Lady Griz Orientation :: Jocelyn Land

This story is just begging to start with the mom.

Growing up in Bothell, Washington, she was a tall one, the usual sports pulling at her because of it, volleyball and basketball, the ones where height is an advantage, the latter played on a girl's feet, the other … excuse me?

"I didn't like volleyball. The first time the ball fell in front of me, the coach said, you have to dive on the floor for that," recalls Sara Land. "I was like, nope, I'm out. So basketball it was. Pretty simple."

She was good. And in demand. Montana wanted her. Had the then Sara Raynor on campus for an official visit, though she eventually chose San Francisco, where she scored six points over six games as a freshman in 1996-97 before escaping to home after one semester.

"One of the coaches I'd classify as fairly verbally abusive. It was back in the day when more things were allowed than they are now," she says. "I called home and said, I can't do this. There were five of us in our class and all but one of us left.

"That's why I accompanied Jocelyn on all her recruiting visits, just to try to watch for red flags."

Ah, Jocelyn, the protagonist of this article, that sweet-shooting playmaker who is one month into her Lady Griz career, but we need to hold her off to the side, over in the wings for now. The stage needs a little more setting.

She went back to the Pacific Northwest, Sara did, after the San Francisco experiment didn't work out, enrolled at Washington, same as Jeff Land, high school sweethearts together again, still together all these years later.

He put himself through college working for Home Depot, his entry into the hardware tool industry, one that has taken the family from Washington to California to Vermont and finally to Minnesota, four kids arriving over the years, Judah, Jocelyn, Gabriella and Natalya.

There is something to be said for stability, of going from birth to college in one house, on the same street, surrounded for years by the same group of friends, the comfort level in what's familiar growing by each passing year.

And there is something to be said for the Land lifestyle, going from place to place, Jeff moving from job to job, company to company, now the Senior Vice President of Merchandising for Northern Tool + Equipment in Minnesota. It brings kids a resiliency, an adaptability, an adventurer's spirit.

Judah? You can find him in Mississippi, Clinton to be more specific, going into his senior year at Mississippi College, the 6-foot-9 forward coming off his best season yet, averaging 7.5 points on nearly 70 percent shooting and 6.6 rebounds. He loves the South. Who knew?

Jocelyn? She started at Butler, the school outside Indianapolis, spent one season with the Bulldogs before decamping for Montana, not a thought given by either one of them to the idea that, hey, that's kind of far from home.

What they've learned over the years is that home is the people, not the house or the location. And you can always stay tethered to those you hold most dear, no matter the distance.

"That was one of the benefits of moving. It doesn't have to be permanent. You don't have to live there the rest of your life. That's kind of the attitude we had with both of them," Sara says. "Try it, you might like it. And if you don't, that's okay.

"They never would have had that attitude if they had lived in one place their entire life. It would have been scary to move. You don't want to leave everything you've ever known. They are brave because of it."

Okay, let's bring Jocelyn front and center, now that everything is set, though this could have been a story about her prowess as a swimmer had the family's stay in California, near Calabasas, a few miles inland from the Malibu coast, lasted longer. It didn't matter the sport. The kid just had it.

"She's always been my kid, out of all of them, who was good at any sport she tried," says Sara. "She was very athletic and very coordinated, ever since she was really young."

Jocelyn figures it was maybe the seventh grade when she started beating her dad on the basketball court, the winner of their one-on-one games taking possession of the WWE-style wrestling belt, wearing it around the family home to lord her dominance.

She became a shooter through the drip-drip-drip method, a little bit each day, form shooting her way to a full pot of excellence, a routine as simple as 150 per day adding up to more than 1,000 per week, the muscle memory getting stronger by the outing.

"My parents would always tell me, the small things matter," she says. "Small things add up to a lot. Them ingraining that in my brain early helped."

But she wouldn't be able to truly separate herself just as a shooter. Shooters are all over the place. Not a dime a dozen, maybe a dollar a dozen. No, she would become a baller, that rare player, the arrival of COVID and the family's home in Vermont combining to put her on a path to Division I basketball.

"She was always good but she wasn't necessarily polished," says Sara. "We knew she was going to be good when COVID hit." It was late winter in Vermont, schools were shut down and locked tight. Instead of retreating to something inside, something electronic, Land put on her gloves and headed outside.

"Rather than be on her phone or waste time, she doubled down and spent more time outside shooting. That's when the dedication kicked in. That's when Jeff and I knew this kid could be really good," says Sara.

She could already shoot it, so she maintained that strength while also turning a lens on her weaknesses, because a shooter evolves into a baller only if she has a well-rounded game. She'd pack her gloves with hand-warmers, go out, work, come back inside to warm up, then go back out again, all self-prompted.

"Her left hand? I'm going to fix that. Her ball-handling? I'm going to fix that," says her mom. "She was so determined and became really driven. She wasn't doing fancy or flashy stuff. To be honest, a lot of it was boring. That's when we knew."

It wouldn't take long for a larger audience to know as well, after the family moved to Chanhassen, Minnesota, Land going from Vermont outpost to one of the nation's hotbeds for prep girls' basketball. "Crazy how much talent there is. There are so many kids who are so good," Land says.

One of those players was Aaliyah Crump, who will be going into her freshman season at Texas this fall, who back then was a hotshot for Minnetonka High, which was 11-0 that January day, ranked second in Minnesota, ranked nationally as well.

