The Hall of Famers :: Kelly (Pilcher) Beattie

The photo becomes more remarkable by the year as its place in Lady Griz history moves further and further into the past while the game moves forward apace, the players never aging, frozen in time, 16 of them posing in front of a brick wall, all donning their high school letter-jackets atop blue jeans and white sneakers.

There is a vibe that emanates from the photo, that these were the coolest girls around, a club neither you nor I would have had the bona fides to enter or even approach without getting tongue-tied and then melting in their presence. But they were more than that. They were ballers of the highest order, the best the state of Montana produced in that snippet of time, 16 Montanans, now 16 Lady Griz.

While their coach, Robin Selvig, was loyal to his home state – Outlook proud, baby! – when he was building his teams, going 16 deep from Montana, 100 percent of the roster, was something new, done just once in the modern era of the Montana women's basketball program, soon approaching 50 years, that team from 1993-94, the ones still beaming, forever.

The first version of the photo, the one that was to go on that season's schedule poster, was taken with the players in their University of Montana letter-jackets. It was a good look, clean, sharp, unified under the school's banner. But what if they extended it, to include the entire state, rocked their school letter-jackets to bring the message home, from Montana, representing Montana? All of us, 16 strong.

And what if they then stamped that poster with the apropos tagline MADE IN MONTANA? How cool would that be? And who came up with the idea, anyway?

Was it you, Skyla Sisco, sitting there front and center, a future Grizzly Sports Hall of Famer? Probably not. You were in your first semester after arriving from Malta High. You wouldn't even play that year, redshirting as so many former high school stars did when they joined the Lady Griz, good but not good enough to take time away from players who had been with Selvig for three or four years already.

Was it you, Sherri Brooks, seated in the middle on the left side, the player forever enshrined on Montana's all-defensive team? Or you, Ann Lake, opposite Brooks on the right side, herself a future Hall of Famer, as would be Greta Koss, the one standing tallest in the back, another player from Malta, the Class B school that had an AA-sized impact on Selvig's program over the decades?

Maybe it was you, Trish Olson, standing, back row, far left, who would go on to join Selvig's staff for more than two decades as an assistant coach, or you, Kristy Langton, seated, right in the middle, the big S of Stevensville on your jacket, the all-around athlete who could beat you in basketball, volleyball or golf, take your pick, she was all-state in all three, the exemplar of the program at the time, athletes who chose basketball for their college sport, the S on her jacket suitable for any of them: superwoman.

Or maybe it was you, Carla Beattie, standing off to the far right side, almost out of frame, ball under your arm, partly covering the G, the pride of Granite High and Philipsburg, at the time the state's all-time leading prep scorer, having taken that crown from another former Lady Griz, Marti Kinzler, the ball right next to her heart, where it had been since birth, the family sport, the high school gym two blocks from home, a twin sister and two older brothers to battle with, mom telling them as they headed out the door, again, with their dad's school keys to not come home mad. Yeah, right. Never going to happen.

Or maybe it was that team's heart and soul, point guard Kelly Pilcher, seated, forming a power triangle with Langton and Sisco, the player who in late November of that season would lead the Lady Griz into one of the nation's most feared venues, home of the Tennessee Volunteers, in Montana's season opener and never bat an eye despite going up against Tiffany Woosley, a former USA Today national high school player of year, so hard to guard when Selvig would yell out "GO!" – the team's call for an on-ball screen at the top of the key – that Pat Summitt was forced to be in late-season form and intensity.

"I can remember she was switching who was on Kelly. They couldn't stop her from getting to the basket and (Summitt) was getting pissed," says Selvig. Pilcher would finish with 16 points on 7-of-13 shooting and five assists. Woosley went 3 for 9 and turned the ball over six times. Tennessee would win the game but Montana would shoot 50 percent over 40 minutes and outscore the Volunteers over the game's second half, forcing Summitt to go with her starting five longer than anyone would have expected.

Except, of course, the Lady Griz, who traveled to Knoxville not for some payout or guarantee or one-time experience but to win the game. "It was never, oh, my gosh," says Langton. "It was, let's go play our game. The one thing you always knew you were going to get with our team is we were going to work exceptionally hard and we were never going to quit, even if we were at Tennessee. It didn't matter.

