Lady Griz Orientation :: Aby Shubert

Funny how these things can turn out, how a guy can be scrolling through the basketball options on ESPN+ on some random winter night in southern Minnesota and there was that team again, the one that had caught his attention on ESPN+ on a different random winter night in southern Minnesota.

He discovered them early in the season and would watch them every time he came across them again, this team that played so fast and shot the 3-pointer like few teams in the country could, starters, subs, all of them capable of hitting from deep.

It wasn't just the style of play that kept him coming back. It was also personal. He would think to himself, man, Aby would fit so well with that team, these Lady Griz. He could picture her running the floor, spotting up in the corner and knocking down shot after shot.

Then he would think about his daughter, not playing in Dahlberg Arena but where she was at that moment and his mind would leave the game playing in front of him and drift from Montana to Ohio, where Aby Shubert was playing – or getting through – her freshman season at Xavier.

She arrived at the school's campus in Cincinnati a year ago this month under the most challenging of circumstances.

She had spent years building a relationship with then Xavier coach Melanie Moore and her staff, only to watch as Moore was let go after the 2022-23 season. Less than a month later, Xavier announced that Billi Chambers had been hired away from Iona, that she would be Shubert's college coach.

Moore's last team, the one she coached while Shubert was a senior at Kasson-Mantorville (Minn.) High, ranked 283rd in the country in 3-point shooting, which was Shubert's specialty. Shubert was going to be part of a program-changing revolution, one that emphasized the 3-point shot.

Then she found out Moore was not going to be her coach, that her dreams of shooting Xavier up the Big East standings might not be Chambers' vision for the program, this coach who had not been the one to recruit her to the program, the one who would be under pressure to win and win now.

That would have been a stressful enough environment to enter. She also arrived unable to play, half a year removed from ACL and meniscus tears suffered in her right knee in the second game of her senior season.

It was the rare trifecta of undesirable: A freshman joining a new program being led by a new coach who hadn't recruited her and being unable to make an early impression because she was nowhere near being able to play like her old self because of an injury.

Welcome to the big time, kid.

A redshirt season would have been ideal, more time to return to full health, more time to adapt to high-level Division I basketball, because there would be a league game when she would run by the opposing bench and be just steps away from Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma. That's life in the Big East.

It was the physical that reached readiness faster than the mental, Shubert getting cleared to play last October, nine months after her injury but well before she was ready to hear those words, ones she thought she was weeks and weeks from hearing.

She needed more time but there wasn't any to be had. Xavier needed her in just the second game of the season. She would play in 20 of 28 games last winter for a team that went 1-27 and would go winless after December 15.

The team wasn't successful, its scoring margin of -21.9 ranking third from the bottom in the NCAA statistics, and Shubert never felt like her old self, rushed back earlier than she would have wanted, playing out of devotion to her team more than out of confidence in her ability to be back on the court.

Shubert would take 22 shots on the season, 19 of them from 3-point range. She made six, the 3-point revolution never happening as Xavier, now under a coach who didn't want to emphasize the 3-point line like Moore was planning to do, shot 28.7 percent from distance.

And then on some random night in southern Minnesota, Kyle Shubert would once again come across the Lady Griz shooting their way to another victory and the dream would reload anew: Man, Aby would fit so well with that team.

"It was a tough year and a struggle for her," says Kyle, in Missoula this weekend, his first-ever trip to Montana. "We liked the school and we liked her teammates. We were hoping something could be salvaged, maybe something would change, but she just said she couldn't do it."

Every option was on the table, even the nuclear one: giving up basketball.

"I told her, we're going to support you 100 percent no matter what you decide," he said. "If you decide you don't want to play basketball anymore, we totally support that as well. She said, I've worked too hard to get to where I am now to go somewhere and sit on the bench."

It was Kyle who helped create his daughter's love for the game. She had had some success playing basketball as a youngster, so he acted on a hunch.

With Kyle and Carron's four kids at home mostly by themselves one summer, as he went to his day job as a civil engineer, Carron to hers as a nurse, a list of chores was made to keep the kids away from the television.

