Lady Griz announce award winners

The Lady Griz basketball program has as its foundation four core tenets, the first of which is unselfishness.

The others: academic excellence, character and integrity, and competitive greatness. All of them are nonnegotiable.

It's the first one, unselfishness, that Montana coach Brian Holsinger knows from experience can be the trickiest. It just comes with the territory when a coach has a dozen-plus players who all want to be on the court and in the spotlight when game-time arrives.

The typical career arc, at least historically if not presently, is for a player to work her way into more minutes, from freshman year to senior, hard work and experience being rewarded with a larger role.

A coach, then, becomes a manager, of personalities, of expectations, of human nature to put self over team, multiplied by however many players the coach has on their roster.

It's when that typical career arc, senior year as apotheosis, isn't realized that unselfishness can be put to its greatest test, when disappointment can set in and fester, an insidious disease that originates in the dark corner of the locker room and spreads into the open, team as host and carrier.

Katerina Tsineke joined the Lady Griz as a junior prior to the 2021-22 season, a transfer from East Carolina.

She was in the starting lineup for her first game in a Montana uniform, scoring 10 points on 5-of-8 shooting, with three assists, three blocks and a steal.

She would start the season's first nine games, then move to a reserve role, coming off the bench to change games with her defensive instincts and tenacity, and her occasional scoring punch.

As a senior this past season, she played in 23 of 30 games, averaging six minutes. She totaled 19 points on the season.

It wasn't how she thought it was going to go, her career at Montana. It wasn't how any senior thinks it's going to go in her final season of college basketball.

The reason Tsineke was presented with the Theresa Rhoads Award on Wednesday night at the team's postseason banquet, given to the player who best exemplifies Lady Griz basketball, is that the guard never allowed her frustration in role affect her value as teammate.

"One of the best I've ever coached, because that's really hard as a senior," said Holsinger. "There are times when someone doesn't get to play and it can really impact the team in a negative way. She never did that. She was always positive, always encouraging, always an amazing teammate.

"To me, that's what this program is about. She didn't get the minutes she would have liked, but what she added to our team was invaluable. She will always have the highest recommendation from me in anything she does in life because of who she is as a person and a teammate."

Also on Wednesday, Carmen Gfeller was named the team's Mary Louise Pope Zimmerman Most Valuable Player, Dani Bartsch the Julie Deming Outstanding Defensive Player, and Gina Marxen doubled up as the Grace Geil Most Improved Player and Shannon Green Most Inspirational Player.

That Marxen attended a postseason banquet on Wednesday night would have come as a surprise to the Marxen of the spring of 2021, the one who set down the basketball after her third collegiate season and didn't pick it up for more than a year. She was done with the game.

Then, she reconsidered. Then, she put her name out there. Then, she was won over by Montana.

She arrived in Missoula last June, looking on the surface like the player who was so previously decorated but Holsinger knew it would take time. The refamiliarization process wouldn't be measured in days or even weeks. It would take months for her to be the full Gina Marxen again.

She had her moments in the early parts of the season, but it took until late January before she was truly back to being herself, the floor general, the sniper from the 3-point line, the deft distributor.

In the end, a season stat line you would expect from Marxen at full strength: 11.1 points per game, a team-high 50 3-pointers on 38.5 percent shooting, a team-high 95 assists against only 47 turnovers.

"Gina's expectation was to come in and be her old self right away, and that just wasn't the case," said Holsinger. "It takes time when you haven't picked up a ball for a year.

"There was consistent improvement from the beginning to the end. If she wasn't the best player on our team at the end of the year, she was close to being the best. She was consistent, efficient, comfortable and just playing really good basketball."

That earned her the Most Improved Award. The Most Inspirational Award came from what she brought to the team from its very first offseason workout with her on the court.

Most of it was just Gina being Gina. Some of it certainly came from rediscovering her love of the game once again, finding something that had been lost, and being a part of a team after going solo for a year.

"This one was easy because of who she is," said Holsinger. "She is happy-go-lucky and easy to be around, so people love her. She is fun, she smiles a lot and makes people laugh. It was inspiring to see someone have so much joy after coming back to the game."

After Montana dropped back-to-back home games in January, giving up 159 points and getting outrebounded, Holsinger opted to make a change not just to his starting lineup but how minutes would be distributed.

The biggest change in role came for Bartsch, who led the Lady Griz to a win over NCAA Tournament qualifier Sacramento State in Montana's next game out. It was the first of four straight wins for the Lady Griz and five out of six.

Up to that point, Bartsch was averaging 4.0 points and 5.9 rebounds off the bench. As a starter, she closed the season averaging 8.1 points and 11.2 rebounds over Montana's final 11 games.

She had 17 rebounds in Montana's overtime win at Northern Arizona, the most for a Lady Griz since 2018-19, three off the program record of 20 and tied for the 10th most all-time.

She had 12 or more rebounds in six of the team's last eight games.

"From the moment we inserted her into the starting lineup, she did an amazing job," said Holsinger. "She had some unbelievable performances from a rebounding perspective, some of the best in the history of a program that has had some great, great rebounders.

"She was a huge reason we started to get things right as the season went along."

Montana went from its opponents shooting 41.9 percent with Bartsch coming off the bench to 40.0 percent with her in the starting lineup. It wasn't the 35.5 percent the 2021-22 team defended at, but it was an improvement.

"I don't know if we ever found defensive answers this season as a team, but she definitely was a factor in us winning some games in the second half," said Holsinger.

"The win against Sacramento State was gigantic. She just led our defense. In a lot of ways, she kind of changed our season around with her defensive versatility. She can guard guards, she can guard posts. It was fun to see her improvement and her confidence gained on that side of the ball."

Gfeller was named the Most Valuable Player partly because of what Holsinger knows he is going to get out his star forward on a day-to-day basis, both on and off the court, but also because of what Gfeller is becoming to the program as she prepares to go into her sixth season as a Lady Griz.

The voice of a captain. "A big part of MVP to me is her willingness to get out of her comfort zone and become a leader in our program," said Holsinger.

The talent has always been there. She was third-team All-Big Sky Conference as a redshirt sophomore, first-team as a redshirt junior, second-team last season as a redshirt senior.

She decided during the season that she would return for one more year. And that means more of the same, which in this case is a good thing, a very good thing.

Over the last three seasons, Gfeller has averaged 14.0 points on 51.2 percent shooting and 5.7 rebounds.

"Going into a game, you know what you're going to get from Carmen more than any other player on our team," said Holsinger. "She is the most consistent player we have. She is a player you can count on and trust on and off the court."

University of Montana Athletics

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Players Mentioned

Dani Bartsch

Carmen Gfeller

Gina Marxen

Katerina Tsineke

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