"We were going to give it everything we had and knew we were going to play harder than the other team. That's what epitomized Kelly Pilcher, that work ethic. She was my favorite player I played with because she was so tough and so tenacious and never gave up, never quit."

And always had her teammates' backs, like the time at Northern Arizona – Montana won at Flagstaff 80-31 when Pilcher was a junior, 73-37 when she was a senior, so take your pick for the year of the aggrieved Lumberjack – when Langton ended up on the floor, per usual, this time with an NAU player on top of her, who took out her annoyance at being unable to score by surreptitiously punching Langton in the stomach as she removed herself from the Lady Griz.

Yeah, that wasn't happening, not on Pilcher's watch. "I don't know where she came from, but Kelly was immediately there. It was like Batman," says Langton. "She ripped the girl off me. That was the kind of player and teammate she was."

The Tennessee game, which opened the 1993-94 season, Pilcher's last in a Lady Griz uniform, would be the start of one of the best seasons by a point guard in program history. She scored it when necessary, averaging nearly 10 points per game, but was at her best as a distributor, either on the break, where she picked apart retreating defenses, or out of a set offense, breaking down her defender, then the opposing team's entire unit before finding open teammates.

"Kelly is unquestionably one of the best point guards in the country. That isn't guesswork, it's fact," Selvig said before Pilcher's senior year, before she almost led Montana to a win at Stanford in the second round of the NCAA tournament, one or two plays from the Sweet 16, tied 60-60 before the Cardinal won 66-62, Montana holding a team that had been averaging 91 points at home that season to 25 points fewer.

The Cardinal viewed the Lady Griz differently after the game than they had earlier in the day, when they strolled in for their shoot-around, just as Montana was finishing. "We could see it in their body language. They were kind of chuckling looking at us. I remember looking at them and thinking, we know we can beat you," Beattie recalls. "That was our mindset, that we could beat anybody. We certainly weren't intimidated by anybody."

Pilcher ended her career with that loss but was right on her averages. Playing all 40 minutes, she totaled 10 points, seven assists, six rebounds and two steals as Montana held Stanford to 33.9 percent shooting and a mere seven offensive rebounds. The Cardinal didn't win as much as they survived and advanced against one of the best defensive teams Selvig ever coached. Montana allowed 55.8 points per game that season, with opponents shooting 35.4 percent and turning the ball over more than 20 times.

"Defense was our strength and Kelly's game was, nobody's going to beat me. That was her game," says Langton. "She's not going to get beat. And if she does, it's not going to happen a second time. That was the team culture we had at the time. Don't let your man score. If they do, don't let it happen again. That was our attitude. That was led by Kelly as point guard and team leader. That's why we held Stanford to 66 points."

It's the stories that bring these Hall of Famers' careers back to life, especially those that took place decades ago, like the time she was riding the bus home from another game as a freshman and she was seated on the aisle, right across from Selvig, who wondered why his back-up point guard was so dejected, this player who had won two state titles at Big Sky High and who had added two more Class AA titles in volleyball and one in track and field. All Pilcher had known in her life was winning. Now she had the look of someone who couldn't do anything right.

"Robin could tell something was wrong," recalls Pilcher's dad, Russ. "He says, 'Hey, what's wrong?' She said, 'I can't dribble, I can't shoot and I can't pass.' Robin said, 'Who possibly could have told you that?' She said, 'You did!'" Yeah, that's the good stuff right there. Because who can't picture that scene even 30-some years later, Selvig the in-game madman showing his softer side to a player who had never had a coach quite like this one, who brought both the fire but also a deep love for his players, the combination that generations of girls responded to, learning that they, too, could live at both extremes, the girls next door and the girls who wouldn't back down from anything or anyone.

But it's the facts of her career that will have her entering the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame on Friday night, the ninth former Lady Griz player to be honored, following Cheri Bratt, Marti Leibenguth, Shannon Cate, Lisa McLeod, Greta Koss, Skyla Sisco, Ann Lake and Jean McNulty. Nine Hall of Famers, all products of Montana high schools, later representing the Lady Griz at the highest of levels of women's college basketball while playing under Selvig, who says, perhaps unnecessarily, "Montana was very good to me."