Logan would do this, Aby would be responsible for this, Sydney needed to do this and Noah, the youngest of them all, could do this, their grandparents next door playing supervisor. Folding laundry, vacuuming, keeping busy and learning how to be responsible and part of a functioning family home.

Then Kyle threw in one extra task for Aby: 30 minutes of basketball every day. He didn't give her a script of drills to work on, a series of shots he wanted her to take, skills he wanted her to try to master before the summer was out.

He simply wanted her to have a basketball in her hands for 30 minutes every day, doing whatever she wanted to do. That freedom, aided as it was by Kyle's 30-minute request, led to a self-discovered love as trips to the driveway hoop became less a task and more and more something she couldn't do without.

"You want to expose your kids to things like that and hope they are going to latch on to things and love it. Then it's no longer a chore," he said. "That's all it took. She just needed a little gentle nudge. You couldn't keep her off the court after that."

Before it turned into climate-controlled gyms, AAU basketball, college arenas, it was just father and daughter at the driveway hoop in Kasson, Minnesota.

"I fell in love with it," says Aby. "I decided basketball is what I wanted to be really good at. My dad always told me, why would you want to be mediocre at something? If you're going to do something, give it your all and try to be your best at it."

As pursuits of a love can do, this one required sacrifice and dedication, an all-in mentality, one Kyle chauffeured three times a week, 90 minutes up to Bloomington so his daughter could practice and play in the Minnesota Stars AAU program.

All that coaching by Kyle in the driveway, all those shots day after day in all kinds of Minnesota weather, paid off.

"When she was in seventh grade, one of the writers for (PrepHoops.com) came up and introduced himself," recalls Kyle. "He congratulated us and said your daughter is a high-major prospect. We knew she was good but didn't think much of it until he told us that."

Her AAU coaches had told her, if you can get really, really good at one thing, you'll get a lot of interest. She focused on her shooting and the 3-point line, the path to becoming a dominant post player she was on early in her life coming to a dead end when she pretty much stopped growing after the fifth grade.

While her Twin Cities-based teammates could still double up on sports, going to after-school practices for things like soccer or volleyball or lacrosse and still making evening AAU practices, geography didn't afford Shubert the same luxury. She needed to be in the car as soon as school was out.

She wasn't about to employ half measures.

"I felt like I had to put my all in, especially me being undersized and not as athletic as the other girls. I felt like I had to get really good at one thing," she says. She did and got her first Division I offer before her freshman year of high school.

"After that point, man, let's get to work. Offers are made because of the potential they see in you, and those can be taken away real fast."

Today her new coach, Brian Holsinger, calls Shubert a "uniter," a fresh voice in a program that is using her outgoing personality to more quickly bridge the gap between old – the team's returners – and new – its transfers and freshmen – most of whom are in town and two weeks into practices.

Holsinger would probably never believe it but Shubert, earlier in her life, could not bring herself to talk to adults or people she didn't know. The family would go out to a restaurant and her parents would have to tell the server what Aby wanted from the menu, their daughter sitting frozen beside them.

"I finally got to the point, Aby, you're going to have to order your own food or you're not going to eat. You need to start learning how to talk to people," Kyle says.

The shell she broke out of to become who she is today was a side-benefit of the recruiting process. Want to play college basketball? Then you'd better learn how to talk to coaches over the phone.

"She'd go into our study and I'd hide outside and listen without her knowing," her dad says. "That was the best part of the whole recruitment process. It taught her how to talk to people and have conversations. It made her much more of an outgoing person and really advanced who she was."

She burst onto the national scene once she broke her own heart and switched from the Stars, leaving longtime friends and teammates behind, for the Minnesota Fury, which gave her the opportunity to play for a club whose goal it is to get its players seen while playing in the high-level Under Armour circuit.

With Kennedy Sanders, who is going into her second year at Colorado, playing the role of elite point guard and distributor, Shubert filled her role as deadly 3-point shooter. Xavier had to have her and got her, wrapping Shubert up before she even had a chance to make her official visit, the only one she took.

