Lady Griz to be tested in first road game

The Montana women's basketball team, which dropped its season opener on Monday, will face its first road game of the year on Friday when it plays at Colorado State.

The Lady Griz (0-1) and the Rams (1-0) will tip off at 5 p.m. in Moby Arena in Fort Collins.

The game is the first half of a doubleheader. The Colorado State men's team will host Southeastern Louisiana at 7:30 p.m.

Montana and Colorado State are meeting for the 11th time overall, the first time since the 2016-17 season.

Coverage: The game can be watched on the Mountain West Network or be heard on KMPT 930 AM/99.7 FM or 930kmpt.com, with Riley "Ace" Sauerwein calling the action.

At a glance (Montana): The Lady Griz opened their season on Monday night with a 65-63 home loss to North Dakota State, just the seventh time since 1978-79 Montana has dropped its home opener.

The Lady Griz built an eight-point lead in the second quarter, but a 25-8 run by the Bison that spanned the second and third quarters was too much to overcome.

Montana took a 63-61 lead with 58 seconds to play, its first lead since early in the third quarter, on a Sammy Fatkin basket, but NDSU scored the game's final four points to leave Missoula with a victory.

In her Lady Griz debut, Idaho transfer Gina Marxen led both teams with 21 points. She hit four 3-pointers and went 6 for 9 overall with four assists.

Fatkin added 19 points on 9-of-26 shooting. It was the most shots taken by a Lady Griz since Mandy Morales put up 28 at Portland State during the 2008-09 season and tied for fourth most all-time.

(The program record is 30, taken by Shannon Cate against Iowa in the first round of the NCAA tournament in 1991. She went 16 for 30 and scored 36 points.)

Haley Huard hit a pair of 3-pointers and finished with nine points. No one else scored more than five as Montana played without preseason All-Big Sky Conference selection Carmen Gfeller.

Montana went 6 for 21 (.286) from the 3-point line, just 13 for 25 (.520) from the free throw line.

Montana, which finished 13th nationally last season in field goal percentage defense (.355), allowed North Dakota State to shoot 51.6 percent in the second half, 40.6 percent for the game.

Two newcomers, Marxen and freshman Alex Pirog, were in the starting lineup. Sophomore Dani Bartsch also made her first career start.

Three of Montana's five reserves off the bench, redshirt freshman Keeli Burton-Oliver and freshmen Mack Konig and Libby Stump, were playing their first game in a Lady Griz uniform.

Marxen's 21 points on Monday give her 975 for her collegiate career. She scored 954 in three seasons at Idaho.

At a glance (Colorado State): The Rams opened their season with an impressive 82-62 home victory on Tuesday over BYU, a team that went 26-4 last season and made the NCAA tournament as an at-large.

Colorado State trailed 39-35 at the half but shot 18 for 32 (.563) in the second half, 8 for 12 from 3-point range, while the Cougars were going 7 for 27 (.259) over the final 20 minutes.

CSU, which turned the ball over just four times, got a remarkable 40 points from its bench, outscoring BYU's reserves 40-3. The Rams finished the game 11 for 23 (.478) from the arc.

Colorado State was led, not surprisingly, by senior point guard McKenna Hofschild, who had 18 points on 7-of-11 shooting and nine assists.

The transfer from Seton Hall was voted the Mountain West Newcomer of the Year as a sophomore in 2020-21, All-Mountain West as a sophomore and junior.

She averaged 16.9 points last season and 6.5 assists, which ranked fifth nationally. That included a 17-assist game against Utah State.

In October she was one of 20 players named to the Nancy Lieberman Award watch list for the nation's top point guard and one of 25 named to the Becky Hammon Mid-Major Player of the Year watch list.

Also in October she was one of five players named to the Preseason All-Mountain West Conference team.

Redshirt junior Cailyn Crocker, a first-year guard who transferred from Cal, scored 17 points against BYU in 20 minutes off the bench.

Colorado State went 21-12 last year, its sixth 20-win season under 11th-year coach Ryun Williams, and finished sixth in the Mountain West with a 9-9 league record.

The Rams, the No. 6 seed, defeated No. 11 San Jose State, No. 3 Wyoming and No. 2 New Mexico at the Mountain West tournament before falling 75-65 to No. 1 UNLV in the championship game.

Colorado State made the WNIT, where it lost a first-round game at Portland. The Rams have made the NCAA tournament once and the WNIT five times under Williams, whose first season was 2012-13.

The Rams, who are now 99-28 at Moby Arena under Williams, were picked third in the Mountain West preseason poll, coming in behind heavy favorite UNLV and New Mexico.

Series history:

* Colorado State leads the series 6-4 and has gone 3-1 against Montana in Fort Collins. The Rams have won the teams' last three matchups, the last two by a combined 46 points.

* Montana's lone win in Fort Collins was a 79-50 victory in the 1985-86 season, behind 12 points from Marti Leibenguth, Margaret Williams and Kris Moede.

* Montana's last three trips to Moby Arena have ended with a loss, by an average of more than 18 points per game.

* Montana's last trip to Colorado State, early in the 2015-16 season, was a 75-43 loss when the Lady Griz managed to shoot only 23.1 percent.

* That was the season Colorado State went 31-2 and went a perfect 18-0 through the Mountain West.

* The teams' most recent matchup was a 63-49 Colorado State victory in Missoula in 2016-17. Ellen Nystrom scored 27 points to lead the Rams, who held the Lady Griz to 34.0 percent shooting.

Upcoming: Montana will get a pair of home games, hosting Providence (MT) on Tuesday at 11 a.m. in a return of the School Day Game and North Dakota on Sunday, Nov. 20, at 2 p.m.

The Lady Griz will close out November playing in Loyola Marymount's Thanksgiving Classic in Los Angeles. Montana will play Wichita State and California.

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Players Mentioned

Dani Bartsch

Keeli Burton-Oliver

Sammy Fatkin

Carmen Gfeller

Haley Huard

Mack Konig

Gina Marxen

Alex Pirog

Libby Stump

University of Montana Athletics