She was Montana's back-up point guard her first two years, in 1990-91 and 1991-92, not once in the starting lineup until she was a junior, the rare Lady Griz player in the 1990s who was pressed into service from the start, unable to redshirt because of the program's needs at the time, backing up Julie Epperly, an experienced upperclassman the two years Pilcher was an underclassman.

Montana would advance to the NCAA tournament in both of Pilcher's first two years, losing a tight home game to Iowa in 1991 in the first round, winning at Wisconsin before falling at USC in the second round in 1992. And then, a passing of the torch, or ball, from Epperly, whose primary job had been to get the ball to Cate as often as possible, to Pilcher, whose job was to go. Then go. Then go some more, to find the open teammate, any teammate, in the best position to score.

"She was always pushing the ball. It was all about the fast break. Let's try to get the easy points first. We were always turning and going, turning and going. She was a phenomenal passer. She had court vision that was uncanny," says Langton, who was one of those players who loved to turn and burn once the Lady Griz were in possession, as did Ann Lake and Sherri Brooks. "It was push, push, push, then in the half-court offense, she had the vision to feed you the ball where you needed it to make an easy bucket."

In Pilcher's first year as a starter, as a junior in 1992-93, Montana's season came to an end in the Big Sky championship game at Montana State, losing 64-57 to the opponent Selvig-coached teams had been 32-3 against prior to that loss. "All of the kids I had kind of taught the others what the expectations were," said Selvig of that setback, the one that kept the Lady Griz from making an unreal 11 straight trips to the NCAA tournament between 1988 and '98.

"That didn't set well with any of us," said Langton. "The teams that had come ahead of us had not lost to the Cats. That's something we knew. Bozeman had some fantastic players at the time, but that fueled us for sure."

With Pilcher leading the way as a senior point guard in 1993-94, Montana would win 25 of 28 games between opening the season with a road loss at Tennessee and ending the year with a tight loss at Stanford, the former playing a role in the tight result of the latter. "Rob was not afraid to schedule tough games and those really helped us prepare for the NCAA tournament. We were almost always outsized but we had great athletes and played so well as a team," said Beattie.

Pilcher finished her senior year with 215 assists, then a program record and still the second-most in program history for a single season. She was voted both All-Big Sky Conference and to the Big Sky All-Tournament team as a junior and senior, and three times was named Big Sky Player of the Week. Her 475 career assists rank seventh in program history.

She was on teams that went 97-21, 57-2 at Dahlberg Arena, and lost only six league games over four seasons, winning an outright Big Sky regular-season title as a freshman, co-championships as a junior and senior

She played in three NCAA tournaments, in five NCAA tournament games, coming off the bench to finish with 10 assists against two turnovers in road games at Wisconsin and USC as a sophomore. In her final game at Dahlberg Arena, a 77-67 win over UNLV in the first round of the 1994 NCAA tournament, she orchestrated a near perfect Missoula swan song: 20 points on 8-of-14 shooting, eight assists, five steals and four rebounds while playing all 40 minutes.

Two years as a reserve, a role more indicative of the strength and experience of those teams than anything to do with Pilcher, then two as a starter, all the way to the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame. "Kelly was a contributor and a very good player, but she just kept getting better and better and ended up being a heck of a guard," said Selvig.

It's a symbiotic relationship, the position played by Pilcher, a point guard nothing without her teammates and her teammates nothing without a good point guard. That's why Pilcher is being inducted, partly for her own excellence, partly for the success of the teams she led. It's why all of the former Lady Griz have been inducted, really, skilled players who were made to look even better surrounded by so many of their kind.

"I was on awesome, fantastic teams. I'm getting this because of my team. Anybody from a team sport does. I was super lucky to be around these fantastic players and we had a lot of success," Pilcher said. "We won some big games and I got to be part of that."

Those are the facts, the numbers, the accolades, the wins and losses, the postseason success, but it's the stories we're here for, the ones that take a girl, born in the 70s, raised in the 80s, a Lady Griz in the 90s, and bring her back to the forefront at just the right time, just days before her induction.

With all the storylines to choose from, this one might be the best place to start: Pilcher took five official visits while filling her afternoons and evenings with practices and competitions at Big Sky High, basketball in the fall, back when that was the case, volleyball in the winter, ditto, and track and field in the spring. She traveled to USC, Oregon, Washington, Washington State and across Missoula to her hometown Lady Griz, schools lining up to get the standout athlete on campus.

