Lady Griz host Fighting Hawks in Sunday matinee

The Montana women's basketball team will try to make it a 2-0 home stand when it hosts former Big Sky Conference rival North Dakota on Sunday.

The Lady Griz (1-2) and Fighting Hawks (2-0) will tip off at 2 p.m. inside Dahlberg Arena.

Montana, after dropping games against North Dakota State and Colorado State to open the season, picked up its first win on Tuesday afternoon, defeating Providence (MT) 71-43 in the Lady Griz School Day game.

North Dakota, which plays at Montana State on Friday night, is off to it first 2-0 start since the 2007-08 season, when the then Fighting Sioux were one of the nation's top Division II programs under coach Gene Roebuck.

The Fighting Hawks opened the season with home wins over Detroit Mercy, 70-61, and Wyoming, 67-55, against a solid Cowgirls team that was picked fourth in the Mountain West preseason poll and had a six-point lead on Gonzaga late in the fourth quarter on Tuesday before falling 66-64 in Laramie.

Sunday's contest will be Montana's final home game until Dec. 8, when Montana hosts Grand Canyon.

The Lady Griz will face Wichita State and California next week at Loyola Marymount's Thanksgiving Classic in Los Angeles, then face Washington State on the road on Dec. 8.

Coverage: Sunday's game will be streamed on ESPN+ and be available on KMPT 930AM/99.7 FM or 930kmpt.com, with Riley "Ace" Sauerwein calling the action.

Round III (of IV): Sunday's game is the first half of a home-and-home series, after the teams played a home-and-home series the previous two seasons.

In 2020-21, under interim coach Mike Petrino, Montana shot 47.6 percent and got 48 points from Carmen Gfeller and Sophia Stiles to win 86-72 in Missoula inside a mostly empty building.

Last season, under first-year coach Brian Holsinger, Montana traveled to Grand Forks and came away with a 72-51 victory. Up 33-29 at the half, the Lady Griz outscored the Fighting Hawks 39-22 in the second half, with Sammy Fatkin finishing with a career-high 25 points.

The teams will play in Grand Forks next season to complete the current game contract.

At a glance (Montana): The Lady Griz opened their season with a 65-63 home loss to North Dakota State last week, then went on the road and lost 82-58 at Colorado State last Friday.

Both teams shot better than 40 percent, which Montana's opponents only did seven times in 30 games last season. The Lady Griz are 1-8 under coach Brian Holsinger when they allow an opponent to shoot better than 40 percent.

That wasn't an issue on Tuesday when an outmanned Providence team was held to 28.8 percent shooting. The Argos jumped out to an 8-0 lead, but the Lady Griz more than doubled them up over the game's final 37 minutes.

Fatkin, who went 9 for 26 against North Dakota State and 2 for 8 at Colorado State, led Montana with 24 points on efficient 10-of-16 shooting.

Making her first collegiate start, redshirt freshman Keeli Burton-Oliver totaled 12 points on 5-of-8 shooting, six rebounds and three blocks in just 14 minutes of court time.

Freshman Mack Konig also made her first collegiate start.

Montana went 6 for 33 from the 3-point line, which matched the program record for attempts. The Lady Griz took 33 3-pointers in their 59-58 loss to Massachusetts in 2016-17 in Iowa City, also the third game of the season.

Montana, at 17-to-11, had its first positive assist-to-turnover ratio of the season and had seasons highs in blocks (8) and steals (6).

The Lady Griz have gone 21 for 25 (.840) from the free throw line the last two games after going a costly 13 for 25 (.520) against the Bison to open the season.

Fatkin (16.0/g) leads Montana in scoring through three games. Gina Marxen (12.7/g) also is averaging in double figures.

Freshman Alex Pirog, who leads the team in rebounding (7.3/g), scored her first collegiate points on Tuesday, Willa Albrecht made her season debut off the bench.

Marxen nears 1,000: Gina Marxen will enter Sunday's game with 992 points for her collegiate career. She scored 954 points in three seasons at Idaho and has 38 through three games as a Lady Griz.

Marxen hit her 200th collegiate 3-point shot in Montana's opener against North Dakota State. She hit 199 as a Vandal.