In 2021-22, when Shubert was a junior in high school, Xavier made just 81 3-pointers as a team in 30 games, or two fewer than Maggie Espenmiller-McGraw made by herself last season at Montana.

The Musketeers, who won only nine games that season, needed to diversify their offensive attack and wanted to bring in Shubert to be part of the shift. That's heady stuff for a teenager to hear, to feel wanted for a skillset she'd worked on for years and years.

She committed in April of her junior year, after averaging 22 points while shooting 42 percent from the 3-point line.

"I really liked the fact they weren't a great 3-point shooting team. I was exactly what they needed," she says. "I thought I made a great decision of going somewhere that needed a great 3-point shooter. Then I ended up playing for coaches who didn't value that as much as I would have wanted."

And doing so while playing at less than full health after injuring her knee in the second game of her high school season against Goodhue. Before she could even get off the ground for a fast-break layup, her life as a basketball player as she'd scripted and envisioned was no longer moving in a forward direction.

There was the usual hope, the usual maybes, maybe it isn't the worst-case scenario, maybe it's just a sprain, maybe she'd be back in a few weeks, maybe it isn't that big of a deal. It was the biggest of deals, not only an ACL but her meniscus as well, total destruction, complete devastation.

"It was hard. I cried more than she did," says Kyle, who had his own ACL tear as a high school football player and knew what his daughter was facing on her way back to playing again.

The feeling of loss also came from what she would miss out on, the fruits of all her labor over the years.

"It was her senior year, the year she was going to score her 2,000th point, break the school record, be up for Miss Basketball for Minnesota," her dad adds. "All the things she'd worked for were taken away from her."

She began doing some form shooting once she was allowed to put weight on her injured leg, started shooting free throws once some bend returned. And then it was off to Xavier last June, six months after the injury, to join a new team under a new coach. But it was still Xavier and still the Big East.

"I knew it would challenge me," she said about committing to Xavier as a junior. "I had a lot of mid-major offers but I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to challenge myself to be the best basketball player I could be."

She only totaled 147 minutes last season as injuries so ravaged the Musketeers that Xavier had to cancel two December games because of a lack of available players. In a perfect world, Shubert would have redshirted but last year was far from perfect.

"It was hard. You don't know the coaches at all, and I was doing a lot of rehab and watching the other girls play," she says.

Normally getting cleared to play is music to an athlete's ears, but Shubert last October wasn't expecting to hear that news nine months after her injury and wasn't ready for what it meant. A return to the court, the expectation that she could now be counted on.

She wasn't anywhere near ready to take that burden on. She admits that even today, in June 2024, she is still working to get fully confident in her knee, particularly on the defensive end, which stresses a lower body's range of fitness more so than the offensive end, with its sharp cuts and stops.

She sat out Xavier's first game of the season, a 55-41 loss at Youngstown State. She made her collegiate debut three days later, playing three minutes in an 81-54 home loss to James Madison.

"I wouldn't say I was 100 percent when I started playing, physically or mentally," she says. "Before our second game, coach asked, do you want to play today? Are you ready? We had a lot of injuries, so she wanted me to play and you don't want to let your coach down.

"There were things I felt I could have taken more time on if I would have redshirted but then again, if I would have redshirted, I wouldn't be here. Everything happens for a reason."

And, yes, she did get on the court for Xavier's lone game against UConn last season as Paige Bueckers scored 20 points and led the Huskies to an 86-40 win on Xavier's home floor.

"I didn't score a lot but I played against big-time competition. I'm glad I did it. I think I proved something to myself. I wanted to be the best player I could playing against the best competition," she says.

But the experience also had her dad telling her, if you no longer want to play basketball, we'll support that decision 100 percent, so something was clearly missing, which is why Montana saw her name pop up in the transfer portal after the season.

Lady Griz associate head coach Nate Harris, who has long-held recruiting ties to Minnesota Fury, knew of Shubert and Montana's staff knew the Lady Griz were going to be missing players who made 223 3-pointers last season or more than 250 Division I teams made last year.