But only one of those visits was for basketball. The rest of them were for track and field, where she was in even more demand than she was for the hardwood. When you throw the javelin farther than 150 feet as a sophomore in high school, the best mark in the entire nation for your class, at the age when recruiters are starting to take notice, college programs will know about it and will want you in their program, maybe even more as a heptathlete given Pilcher's abilities in both the throws and jumps.

Her dad, Russ, whose name is synonymous with track and field in the area – Does the Russ Pilcher Top 10 meet ring a bell? He started it in 1999, had his name bestowed upon it a few years later after the long-time Missoula coach retired – remembers the first time he saw his daughter in a different light than simply the oldest of two girls that his and Barb's life revolved around.

There was a youth track and field meet in town, probably younger than youth, more like little tykes. One of the field events was the softball throw, which his daughter picked up, wound up and gave a heave. All it did was land 20 feet farther than anyone her age had ever thrown it at that meet. "Okay, this kid has got an arm. We knew then that she had some skill level," says Russ.

And why wouldn't she, the daughter of Russ, Missoula Loyola grad who went on to play football at Carroll, earning all-America honors as both a punter and as a defensive back, leading the country as a sophomore, punting the ball nearly 46 yards per attempt while playing in the same defensive backfield as Gary Turcott, Pilcher getting induced into the Carroll Hall of Fame in 1979, Turcott in 2011 after leading Carroll's men's basketball team to 376 wins over 19 years as head coach.

Oh, how this handsome athlete shook up Walla Walla, Washington, the day he moved to town for his first teaching job at DeSales High, where Barb was the secretary and Russ taught and coached everything he could, football, basketball, track and field. Barb's three older sisters, who all married rodeo dudes, told their sister the same thing: stay away from this one.

But what was Miss Rodeo Washington, in 1964-65, supposed to do the day he asked her to meet him for a cup of coffee, maybe lunch? How about invite him home to meet the family? "She had me out to her house for dinner a couple of times," recalls Russ. "This was an Italian family and it was the Italian way. They did things a little bit differently, which I loved. We dated for a couple of years, then I finally said, I'm going to bite the bullet. I'm going to ask her to marry me."

They relocated to Missoula so Russ could start graduate school, Barb bringing her horse along, housing it at the fairgrounds, riding it whenever she could, staying true to her rodeo roots all summer long. "I couldn't even saddle a horse, much less ride one," says Russ. "I was a city boy married to a professional cowgirl. I just went along for the ride," their car pulling the two-horse trailer from rodeo to rodeo, one side just perfect for side-by-side sleeping bags and a Hibachi grill. "That was our RV at the time. She barrel-raced and I just sat in the stands and cheered."

He got on at Hellgate High in 1972, the year Kelly was born, coached and taught there until 1980, when he joined the new staff at the new school in town, Big Sky, where he would coach and teach until his retirement in 2001.

Everything he did coaching-related, he had his daughter as his shadow, serving as the ball girl on the sidelines at football games, following him around as he coached his athletes in track and field. "I loved the whole sports environment," says Kelly. "I thought the athletes were so cool. I couldn't wait until I was old enough to be one."

She didn't have to wait. She was one already, but her dad had seen enough in youth athletics to take a no-pressure approach with his oldest. "Having been in the coaching realm, on occasion I saw where parents really forced their kids into things," Russ says. "I did this, so I want you to do this and kids would be kind of forced into an activity, then they didn't like it or get burned out. My wife and I said, if she wants to do something, great. We let her cut her own path."

It's why she became the athlete she did, raised in a household where winning or losing, success or failure, in sports she and she alone opted to try, was met with loving support. She was allowed to become the athlete she was destined to be naturally, without expectations or pressure.

Hey, Dad, I want to try basketball. Sure! Let's get you signed up. And I think I want to try volleyball with my friends. And maybe track and field. You got it! "She was around sports her whole life. She enjoyed it, liked playing, then it just became her," said Russ.

It was track and field that first won her over, and what a resource to have at the evening dinner table, the coach who was the lead clinician on teaching and throwing the javelin at the annual Montana Coaches Association Clinic in 1985, '88 and '93, the dad who brought his daughter in 1984 to the U.S. Olympic Trials in Los Angeles. "Track was my No. 1 sport. I was really into it," said Kelly.

