Anderson brings experiences to Lady Griz staff

Kayla Anderson is a relational coach, just like her new boss, Brian Holsinger. But while the head coach bases his ties to his players on close personal connection, Anderson can go one step further. There isn't a player out there who Montana's newest assistant coach can't identify with.

She's seen the highs, starting a game in the NCAA tournament against eventual national champion Stanford in 2021 while playing at Utah Valley, but it's been the lows that allow her to meet just about any player where they happen to be on any given day.

Anderson suffered her first catastrophic knee injury as a sophomore in high school, then had her other knee betray her as a senior.

After a year of rehab, she went to a pair of junior colleges before making it to Division I women's basketball, putting in two relatively healthy years at Utah Valley before one final knee injury sidelined her for good four games into what would have been her fifth year.

Still, she graduated from Utah Valley in 2022 with a degree in exercise science and is one year into a masters program at Southern Utah, where she was a graduate assistant last season.

Having a good day? A bad day? Anderson understands it all. "Anytime you have adversity in life, you grow," says Holsinger, who hired Anderson in August to be both an assistant coach and the program's director of operations. "That growth is exponential when you have Kayla's kind of adversity."

You wouldn't know her injury history by interacting with Anderson, who is going to make your day better, no matter the mindset you arrive with. She has a knack for turning your A day into an A+ day, a C day into a solid B. And she might just improve upon that.

"She worked our camp this summer and kids just flock to her," said Holsinger. "In our team meeting when I announced that I hired Kayla for that position, our team went crazy. She's already had an impact in her short time."

Rather than impact her for the worse, her experiences have shaped her view on life for the better. "It helped me find the good in what might be a hard moment, day, week, just being able to bring a sense of joy, that it's going to be okay."

Her first injury arrived the summer before her sophomore year at Mountain View High in Meridian, Idaho, a few miles west of Boise. She returned for the first game of districts, in time to help the Mavericks win their first-ever state title.

They repeated in 2016, which is why Anderson made the decision she did a few months later, when she injured her left knee right before her senior year. She'd been playing with the same group of girls forever and they had the type of team that could make it three straight championships.

She came to the decision that she would brace it up, grit it out and play through her senior season with her knee in tatters. Surgery could wait, chances at another title with her besties couldn't.

The college programs that had been showing interest all went quiet, not willing to wait to see how the experiment played out.

"When I called college coaches and told them what I was going to do, that kind of took people out of it. They were like, nope," she says. "If we hadn't won back-to-back, I don't think I would have made the same decision, but these were my best friends that I had grown up with.

"It was painful. I had to learn how to redo everything comfortably. If I stepped wrong or put too much weight on it and my knee shifted or turned, it would buckle. There were a few times that I learned real quick, oh, I can't do that anymore."

In a weird kind of way, that was her first (painful) step on the path toward coaching, though she didn't know it at the time. "I had to be smart instead of just quick and athletic. I had to play slower but smarter."

Her coach at Utah Valley noticed it while Anderson was still a player, hinting that she had a future in coaching. Holsinger saw it too.

"The best thing is, she's a very confident individual in who she is," he says. "She's outspoken and fun to be around. But she also really understands the game. She has a good basketball mind, an advanced basketball mind at this stage in her career in my opinion."

Mountain View would lose its opening-round game at the 2017 Class 5A state tournament to Post Falls before coming back to win the consolation side of the bracket. Two days later, Anderson went under the knife for the second time in less than three years.

"I took a year off for heavy rehab. I had to relearn how to walk. My entire gait was off. I had been walking normally on my right foot but up on my toes on my left foot because that made it feel better," she said.

Her college career began with one season at Salt Lake Community College, one at Midland College in Texas. That landed her a chance at Utah Valley, where she played two healthy seasons before seeing her playing career come to an end four games into the 2022-23 season.

Her original plan had her going to chiropractic school after graduation, but that season on the sideline allowed her to take a deeper look at coaching and what goes into it.

She stopped by one coach's office one day, another the next, asking, what do you do? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it? What do you wish you knew about it before you ever got into it?

She was in, at least to give it a try. She was hired last year as a graduate assistant coach at Southern Utah, arriving in Cedar City two days before the team departed on a foreign tour to Australia. "This is legit," Anderson thought at the time. "I could get used to this."

During the summers as a player, Anderson would return home to Boise, where she came across something new, something she had never had access to growing up, T3 Sport, a gym where she could not only train but help coach kids who also used the facility. Its owner: Aaron Holsinger.

Two summers ago, he told Anderson that his brother needed help at his camp in Missoula. She was on it. She returned to Montana this past summer, knowing there had been some movement on Holsinger's staff. "I had seen the changes. I wonder if?" Anderson asked herself.

She was just what Holsinger was looking for. "For that position in particular, I wanted to find somebody who wants to be a coach, who wants to learn the ropes from the bottom up," he says.

"She'll do everything the assistant coaches do but she'll also do some things from an operational perspective that will help her understand the big picture when she's a head coach someday. It gives you great experience as you move on and move up."

And if the new staff member brings her own unique experiences to the position, all the better, especially when her core values sync up so seamlessly with the head coach's.

"I've never been a ball-is-life kind of girl," Anderson says. "A lot of the college experience is basketball, basketball, basketball. That just leads to burnout and unpleasant experiences.

"When I got into this, I wanted to do it where you can coach from a place where your players know you care about them and it's not just basketball. First and foremost, they are people. That's a super important thing. We can value them as people and players and everything that they are.

"So far, that's been my favorite thing, trying to find how to best help people succeed in basketball, in school and in life, too."

University of Montana Athletics

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