From chaos, stability :: A Lady Griz preview

Mack Konig needed some time away, some time for herself, some space to process everything that had her world spinning.

She'd dealt with adversity on the basketball court over her years in the sport. Injuries. Disappointing losses. Teammate drama. But this was something totally different.

In mid-January, Montana's head coach, the one who had recruited Konig to Montana, stepped away, announced he was taking some personal time off, right in the heart of the season. The Lady Griz would be under an acting head coach, Nate Harris.

For decades, the Lady Griz had been a foundational piece of Montana Athletics. If something went sideways with another program, Robin Selvig's team, pretty much without fail for nearly 40 years, would be a shining light that everyone could look to, a reminder that everything would be okay.

Now, chaos had come for the Lady Griz.

As unaffected as Konig has looked in a Montana uniform in her career, always steady, her game consistent, she, too, needed to step away, the day the Lady Griz would beat Weber State on a weighty Thursday night in January, Konig not in the arena.

She probably could have used days, weeks to process things, but the season wasn't going to hit the pause button. Idaho State was coming to town for a game two days later. Two days after that, Montana would play at Idaho.

She had to do some soul-searching and she had to do it quickly. "It was just a weird time for everybody. You didn't know how the other players were going to react. Even myself, I was up in the air. What's the right decision for me?" she said. "Where are my values?"

Two days later, she was back in uniform as Montana moved to 2-0 under Harris, the Lady Griz putting up 81 points on the defensive-minded Bengals, the most points scored by Montana against Idaho State since 2007.

Less than two months later, Konig was one of the best players in Boise as Montana came within a last-second tip-in of winning the Big Sky Conference championship, the Lady Griz point guard averaging 20.7 points on 51 percent shooting and more than six assists over three postseason games.

What did Konig do with that space and time away, as limited as it was, with as much pressure as she felt to figure it out as quickly as possible? Her answer is the most Lady Griz thing ever, the reason you should be counting down the days until Montana opens the season on Nov. 4 against Seattle Pacific.

The program's foundation? It's still there and as healthy as ever.

"The last few months (of the season), it was taking a step back and looking at what I valued most in our program, which is the team, the city of Missoula and playing with the Lady Griz name on your chest," she said. "Those were the things I kind of honed in on and focused on when everything went crazy.

"The culture of the Lady Griz has stayed pretty strong my four years. It's always been a team that loves each other, a team that is going to support one another. That's what made a huge impact on why girls decided to stay and why we are where we are right now."

Where Montana is right now, with that foundation that goes back nearly 50 years, to Selvig's first-ever practice in the fall of 1978, is a program of stability once again, after an offseason of players changing schools and the Big Sky Conference looking completely different than it did a year ago.

The more things change, the more some things remain the same. The Lady Griz will be one of the favorites to win the league this winter, as Montana has been so many times over the decades.

To try to get Harris, who was elevated to interim head coach in February and named head coach in March, to buy into that idea is a fool's errand. He and the team have their goals, lofty ones, but he refuses to budge his focus much beyond today and what the team can do to get better.

It's maddening because you want grandiose projections from this first-year coach, about returning the Lady Griz to greatness, and he won't do it. He can't do it. He's so determined to get the best out of his team today that he doesn't have time for tomorrow, much less the winter ahead, the seasons ahead.

And that might be why you know the Lady Griz are in the best of hands.

"I think that I learned that there's no substitute to the process and you can't skip any steps," Harris said when asked what he learned from his 17 games in the big chair at the end of last season.

"It's corny but to get to where you want to go, sometimes you have to fail to really unlock things for people, myself included, to learn that there are only a handful of ways to do it. There are a lot of ways to play basketball but only a handful of ways to be really, really good. There is no short-cutting it."

It seemed like Harris had found a shortcut last winter, leading Montana, which was 5-10 when he took over in an acting capacity, to five wins in seven games, one of those two losses coming by a single point to a team that would go 30-4, the other the third game in five days, on the road.