She won the javelin state title as a sophomore, had the best throw in the nation for her grade, the shot put as a junior and senior, going two years without a loss in the event, loading up her championship schedule with the high and long jumps, the hurdles, the relays, taking home 14 individual medals in six different events at the state meet in her career.

Yep, Selvig was up against it, the one official visit Pilcher would take that wasn't for track and field. "There was definitely some question in high school if she was going to go track," the coach says.

The Lady Griz? She had hardly heard of them growing up, basketball not holding her focus or even interest, not when there was track and field to give her attention to. But those times she did get a basketball in her hands? It was clear she was going to be just as good at that sport if she ever went all in.

Her dad remembers the day his niece came to town for a visit and not just any niece but Linda Raunig, who was inducted into the University of Denver Hall of Fame in 1996 after averaging more than 17 points per game for her Pioneer career, from 1976-80, and becoming the first athlete from the school to have their jersey number retired.

Raunig, who would go on to play professionally, then coach at Regis, a Division II school in Denver, from 1990 to 2015, getting inducted into that school's Hall of Fame in 2022, still had her A-game when she and Pilcher, then in middle school, went at it on the family's backyard court. "Linda came in afterwards and said, this girl went past me and I couldn't keep up with her," Russ recalls. "She said, she's going to be a player."

She took all that talent to Big Sky High, and what an incubator of athletes those hallways, classrooms and gyms turned out to be. In the grade above her: Ann Lake and Trish Olson, future Lady Griz, the former a future Grizzly Sports Hall of Famer, plus Michelle Peterson and Heidi Williams, who would play for the Montana volleyball team. In Pilcher's class, Sheri Vinion, who also went on to play volleyball for the Grizzlies.

Big Sky won basketball state titles when Pilcher was a sophomore and junior, the player they called Pilch or K.P., later Miss Clutch, hitting the go-ahead jumper in overtime as a sophomore, the game-winner as a junior to earn tournament MVP honors. As a senior, without Lake and Olson, Pilcher again earned tournament MVP honors after scoring 23 of Big Sky's 38 second-half points to nearly rally the Eagles from 18 points down in a one-point loss to Hellgate, Pilcher finishing with 29.

There were volleyball titles as a junior and senior, a track and field championship as a senior. "That feat, across all programs, has not been duplicated since to my knowledge, with that quality of athletes," says Russ. "It was a quirk of fate that they happened to be there at the same time and ended up going to the same college." Three times she was named all-state in basketball, twice in volleyball.

The competitiveness that Pilcher was known for – "Great competitor. Fierce competitor," says Selvig. "Almost had to have her tone it down." – was alit at Big Sky, when her talent was matched by that in others, then given the outlet of sports.

"She was a very intense, very fierce competitor. The word lose wasn't in her vocabulary," said her basketball coach at Big Sky, Ben DeMers. "That's the attitude she brought every game. She was a real joy to coach.

"I knew wherever she went, she would be successful in whatever it was, whether it was track, volleyball, basketball. She was just an all-around athlete and such a great leader. She set an example for the entire team because nobody on the team worked harder than she did."

Track and field still had her full attention, but what Selvig was building across town was getting hard to ignore. His 1987-88 team, when Pilcher was a sophomore at Big Sky, began the season with 26 straight wins. One of those, a 67-59 victory over Montana State, drew a crowd of 9,258, a program record that will never be surpassed. One month after that, a 74-72 overtime loss to Stanford in the NCAA tournament in front of 8,709 fans, the two largest crowds in program history.

For as much as she loved track and field, how could it compare to that? "We went to the Stanford game," says Russ. "It was packed to the rafters, exciting, thrilling, spine-tingling. I could tell that was something she thought about. That environment had a very powerful influence on her."

Selvig's teams kept winning, going 27-4 when Pilcher was a junior and she really needed to make a decision one of these days. Basketball or track and field? Track and field or basketball? "She was under a lot of stress," says her dad. "She came down the stairs one day and said, Dad, I'm going to play basketball for the Griz."

"I was probably better at track but I liked basketball better," Kelly says. "What Rob had built by then, yeah, this looks pretty great. I can remember the day I made the decision. I'm glad I did."

