Lady Griz Orientation :: Adria Lincoln

In the end, talent won out. And Adria Lincoln proved that you can get from there, wherever that happens to be, to here, part of the Montana women's basketball program, if you're good enough.

This is no Macy Donarski or Macey Huard story, players who prepped at high school programs with winning traditions, with coaches who have been leading the team year after year, where anything short of a state championship is considered a bit of a disappointment.

Let's start here, when Lincoln showed up for basketball tryouts as a freshman at Monroe (Wash.) High. She was one of 12 players in the gym that day. Not one of 12 trying to earn a varsity spot. She was one of 12 players the school had to fill freshman, junior varsity and varsity teams. Yikes.

Twelve is what you might get for high school basketball numbers at Draya Wacker's Melstone High, except Monroe High has a student population of more than 1,500. Melstone as a town has less than a tenth of that.

"They didn't have a feeder program that was functioning," says her mom, Gina, who owns a real estate business. "It wasn't pulling girls. A lot of girls were just not playing, and it hadn't been a successful program for a while."

She had three different high school coaches, the athletic director position changed hands, COVID arrived and Washington shut down schools and athletics harder than most states.

She persevered, was a four-time first-team All-Wesco selection, played every position she had to, carried the burden of having to come through night after night, even with opposing defenses stacked against her.

She opened her senior year with 43 points, 26 rebounds and 10 steals against Ingraham. That's just what she had to do for Monroe to be successful. "There was pressure, but I also liked it," she says. "Each night I just kind of knew. I had a goal of 25-30 (points) and 20 (rebounds). That's what I was going for."

She averaged 25 points and 13.4 rebounds as a senior, led her team to a record of 14-9, the program's first winning record since 2015-16. You can understand why she said after the season that leaving the program with a winning record is one of her proudest achievements.

Adria Lincoln helped bring basketball at Monroe back to life.

"By the time she left, they had three full teams," says her mom. "She had a lot of opportunities to be a leader. She had coaches looking to her, okay, what should we be doing?"

It's the player Montana coach Brian Holsinger began checking out when he was hired to lead the Lady Griz in April 2021. But he is particular about roster construction and the types of players he brings in. He fell for the talent but needed to learn more about the person.

She wasn't being exposed to the type of coaching – either in consistency or quality – that Donarski and Huard, her fellow freshmen on this year's Montana team, were getting at Aquinas High (La Crosse, Wis.) or at Valor Christian (Highlands Ranch, Colo.).

Could she be coached? Did she want to be coached? Did she want to do what it takes to be successful at the Division I level, playing a role, doing your 1/5th on the court and not having to be everything?

Holsinger and his staff did a home visit to the Lincoln family home in Monroe after his first season wrapped up. Adria was reserved, reticent. Holsinger left without getting a feel for who he'd been talking to. He held back on the offer, while other schools continued to extend her offers left and right.

"We learned a few things on the home visit, No. 1 that she would be a good cultural fit. She is a really good kid from a really good family," he says. But? "We were still trying to figure it out.

"Does she really want it? If she'll accept coaching and work at it, she'll be as good as anybody, because she is really gifted and has really good size. That was the debate."

Funny thing: Holsinger left that day thinking Lincoln was quiet, maybe too quiet. Is too quiet. He can't have quiet in his program. Quiet doesn't communicate with coaches and teammates and it doesn't work on the defensive end of the court.

It certainly doesn't reveal what a girl might be thinking as she sits across the table from a Division I coach.

"I think he had a hard time gauging her interest but it's just a different personality type. I think that was hard for him," says Gina. But it wasn't Adria, it was the situation.

"He may not believe it, but she is one of my loudest kids," adds Gina, who has twin boys two years older than Adria, then three kids younger. Adria has a sister who is 10, brothers who are 7 and 5.

"The house is a lot quieter now that she has left than it was after my boys left. People wouldn't believe that. She's just quieter around adult males. It's different for a young girl. People think she's shy or quiet but she is definitely not that."