Then, the growing pains. A 96-76 loss to Northern Arizona, the most points ever allowed at home by a Montana team. A 66-46 loss at Idaho State, the team the Lady Griz toyed with a month earlier. Then, the lowest of lows, a 98-66 loss at Montana State.

March looked like more of a reprieve, the end of the season and a chance to reset the program going forward than an opportunity to be great. But behind closed doors, they kept at it, stuck to the process.

"As good as it was at the start and as bleak as it felt at different times, we needed all of that to know who we were at the end of the year," said Harris. "We were not who we were in March without the low points or, for that matter, without the high points."

Then Boise week arrived and a new Lady Griz team showed up and showed out.

Montana went 0-2 against Idaho in the regular season. The Lady Griz overwhelmed the Vandals defensively, winning 65-54 in the quarterfinals.

Montana lost twice against Northern Arizona in the regular season, falling by 39 combined points. In the Big Sky semifinals, the Lady Griz held All-Big Sky first-teamer Taylor Feldman without a basket and Konig had a virtuoso performance, scoring 29 points, 17 in the fourth quarter.

It was on to the title game for the first time since 2015.

"You could feel it in the team, this edge that we wanted this really bad," said Konig. "It wasn't that we wanted it. It was almost that we needed it. We needed to fight for each other to show we were capable of doing something great.

"The energy in the team was different than it had been. It was like we were figuring out what made us different from other teams. We wanted it more than everybody else and we were going to put up a fight. It was really fun."

In the championship game, Montana held a team that had put up 92 points in the quarterfinals and 75 in the semifinals to 45 through three quarters, to 58 for the game.

Yes, Montana lost the game by a point, but it's not the result that carried over from that team to this one but the effort the Lady Griz put in, the near desperation they played with. You can ask Harris about his thoughts on offense, his thoughts on defense but it's mindset he wants to talk about most.

"I hope we compete with an edge and with a toughness that I don't know has been a huge part of Lady Griz basketball as of late," he said. "Hopefully we're much more physical, much more aggressive," then he just goes ahead and says it. "We want to be mean.

"When we go out on the floor, we know we're going to play harder and it matters more to us."

You get the sense this is going to work, with Harris as head coach, because he's so grounded, so realistic. He isn't overwhelmed by the Lady Griz legacy, rather thankful he's inherited the history. He isn't overwhelmed by Selvig's Hall of Fame career because he knows he can never come close to matching it.

He isn't burdened by any of it, just his need to make his team better today, then better tomorrow, then better the next day. You know, the process.

"What Robin accomplished here, it gave us this great platform and we owe so much to him and the young women who came through this program before us," said Harris.

"But it's also very freeing because I never have to worry about being the greatest coach in the history of this program. That's not happening. That ship sailed a long time ago. Robin Selvig is one of the best coaches in the history of women's basketball, one of the best coaches in this league in any sport."

Harris is the first Lady Griz coach, post-Selvig, to truly have that pragmatic approach, to not be weighed down by it, by trying to be someone he's not, by trying to reach the unattainable. That's why he's not thinking big picture, of championships, plural. He's able to focus on today, simply today.

It shouldn't go unnoticed that Selvig had the same approach, of winning the day, then the next, always doing right by the players. Then, all of a sudden, you've won a championship, then another, then you look up 38 years later and you've built one of the best programs in the nation.

"I get to be myself. We get to go out and really shorten our view to, how do we get better today?" Harris said. "We have lofty goals. We expect to be incredibly competitive, but we're not going to do that on Sept. 24. We're going to show up today and try to practice really well. That's it.

"That's what this is. It's about practicing well today. And then, when we get a chance to finally play somebody else, it's about playing well that day. We're going to try to continue that through the year and hopefully over a multitude of years.