Before the Lady Griz, the East-West Shrine Game in Columbia Falls, a reminder that the talent level among female prep athletes in the state wasn't exclusive to Big Sky High. Not only would Selvig build championship team after championship team on in-state players over the years and decades, there was enough at the time to go around, so much so that in-state talent is what Montana State used to build its 1993 Big Sky title team.

"That class was loaded. It was really special," says Langton. "It was an incredible class of kids. Great athletes and multi-sport athletes. A lot of us competed at a high level in three sports. Just something in the water. I don't know if it's been replicated for girls. It was a special group that was ultra-competitive. It was amazing to be a part of it."

Of course, every high school standout has her welcome-to-college-basketball moment. The next year, Beattie and her 2,508 points at Granite High arrived in Missoula. "I remember a time we were scrimmaging and I got the ball on the right-side wing. I thought, nice, an open three. So I took it. Here comes Shannon Cate and she blocks it after it's out of my hands, blocks it out of bounds. I thought, okay! You learn to adjust."

As did Pilcher and Langton as two of five Lady Griz freshmen in 1990-91, arriving on a team that had gone 27-3 the year before, going 16-0 in league, winning those games by an average of more than 21 points. There were more championships to be won, and the team wasn't going to wait around for some freshmen to catch up.

"It was challenging," says Langton. "We came out of high school as top players and Kelly and I both got our lunch handed to us on a daily basis by Shannon Cate and Julie Epperly at the point guard the three position. It was eye-opening to see the difference between good high school players to college-level sports. Rob and (assistant coach Annette Rocheleau) would be yelling at us like, come on! Well, I'm guarding Shannon Cate. What do you expect me to do? I'm just a freshman!"

It was the Lady Griz model at the time, so much talent, so much depth, so much competitiveness in their own gym. "We were 2-3 deep at every position. You had to work for playing time. Nothing was handed to you," said Beattie. "Oftentimes our second five was the second-best team in the Big Sky. We pushed each other to get better."

Over time, the game began to slow down, Pilcher getting her feet wet as a true freshman by playing more than 10 minutes per game.

In 1991-92, when Pilcher was a sophomore and Beattie a true freshman, the two subbed on and off together, spelling starters Joy Anderson and Epperly. "When we went in, we picked up the pace a little bit. We liked to run the court more than Julie and Joy did. They played well together but we had a little bit different look. Kelly and I had fun playing together.

"What set Kelly apart was that she trusted her teammates. She distributed the basketball to everyone because her goal was to win. She was a winner." And now she had picked up the hesitation dribble, the skill that had Pat Summitt getting so frustrated two years later. "That set her apart. When she started hesitating and taking it at you, she might bulldoze right through you. You didn't know which way she was going to go."

Good luck pressing the Lady Griz when Pilcher had the ball in her hands, looking up, seeing the defense extended three-quarters court, full court if she was lucky. "In our notebook, when we went over press-breakers, we should have just had a picture of Kelly. She was so fast with the ball. You couldn't trap her. She was so good with the ball and so tough and such a great competitor."

Her time as a starter finally arrived as a junior. It was the same season Langton moved into the starting lineup as a redshirt sophomore after sitting out the 1990-91 season, then playing in a reserve role in 1991-92. "Those older players were hard on us but ultimately it made us better players. We had to scratch and claw for everything we did," says Langton. "It definitely shaped our careers and helped us become really successful later on when we were the standout players."

It would be the first year after Cate and her 2,172 career points had graduated, offense now by committee and fast break, defense by vice grip. No Lady Griz team has ever approached that year's field goal percentage defense of 31.7 percent, a percentage that led the entire nation.

After years of Cate being the centerpiece of the offense – and for good reason, you know, because she was a Kodak All-American and all – it was time to rev up the offense, fast-break points the priority with Pilcher the tip of the spear. "I liked to play fast," says Pilcher. "My junior and senior year, we had Ann, Kris, Sherri. The game sped up a lot."

Pilcher had 126 assists as a junior (4.5/g) and one of her most memorable plays, stripping Boise State point guard Tricia Bader of the ball in the Big Sky semifinals in Bozeman with the game tied 68-68 and the clock ticking down toward 0:00. Pilcher raced to the other end and laid the ball in just before the horn, not knowing her daughter, Leia, would one day call that floor her own and be coached by Bader, later Binford, as a member of the Montana State Bobcats, who erased all Pilcher's good memories of the semifinal win over Boise State one day later with a win over the Lady Griz in the championship game.