They were in this holding pattern, Lincoln and Holsinger were. The Lincolns didn't think Montana was that interested, at least not enough to make an offer like so many other programs had. On the other end, Holsinger needed to learn more about her, see her in action.

That summer, after her junior year, she and Northwest Blazers played in Pennsylvania on the Under Armour circuit. Then Cincinnati. And how do you like me now? Playing against some of the best competition in the country, Lincoln stood tall, stood out.

"Playing against some of the best teams in the country, she just became more aggressive. She showed a different level of aggression and want-to that she hadn't shown before. She just changed," says Holsinger, and that was a problem. Now everyone was interested.

"Okay, now we're going to have a battle on our hands," he remembers thinking. "We rushed it at the end of July. A lot of schools started contacting her AAU coach, and we hadn't offered her. We offered her and got her over here ASAP."

Holsinger had plenty going for him. And that is even outside of his usual go-to's of the classic college campus, Missoula, the Lady Griz history and ongoing fan support.

Lincoln played at Friends of Hoop with Macey Huard, when the Huards were still based in the Northwest, trained with Haley, played with Libby Stump with the Blazers, and everybody could use more Libby Stump in their lives.

Gina? She went to high school with Cindi Oliver, mother of Lady Griz Keeli Burton-Oliver. Gina's cousin was Stump's math teacher at Lynden Christian.

"We knew a lot of families, which made it comfortable and easy for her," says Gina. "A lot of connections, a lot of familiarity. We thought it would be an easy transition."

And then there is the piece that rarely gets mentioned in these articles, the feelings of a mom and dad who are turning a daughter over to what essentially are about to become surrogate parents, coaches who will be around their daughter on a near daily basis in her first extended time away from home.

"There are a lot of shared values between the coaching staff and our family. As a parent, that was nice to see," Gina says. "It wasn't the deciding factor, but it was something we as parents were looking for.

"You don't want to spent 18 years raising your kid a certain way, then send them off to college for time with adults who don't share your values. That was really important."

She committed, obviously, and became the unknown of this year's freshman class. Macy and Macey committed the previous spring, which gave them more attention, and both have a higher Q Score because of family.

Lincoln arrived in June as more of an unknown. This is what is known now, as the season gets into high gear. She is going to be good. Like, really good. As in, really, really good. She is 6-foot-1 with a skillset that goes from paint to 3-point line. That's why she had her first Division I offer as a freshman.

Holsinger's concerns – is she willing to be coached, does she really want to get better? – were answered on her visit, when he sat her down at a computer, fired up her video and coached her right then and there.

"I loved that. I wasn't coached in high school at all, so that kind of clicked for me," she says. "This is somewhere I would be coached and they care. I could get better here. That's what I wanted."

She's gone through practices where she is like a car engine trying to start on a cold morning. She's thinking too much, Holsinger will later tell her, getting bogged down. He doesn't want that to cost Lincoln her instincts, her aggressiveness. She agrees, then becomes herself, which is really, really good.

You'll see.

It's something she's wanted since the fourth grade, when she ditched soccer and went all in on basketball, following Alec and Jacob, the twins who were getting into travel basketball as sixth graders.

But this was different than the boys' love of basketball, even at that age.

"Even by fourth grade it was, okay, I'm going to be a WNBA player," Gina recalls. "This is my thing. She'd wake up in the morning before school and dribble for 10-15 minutes in the house. She did that on her own, really self-motivated.

"We saw the level of intensity. We had the two older boys who we could compare. Okay, this is different than their level of commitment."

They were in a rental. After years of living in Redmond, where Steve is a police officer, they were on their way to Monroe, to a slower pace, to more space, more property. The one-year rental had a wood floor in the entryway. There was no sleeping in in that house, not when Adria had to get her dribbling in.

"I liked the idea of working at something and seeing the difference when I was working at it," she says. "I'd draw a ladder with chalk. I could just see the difference. I loved that."

The move made sense, professionally, for Steve. If I get a speeding ticket, I don't want to be standing behind that same guy, now out of uniform, in the line for the deli at the local supermarket. He doesn't want that either.