"We have goals. We put them up in everyone's locker. They're in my office. We want to go accomplish things. But everyone in the nation wants to accomplish things. How you go about it is way more important than anything else, so we want to focus on being good today."

Harris goes into the season with two building blocks in Konig and sophomore Avery Waddington that are the envy of most coaches in the league, returners who are at the same school where they've already accomplished something.

Konig gives Harris a senior point guard, someone who can put up 25 points or dish out 10 assists, or both, depending on what's needed. She surpassed 1,000 career points in Boise and last season totaled 165 assists, the most for a Lady Griz point guard since Mandy Morales in 2006-07.

"You can never overstate the point guard position," said Harris. "Mack is a tremendous player and is going to be a huge part of what we do. What I appreciate most about her now is that she is competing with a desperation. A lot of players with her talent don't always have that competitive desperation.

"She's becoming a really good leader. There has been some stuff, but here's a kid who's in her fourth year who is poised to kind of take that mantle of, this is my team, this is my moment, this is my chance to go do great things.

"That being said, Mack knows more than anyone that nothing good happens alone and nothing worth accomplishing is done in a vacuum. She is excited to bring her teammates along and is excited to be part of something bigger than herself."

Waddington, Montana's only other returning starter, is coming off one of the best freshman seasons in program history. Only Hollie Tyler, in 2001-02, scored more points as a true freshman than Waddington did last season.

Mirroring the team, she had her ups and downs a year ago but came of age in a one-point home loss to Montana State, putting up a season-high 21 points, 15 in the fourth quarter in a game that begged for someone to do something special.

She was at her first-year best over three games in Boise, averaging 15 points on 50 percent shooting while grabbing eight rebounds. And to think that was only a sign of things to come, an appetizer.

"I'm excited to see what she accomplishes," said Harris. "She is a unique talent. She can do things on the basketball floor not a lot of people can do. She has a combination of length and skill and athletic ability that is special and unique for this league.

"I generally think that people take a big jump between their freshman and sophomore years. That's hard to imagine given some of the things she did down the stretch. It's exciting," then Harris defaults to coach mode. "But we want all our players to get wrapped up in the day-to-day commitment to the process."

Konig (11.6/g) and Waddington (10.0/g) led the Lady Griz in scoring last season. The next four players on that list are all gone, Dani Bartsch, MJ Bruno and Tyler McCliment-Call to graduation, Izabella Zingaro to Cleveland State, the only player Montana lost to the transfer portal.

Zingaro departed on good terms, program moving in one direction stylistically, spread out, a hole in the middle, lay-ups and threes taking priority, player at her best when she can be that middle, back to the basket, overwhelming opponents with her size and touch and scoring ability around the rim.

Harris isn't purely a three-is-more-than-two devotee, but he knows how effective it can be given the right players.

"If somebody is going to pack it in, we'll end up taking a lot of threes," he said. "We have a roster where if a team dares us to shoot, they are going to end up digging themselves a pretty big hole. As they move out, we'll attack the hoop and be really aggressive to go finish at the rim."

Combining that with a defense-wins-championships mentality almost got the Lady Griz that title in March.

"We scored more at the rim in the tournament when we didn't have a post player on the floor," said Harris. "We moved people out, which created chances for people to go get lay-ups."

In the defining moments in the championship game, late in the fourth quarter, Waddington got to the rim with 30 seconds left to bring Montana within two. With less than 10 seconds left, Konig got into the paint before pivoting and finding Bartsch for an open three at the top of the key.

Every move Harris and his staff made in the offseason was done with all of that in mind, strengthening what's already there, the Lady Griz bringing in six newcomers, one freshman and five transfers.

"We've recruited a roster that will make people pay if (the three) is the shot you think you're going to give us," said Harris. "As defenses move out, it gives us more and more opportunities to attack the hoop and score at the rim."

