griz since Katie Baker seven years earlier.
She played 14 minutes and finished with seven rebounds. Five of those came on the offensive end. Because of course they did.
On Thursday night she became the 36th player over the last four decades of Lady Griz basketball to reach 500 rebounds. And then she rolled her ankle. Because of course she did.
"It's fitting that the first thing I remember is how well she rebounded for her size," says Petrino.
We'll remember the backdoor cuts, the ones so difficult to guard against unless her defender opted to match the speed at which she plays. That rarely happened.
We'll remember the drives to the basket, so often to her left hand, and the sweeping finishes that at first seemed unorthodox until they became a matter of routine.
Her teammates will remember the two sides of Schoening. "Madi was not about to take it easy on anyone coming in," says Sophia Stiles. "I found that out really quick."
The coaches have come to rely on it, an intra-squad proving ground for newcomers. If a freshman can keep Schoening off the boards, they can box out anyone the Lady Griz will see on an opposing team.
"She makes her teammates better by pushing them all the time at practice," says Henderson.
But off the court? "She's nothing like that. She's very goofy, laughing all the time, the biggest smile on the team. It's actually quite interesting to see the two different sides," says Stiles.
Call it the Tao of Schoening, the yin and yang, or how contrary forces can be complementary for the greater good of the whole. Or maybe just say that's Madi being Madi.
"My teammates know I'm a different way on the court than off the court. I may get after them but I love them," she says.
She wasn't going to change the way she played for anyone, even for the sake of her own body. She had a solid freshman season but nothing has ever been the same.
At the start of her sophomore year, the kidney issue came up. She played through pain and discomfort that would have had most of us on the couch, complaining. She kept a heating pad courtside and played on.
After the season, they drained the infection and lopped off a piece of her kidney. They stitched her up, sent her on her way, and she was back to playing all out. And you were none the wiser.
Third year? An early-season ankle injury. She started the opener at Gonzaga. A few days later, she twisted it again. It felt like there was a fire inside her left Nike.
The ligament that runs down the outside of a person's foot just up and tore off a piece of bone from her fifth metatarsal, an avulsion fracture. That can happen on a rolled ankle, when you push your body past the breaking point again and again. The body can only withstand so much.
In the battle of determination versus physiology, the latter almost always has the final word. One will always break and give in before the other. For most players, the former taps out first. For Schoening it was body as governor.
She attempted to play through it. She's tough, but she does not suffer from analgesia, as much as she seems to. She feels pain, just like the rest of us. "The bone was just kind of floating around. It wasn't connected," she says. Remember that the next time you're overwhelmed by the ravages of a hangnail.
She had surgery in January of that season, the one that was lost.
You might consider her unlucky. But that would discount the way she plays, what she puts her body through. It can only absorb so much before it starts to break down.
Last year "the back stuff started happening," she says. "Vertebrae rubbing against each other and squeezing the discs out," which doesn't seem compatible with a functional life much less Division I athletics.
It was partly genetic. Her dad had it. Her grandpa, too. But it's not supposed to arrive when you're 21. "It could have been expected. Athletics probably sped it up."
She sounds at peace with it all, like she's come to accept that she is who she is as a competitor, and that she is okay with whatever the cost of that may be. Not like she has a choice.
She was on-again, off-again through November and December last season, then got a back injection that allowed her to return to the starting lineup. She took one for the team, literally.
She's had so many injuries, she forgets some of them. "Oh yeah, I broke a finger that season."
It's the ring finger on her left hand. She holds it up and the end of it dips down at an awkward angle. It's unsettling. But she keeps going hard to the basket with that hand anyway. "It needs to be fixed, so that's in the plans," she says.
She's still dealing with her back that requires occasional injections. She had an ankle sprain earlier this season that had her on crutches. It's the one she re-aggravated on Thursday night.
Because she never really gets over her injuries. It's more about managing them, deciding which of them take priority on any given day, triage and the modern basketball player, at least this one.
If practice lasts two hours, she needs four to pull it off, with both pre-practice and post-practice trips to the training room. There is a reason she says athletic trainer JC Weida and she are "besties."
It's a sad truth.
Pre-practice: There is time in the hot tub, time with a hot pack on her back, stretching, getting taped. Weida pulls on her ankles until they pop. Pops her hips, pops her back. Just to be able to practice.
"Got to get it all back in place," she says.
Post-practice, after all of it has gotten back out of place: Ice, compression, stretching, more adjustments.
"She has invested her whole body into this program," says Petrino. "She puts a lot of time in right now just to get her body ready for practice."
But it's done nothing to dampen her enthusiasm, either for competing or celebrating her teammates or for just having Montana stitched across her uniform front. It's always meant something, always will.
"My favorite memories are the passion she shows when she cheers her teammates on. She wears it on her sleeve out there," says Petrino. "She's loved being a Lady Griz," which has inspired the same feelings in us, toward her.
The reward for all of that has always been Senior Day. It's a sendoff, an appreciation that at Montana goes two ways, from player to fans, from fans back to the player, a mutual affection, an acknowledgement that both sides made it better for the other over four or five years.
It's a thankfulness for what each gave the relationship, the thrills from one, the unconditional support from the other, and an underlying sorrow that it can't go on forever.
Thus the tears, of what was and what will never be again.
Of all the things that have happened in the last year, of the things that have been taken away, that one has hit Schoening hard. The seats inside Dahlberg Arena on Saturday will be 99.9 percent empty.
"Eighteen years of basketball, you don't see it coming to an end with nobody there," she says. She's earned more, but she won't get it.
By summertime, she'll be living back in Sandpoint, perhaps for good, elementary education degree in hand, with coaching on her mind, her way of staying in the game.
Her body will have started healing, at least those injuries that can. The rest will stick with her, reminders of a former life.
She is asked what she might get into for post-collegiate activities to stay active, to remind herself that she was who she was. You expect something low-impact, something she can carry into the years ahead. You assume she is done with all this competing, this battling. And you are wrong.
"They have the Lady Monarchs, a soccer team," she says of Sandpoint. "All the graduated alumni and older ladies play." Oh. My. God.
Somebody better update the league's indemnity clause.
I acknowledge that Madi Schoening might be playing on any given night and that I subject to this willingly, holding no one but myself responsible should I find myself between her and the ball.
That's just Madi being Madi, something we've come to love over the years, a career now marked by days. "I gave it everything I had," she says, as if she even needed to. Her body of work speaks for itself.
Players Mentioned
F
/ Women's Basketball
F
/ Women's Basketball
F
/ Women's Basketball
G
/ Women's Basketball
F
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