They would all restore order the following year, opening with Tennessee, closing with Stanford and winning almost everything in between.

Jim and Eileen Beattie began as high-school sweethearts in Anaconda, then moved across the Pintlers to Philipsburg, where he taught business, educating year after year of Prospectors in the same classroom and most important to this story had 1) four kids and 2) keys to the high school and its gym.

Ken and Steve came along first, then twins Carla and Crista, growing up just blocks from the school, where Jim coached the girls team, then the boys, games becoming a true family affair, dad coaching, boys playing, Carla on the bench keeping stats and soaking up the family passion, small-town basketball, and Crista on the cheer team.

"We watched basketball, we played basketball, we talked basketball. We had to be careful because we were all very competitive," says Carla, who would team up with Jim and Crista and take on the two boys. "Mom would warn us when we went to the gym, don't come home mad at each other. It didn't always work out that way."

Like so many basketball-loving girls growing up in western Montana, she was brought to her first Lady Griz game and had an awakening. That's what I want to do, that's who I want to be, that's the coach I want to compete for and the fan base I want to play in front of.

"Even though I came from a small Class C school, I always felt I could play for the Lady Griz," says Beattie. "I grew up with my dad taking me to games. That's where it starts, as a little girl and building that belief that you can play at that level."

It was that local connection that sparked the interest in what Selvig was building, a following that was galvanized by all the winning that was taking place, Montana going 131-6 at home in the nine seasons before Pilcher arrived and joined the program.

They had been following these future Lady Griz for years as high school athletes, when they were competing for rival schools, now joining forces for the college program with the big dreams in little Missoula. It gave it a small-town, home-town feel, local girls stepping into the competitive furnace of Selvig's program and getting forged into one of the top programs in the country. They became a must-see attraction, fans lining up before the doors opened to flood the lower-level general-admission bleacher seating.

"Those Missoula girls and others from Montana, they brought a following with them," said Russ. "The attendance began to increase steadily, then they were being successful and winning. It was amazing. They talked about it downtown. It was the main thing at that time, Lady Griz basketball. It really did draw. That was a big recruiting thing for Rob. Girls would work at it to get there."

From the 1981-82 season through 1997-98, Montana went 247-13 at home, ranking in the top 16 in the nation for home attendance the first 14 years the NCAA started tracking it, topping out at No. 6 in 1987-88 and 1988-89, and drawing 5,123 per game in 1993-94, Pilcher's senior year, fans flocking to Dahlberg to watch this squad of all-Montana girls go 17-0 in home games.

"We looked forward to those games so much. It was so much fun and so awesome to play in front of our crowd," says Pilcher. Adds Beattie: "Nothing compared to playing in Dahlberg Arena. You never had to get hyped up before a game. All you had to do was put on the uniform and walk out onto the court. The fans were the best in the country. For me as a high school player, getting recruited all over the country, it was hard to even think of playing anywhere else. It was unbeatable."

It just built upon itself, Selvig as architect, each class taking what they'd been given and taking great care to keep it going, this little program that could. "You come in as a freshman and it was just instilled in you early," says Langton. "It didn't matter who we were playing or where we were playing, we were not going to be intimidated by anybody. We knew we were from Montana and didn't look like a lot of the teams that were national powers at the time, but that was never in our minds. We're going to give them all we have. That was Rob's message all the time."

Ken and Steve Beattie both played at Montana Tech but got to Missoula when they could, for the basketball, to support their sister, to keep tabs on her fellow Lady Griz. "My brothers were always checking out my teammates. I was used to it." Ken met Kelly one day. They ran into each again, hit it off, Ken working his way into this collection of the coolest girls around and using his game to link up with the team's point guard. They celebrated 30 years of marriage earlier this year.

But before that, Pilcher was a reserve guard, learning, getting better, patiently waiting for her chance to become one of the faces of the program, one of the players introduced in the starting lineup to the adoration of thousands in the fieldhouse and even more beyond. "So true about putting your time in, paying your dues, then all of a sudden things start to happen as you move down the road. That's what happened with Kelly," says her dad, who maxed out his and Barb's credit cards to make every game of their daughter's senior year.