Joining Montana via the transfer portal are senior Maggie Hutka (Colorado Christian), juniors Kennedy Gillette (College of Southern Idaho) and Zoey Washington (St. Thomas), sophomore Jocelyn Land (Butler) and redshirt freshman Ava Cossette (South Dakota).

If there was a game today? "I think you'd see Jocelyn have a big role. I think Kennedy would have a big role. I think Maggie would as well because of her physicality and how hard she competes," said Harris.

"Maggie is a tough, physical kid, someone you don't want to play against on a day-to-day basis, which is someone I like to put on the floor. If people hate playing against them, we love having them out there."

Then there is the lone freshman, Rae Ehrman, who, well, you'll just have to wait and see this one for yourself. "She has this unique gift," said Harris. "Not a lot of people can shoot the basketball the way she does. She could have a really big role as a newcomer."

Montana returns five letter-winners – senior Alex Pirog, redshirt junior Draya Wacker, juniors Adria Lincoln and Aby Shubert, and redshirt sophomore Macy Donarski. Senior Lauren Dick and sophomore Chloe Larsen also return.

It's those returning players who were so instrumental in attracting the transfers, each of whom has her own story for why she departed her previous school and what she was looking for in her next one.

"A big thing about our program and the Lady Griz in general is a legacy that is built on fighting for and loving each other," said Konig. "We will do anything anybody needs.

"It's important to have that support in a complicated time in your life, when you're going to college, experiencing new things, alone for the first time. You want people who love and support you, who will allow you to make mistakes, then challenge you to be better.

"I think that's what a lot of people want when they go to college and are joining a team. I think we kind of nailed it on that. When transfers come, they find a team they want to fight for. That builds a really strong connection with everyone."

It's now October and the Lady Griz are operating full speed ahead but still mostly off the radar, gladly waiting their turn as Montana's fall sports go about dominating the weekly news cycle and taking the spotlight. Those Grizzlies have earned it.

But soon enough the calendar will flip to November, Seattle Pacific will roll into town and the season will be under way, Montana's next five opponents going by the names of Oregon, Washington, South Dakota State, BYU and Utah, four of those five coming off NCAA tournament seasons.

"Ultimately I want to be better on January 1 than we are on November 1. How do you do that other than play against really good people and figure out who you are and what you're good at and what you're not good at," said Harris.

"They are difficult games but we'll be just naïve enough to plan on winning every single one of them."

They now hold in their hands, thanks to the success of March and leaders who want that to become the new norm, blueprints for how to go about that.

They received all the feedback they needed down in Boise, when some former players caught up to them and said, Hey, that's how we used to play! And we all know how that worked out most of the time.

"I hope that's what people see, a team that is going to scrap and take the fight right to their opponents from the very start, in a way that people say, oh, that's new," said Harris.

"Those early games will be great opportunities for our kids to show up and take the fight right to their front door and let them know we're here to compete and here to win. We want to play those types of games every year because it will help us become the best version of the team we can be."

Konig, on a smaller scale, has become the best version of the player she can be, one who endured the challenges that last season brought, came out stronger, now wants to put her final imprint on this team and this program.

"I have never been one to believe in miracles, but I do believe in hard work, effort and sticking with things," she said. "I want to leave Montana with the confidence that I encouraged somebody else to have those values.

"You don't have to be the one scoring all the points or has the most amazing stats every single game. But you do have to support your teammates, you have to work hard, even when you don't want to, the mentality that it's not just about you. That's the culture I'd be happy leaving Montana with.

"And, of course, I want to win a championship. Those would be the two main goals."

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Dani Bartsch

MJ Bruno

Ava Cossette

Lauren Dick

Macy Donarski

Rae Ehrman

Kennedy Gillette

Maggie Hutka

Mack Konig

Jocelyn Land

Chloe Larsen

Adria Lincoln

Tyler McCliment-Call

Alex Pirog

Aby Shubert

Draya Wacker

Avery Waddington

Zoey Washington

Izabella Zingaro

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