He wasn't always going to be a police officer. He landed at the University of Washington after touring the world as a military dependent, Maryland, Colorado, Tacoma, high school years in Korea. Then on to Washington for college, where he met Gina, who is from Bellevue.

And who wouldn't have been impressed with this guy? He'd just been hired as the operations manager for a startup wireless cell phone company, back when that was still a startup business.

"He was running the northwest division. Super young, running this company, really good money and upward mobility. I was like, wow, he's really on it," Gina says.

They honeymooned in Paris, returned home to start this new life, only to find out that the company had dissolved while they were out of the country. He had no job. But had he ever told Gina that he wanted to be a police officer?

"What are you talking about? That's not what I signed up for. But it's worked out," she says.

Their oldest daughter's high school experience at Monroe mirrored her overall basketball experience, which is not how anyone would draw it up. Gina coached Adria and her friends through third grade, then had to turn her loose to whatever was out there.

"Just really inconsistent. Her most consistency was when I coached her up to fourth grade," she says. "Then after that, she had to jump around to different clubs because they didn't have enough players to make a team or they weren't fielding that age team or a coach left. There were just issues."

But that talent wasn't going to be hidden, no matter the challenges. She played at Friends of Hoop in middle school, Tree of Hope in eighth and ninth grades, Blazers after that.

"Other girls in other schools had fall ball and summer camps. Her entire time, she had no offseason training or support from the high school. It affects the players who are committed," Gina says.

"She really had to look and work harder to find opportunities to play, players to play with, find places to train. She had to really fight for it."

Gina did her part, filling out an application for the 2021 U16 USA Basketball National Team Trials in Indianapolis. Adria was accepted, one of just 34 from around the country for that age group.

"I think she had a hard time gauging where she fit in the national scheme of things. People talk about how local good isn't the same as national good. If you're a standout player on your high school team, you're good local but where do you fit in in the big scheme of things?" Gina says.

Then Adria went to Indianapolis for a week and did just fine.

"I think it helped her realize, okay, I can hang with these girls, girls who have been getting private training, have parents who were professional athletes and had different opportunities that helped them along. It helped her put it in perspective. If I work hard, I can be at their level."

The calls started when Lincoln was in the eighth grade, Adria and Gina both on, adult taking the pressure off child when another coach was giving his or her pitch. The first offer came when she was in ninth grade.

What wasn't ideal at Monroe High actually added to the intrigue of Lincoln the player.

"They saw potential and knew she hadn't had consistent coaching. A lot of them looked at that as a positive," Gina says. "She is this good and she hasn't had consistent coaching? Imagine what's going to happen when she gets in college."

Just imagine: "She can be as good as she wants to be from a physical standpoint," says Holsinger, the coach who, after all that recruiting by so many from so many schools for so many years, ultimately landed her. You'll thank him for it.

She committed to Montana, then unleashed her full game as a senior, putting up those big averages. After opening the season with 43 points against Ingraham, she later broke her own single-game scoring record with 45 points against Foster and ended her career with seven school records.

And that 14-9 record, something to be proud of given the circumstances.

She was a McDonald's All American Game Nominee as a senior, one of just five from Washington. She was selected to play in the 2023 Washington State Girls Basketball Coaches Association All-Star Game and the 2023 WAVOR (Washington vs. Oregon) all-star game.

Sure, the move from Redmond to Monroe wasn't ideal from the narrow perspective of high school basketball, but Steve and Gina did come through on their promise to build a gym on their property, which they did three years ago. Inside a pole barn sits half a basketball court.

"It was partially bribery on our part. None of them wanted to move. That was part of moving out to land, we could have this rec space for them, where other people could come and have something to do," says Gina.

"We're in Washington, where it rains all the time, and Monroe is a smaller town. All you have is the high school gym and the YMCA. With six kids, it's nice having somewhere to be able to go."

Making the best of the situation. Imagine that.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Keeli Burton-Oliver

Macy Donarski

Macey Huard

Adria Lincoln

Libby Stump

Draya Wacker

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