Pilcher didn't completely abandon track and field. Like so many Lady Griz athletes of that era, she used the free time she had in the spring, after another successful basketball season had wrapped up, to scratch that particular itch. She finished fourth in the javelin, fifth in the shot put at the 1992 Big Sky Conference outdoor championships, following her sophomore season.

Then, by her junior year, she was in the starting lineup, then, before her senior year, learning Selvig had signed her and her teammates up to play at Tennessee to open the 1993-94 season, this all-Montana team traveling to face one of the nation's top programs, that had won national championships under Summitt in 1987, '89 and '91, and would go on to win five more.

"From the time we heard we were going there, it was, oh my gosh, so nervous for that game," Pilcher says. "Glad I was able to get the ball over half court and have a good game. We did well. That was one of my all-time favorite games even though we lost."

Montana hosted and won the Big Sky tournament, defeated UNLV at Dahlberg a few days later in the first round of the NCAA tournament before losing at Stanford, a game they all remember in vivid detail, of what could have been, a spot in the Sweet 16.

"In today's day and age, we would have been a 25-point underdog, but my girls thought we could win. And we could have," said Selvig. "One of the things I remember about that, we called a wheel play, a dump to the high post, fake it, then throw it over the top. A Stanford girl got over and just tipped the ball."

Not a bad way to go out, losing by a fingertip on a wheel play to the team that had won two of the four previous national championships on that team's home court. "We hung with them pretty good. Would have been happy to make it to the Sweet 16 but happy the way it ended," says Pilcher. "That would have been awesome to win but so happy we won the (Big Sky) tournament and an NCAA game."

Ken had graduated a semester earlier, a petroleum engineering major, and had moved to Denver to begin working. They got married a month after Pilcher's spring graduation, the newlyweds setting up in Colorado, Ken doing what a petroleum engineer does, Pilcher working in a detention center for girls.

He moved on to a field office in Baker, Montana, after two years in Denver. They've been in Texas the last two and a half decades, Midland first, over to Houston for three years, back to Midland for the last 17. Daughter Kayla arrived in 1995, turning Kelly's full-time profession into mom and coach. Kayla was followed by Alissa, Makenna and finally Leia, the oldest three all back living in Midland, with three daughters of their own, Kayla due in December with a boy to finally break up the female hegemony.

Leia played three years at (OMG) Montana State before transferring to Northern Arizona. Last year she was voted second-team All-Big Sky and to the Big Sky all-tournament team after the Lumberjacks knocked out (double OMG) Montana in the semifinals in Boise. She has one year of eligibility remaining as she pursues a graduate degree.

In 2007, Ken convinced Carla and her husband Seth to move to Midland. Steve and his family have also relocated, with Jim and Eileen spending winters in West Texas.

Basketball has continued to be the family sport, the thing that's connected them, Pilcher coaching her four daughters on the junior high team at Midland Classical Academy before sending them off to Carla and Jim on the high school team. Once Leia went from the junior-high to high-school team, Pilcher did as well, joining Carla and Jim, the whole lot of them retiring from coaching once Leia moved on to Montana State. It was a good run. It's been a good life.

She's been Kelly Beattie now longer than she was Kelly Pilcher, but those are just names for the same person, on Friday night to become a Grizzly Sports Hall of Famer. What she accomplished as an athlete flipped the family dynamic. For years she was Russ Pilcher's daughter, the father a towering figure on the Missoula sports scene. One day he was asked for the first time, are you Kelly Pilcher's dad? He'd never been asked a better question, his heart warming with the idea that his daughter had made a name for herself.

"We were proud parents of her success. What she did speaks for itself. I was very honored to be her dad. I had a little success at Carroll and was always Russ Pilcher. When she came along, pretty soon I was Kelly's dad. It made me feel good," says Russ, who was inducted into the Montana Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2002, two decades after he made Carroll's.

Did we mention a little bit of competitiveness runs in the family? "I told her, okay, Kelly, here's the deal. I'm in the Montana Coaches Association Hall of Fame and the Carroll Hall of Fame. Now you're in the Grizzly Sports Hall of Fame. You've got one to go, baby."

University of Montana Athletics

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