"We were looking for a kid who could really shoot. We went back and watched film of her club season. They had a really good point guard, they spaced the floor, a lot of drive it in and kick it out. She could really shoot," says Holsinger.

"I knew after talking to her that Aby is a lot better than she played last year. Give her another year of being healthy and she is going to be someone who can come in and knock down shots for us. We really needed someone who could be counted on to shoot it and she is really happy to fill that role."

It happened quickly, probably a done deal (sorry, Brian) right after she hung up the phone after her initial conversation with Harris.

"When she got off the phone with Nate, I think she knew right then," says Kyle. "Family is really important to her. She wanted to go someplace that was going to feel like family and she got that feeling right away from Nate. It just felt different."

After Holsinger's wing man laid the foundation, the head coach closed the deal in an engrossing and memorable call that lasted well over an hour, something Shubert took time out of a trip to Spain to engage in.

"He's exactly what I wanted in a head coach," she says. "I wanted to have a close-knit relationship with my coach and be able to trust him and have him trust me. The way he encourages his players and develops them, it's exactly what I wanted."

When Aby and Carron made an official visit to Montana last month, it was the program's head coach and associate head coach who were there to meet them at the airport. Back home, Kyle was sold. "Right then, they said it felt right, that this was the right place and where Aby was supposed to be," Kyle says.

Last season took a toll on all of them. That's why Carron was in tears in Holsinger's office as the visit came to a close. The whole family needed to feel whole again, to feel right, to feel optimistic, encouraged, about the college basketball experience.

They'd been sold on the idea of team as family from coaches from all over, since Aby had first started being recruited years ago. For some, it's just talk, a trojan horse to get further into the process. For Holsinger and his staff, family is the way they operate. It's non-negotiable.

"That was a concern of ours, because we've been told a lot of things over the past few years," Kyle says. "At some point, you just have a feeling about people. As my wife said, you can't fake it for 48 hours."

She'll carry a bit of a burden into the season, a 3-point shooter on a team that lost both Espenmiller-McGraw and Gina Marxen and their 156 makes from last season, but Montana won't look or play like the Lady Griz did last year.

Their interior presence is going to be much more pronounced thanks to the arrival of Izzi Zingaro – and just wait until you get a chance to see her play – so don't expect Montana to let fly nearly 1,000 attempts from the arc like it did last year, 927 to be exact.

If Shubert can hit 50 or 60 3-pointers and do it on 40 percent shooting, which shouldn't be a stretch, she'll have done her job.

"We'll have a low-block presence that will be different this year," Holsinger says. "If you're going to double, we're going to kick it out and make sure people can't guard us both ways. It's a really simple game. If you have an inside presence and you have kids who can shoot, you're hard to guard."

Summer practices can be a bit of a grind, the winter ahead the furthest thing from the players' minds as they bask in late-spring Montana. But there is a joy to Shubert these days with her new team, her new teammates, her new coaches, like she's experiencing something she never has before. In a way, she is.

"The level of basketball is better than I thought. It's very competitive. And the development at practice is something I didn't experience my first year. (Brian) takes the time to explain and teach things, and that's what a great coach does," she says. "I didn't have that my first year. I really cherish that."

On Thursday, after another practice, she went to the locker room and then was right back on the court, music playing, shots going up, her thoughts on what lies ahead, not what's in the past. She's ready.

"I'm a competitor. I wanted to be brought in somewhere that I was wanted and the coaches thought I could make a difference. I found everything I wanted here."

This coming winter, Montana's games on ESPN+ will go from accidental to must-see for the Shubert family back in southern Minnesota, the Lady Griz program going from a wouldn't-that-be-great passing thought to an I-can't-believe-this-is-happening reality.

"It was one of those weird things, with their games coming on a little bit later in the Central time zone," Kyle says. "I was really excited when I found out they reached out to her. We're really happy with where she ended up."

Those 30 minutes he asked his daughter to spend daily with a basketball in her hands so many summers ago turned into a love for the game. Now that it's back in full bloom, now that she is approaching full health, there is no telling what it could lead to.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Maggie Espenmiller-McGraw

Gina Marxen

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