At a glance (North Dakota): The Fighting Hawks, who worked their way to 15-10 last season after opening 1-4, finished 15-15 a year ago and fifth in the Summit League with a 9-9 league record. Six of those nine Summit losses came against South Dakota, South Dakota State and North Dakota State.

With three starters back, North Dakota was picked fourth in the Summit League preseason poll, behind South Dakota State, South Dakota and Oral Roberts, which ended UND's season in March in the Summit League tournament.

North Dakota finished one spot higher than North Dakota State, which won by two in Missoula last week.

Senior guard Kacie Borowicz, Miss Minnesota Basketball as a senior at Roseau High, where she scored more than 3,000 points, was first-team All-Summit League as a junior and one of six players in October voted first-team Preseason All-Summit League.

Borowicz missed last season's matchup in Grand Forks because of injury. She returned to action two days later and put up 33 points and 10 rebounds on Montana State in 22 minutes off the bench in UND's 89-85 win.

Borowicz is leading North Dakota in scoring through two games this season at 19.5 per game. She also has a pleasing 15 assists against only six turnovers. Fifth-year guard Claire Orth is averaging 12 points.

The hard-to-miss Miranda VanderWal, a 6-foot-7 redshirt freshman, is averaging 9.5 points and 9.0 rebounds while opening the season 8 for 11 from the field.

Fifth-year guard Jolene Daninger, who began her career with three seasons at DePaul, is averaging 6.5 points and 10.0 rebounds.

Though the coefficient of determination is still too close to 0 to make any real generalizations about North Dakota at this point, its 2-0 record has been the result of sound defense and ball security.

The Fighting Hawks held Detroit Mercy and Wyoming to 33.3 percent shooting, 11 of 41 (.268) from the arc, and turned the ball over just 15 times in two games. That's generally going to be winning basketball.

Against Detroit Mercy, Borowicz had 19 points and nine assists, Orth had 16 points on 7-of-12 shooting. Against Wyoming, Borowicz had 20 points, the only UND player in double figures.

In both games, North Dakota won because of good first halves. The Fighting Hawks outscored their first two opponents 75-55 in the opening half.

Series history: Montana leads the all-time series with North Dakota 11-8 and has gone 7-1 against UND in Missoula.

That lone win came in 2015-16, a 61-59 North Dakota win when Mia Loyd scored on a baseline-out-of-bounds play with less than a second remaining.

Montana has won the teams' last four matchups, which followed a stretch of North Dakota winning six of seven under former coach Travis Brewster.

North Dakota has the distinction of being the final opponent faced by former Montana coach Robin Selvig, the 1,151st of his 1,151 games leading the Lady Griz.

The Fighting Hawks defeated the Lady Griz 65-62 in Reno in the Big Sky tournament quarterfinals in 2015-16. Four months later, Selvig and his 865 wins called it a career.

Around the Big Sky Conference:

* There are no longer any unbeaten teams in the Big Sky after Eastern Washington lost a close 73-66 game at Oregon State on Thursday night. It was a three-point game with three minutes to go before the Beavers used a 6-0 run over just 29 seconds to pull away for good.

* The Eagles are 3-1, as is Northern Colorado, which lost for the first time on Tuesday at Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

* Montana State trails at 2-1. The Bobcats followed up their impressive road win at BYU with a 79-64 home loss to Arizona State on Tuesday, the same ASU team Northern Arizona took to the wire on the Sun Devils' home court earlier in the season.

At Bozeman, Arizona State raced out to a 20-0 lead six minutes into the game and never looked back. Over that decisive six minutes, MSU went 0 for 9 with five turnovers and missed both of its free throws.

* In other notable recent results, Northern Arizona coach Loree Payne won career game No. 200 on Wednesday in wild fashion. The Lumberjacks won 110-104 at Cal Baptist in double overtime.

* On Thursday night, Portland State defeated its first Division I opponent since Dec. 10 with an 80-73 overtime win at Seattle. The Redhawks were picked 13th out of 13 teams in the preseason WAC poll.

Upcoming: Montana will face Wichita State (2-1) and Cal (2-1) next week in Los Angeles.

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Players Mentioned

Willa Albrecht

Keeli Burton-Oliver

Sammy Fatkin

Carmen Gfeller

Mack Konig

Gina Marxen

Alex Pirog

University of Montana Athletics