It was Land's first season at Holy Family, her sophomore year, and the MLK Day Girls' Basketball Showcase had Holy Family going up against Minnetonka and Crump. Holy Family won 79-68 in overtime, Land showing off her complete game with 33 points and 20 rebounds.

Hey, Minnesota: I'm here.

Someone in the gym that Monday: Nick Storm, co-founder and co-director of Minnesota Fury, a travel-ball team that had 15 of its former members playing in this past spring's NCAA tournament. It's a program that welcomes the best of the best with open arms. And they wanted Jocelyn Land.

She had joined the Minnesota Metro Stars when the family first moved to Minnesota, after her freshman year. She couldn't say no to Fury. "I knew if I wanted a chance, I had to switch," says Land. "It was the best choice of my life."

Sara adds, "That's what really kicked everything off. That's what got the ball rolling. Fury made her better because she was playing against top-tier kids at every practice, then playing against some of the best kids in the country on the circuit and at the tournaments. It opened up a lot of doors."

She went from unknown to a high-priority target for college recruiters seemingly overnight, Land committing to Butler in September of her junior year, partly because she thought that's what she wanted, partly to get this whole recruiting business done and over with.

"It was super overwhelming for me, so I kind of wanted to be done. I was 15, couldn't even drive yet, and I was talking to college coaches," she says. "I thought it was a good fit and didn't want to lose the offer. It was everything I wanted at the time."

When Sara went through the same thing nearly three decades earlier, it was a different era, recruiting done more on a regional basis than national, but the stresses were still there.

Back then, each state had two or three travel-ball teams, those teams going to a few showcase events, like the End of the Trail in Oregon City, where the Lady Griz coaches likely would have seen her in the mid-90s and decide to go after her.

"I watched her go through the process and thought, this hasn't gotten any easier," says Sara. "You still don't know who's telling the truth."

She could have had a do-over after departing San Francisco, but transferring came at a cost, of sitting out a season, the penalty for not getting it right the first time. Her daughter, should she need it, would have an easier way of fixing a decision she later wanted to reverse.

"The transfer portal is a big difference," Sara says. "I knew if something went wrong, she could go somewhere else. We told her, we hope this is for all four years, but if it's not, you're going to be okay. It doesn't mean the dream is over."

She knew by Thanksgiving, just months into her freshman season at Butler, that she needed to make a change. Sara calls it the "perfect storm" of factors that landed hard on her daughter at the same time, that had her no longer wanting to play basketball.

The size of the school, for starters, was too small for her liking. Not helping was being told that parts of the city outside the campus borders were unsafe after dark. And all that work to become an all-around baller seemed to be for naught. She was going to be highlighted as a spot-up shooter.

"She struggled on every front," says Sara, who teamed up with Jeff to talk their daughter through the hard times, to convince her to stick with it through the end of the season.

Land's season stats don't jump off the page, but after the team's loss to St. John's in the first round of the Big East tournament and before the Bulldogs opened play in the WNIT, a number of players headed for the transfer portal, giving Land her best minutes of the season against UIC and Purdue Fort Wayne.

Land put up 24 points in the two games, shooting 10 for 21, playing a season-high 24 minutes against UIC, then topping that by going 28 minutes against Purdue Fort Wayne. It wasn't until she had stuck to her commitment to the program and played out the full season that she entered the portal.

"I knew pretty early I wanted to be out," she says. "I was going to finish out the season. I felt I owed it to the coaches who recruited me and my teammates, but I knew early in the year I wanted to leave. It wasn't a good fit."

Storm, who was Land's coach at Minnesota Fury, is the father of six and carries that role into his work, the girls in his program becoming like extended family. He does what he does because he wants the best for his former players once they go on to bigger and hopefully better things.

When it doesn't work out, he takes it personally. "His job is not over once they go somewhere. He mentors them all the way through," says Sara. "They are his kids. He was concerned because he knew this wasn't Jocelyn. We were concerned as well."

She knows the exact moment her name first showed up in the transfer portal. The phone calls and text messages just five minutes in had her phone red-lining. She was still the same player and coaches knew it, but no one in the family was thrilled to be going through the recruiting process all over again.

"She didn't know exactly what she wanted but she knew what she didn't want," says Sara. "We relied on Nick a little bit. You know our kid really, really well. You also know these coaches in a different way than we do. We'll almost go with your recommendation. Who do you think would be the best fit?

"Right away he was like, if Nate gets the job at Montana, she needs to go to Montana. There won't be a better fit for her."

But Nate Harris couldn't do anything until he got the job, which he did in mid-March after leading the Lady Griz in an interim role over the final two months of the season.

Land didn't show up blind. She knew Aby Shubert, former Fury player, had spent one less-than-desirable season at a Big East school before transferring to Montana, knew she loved it. Land watched for Lady Griz players to pop up in the transfer portal, saw only one and considered that another positive.

There must be a pretty good reason, in this era of mass comings and goings in the hectic weeks of late-March and April, that so many Lady Griz were staying put. They liked where they were. And why mess with happy?

"I really wanted a coaching staff that would care for me as a person, so I looked more into the coaching staff and how they treated their players," Land says. "It shows in the kids who wanted to stay.

"I could tell how the players interacted with the coaches that they had a good relationship. It looked like the players enjoyed basketball. That's really all I wanted, to like the sport again. (Last season) I wanted to quit. I didn't want to play anymore."

A visit was arranged, the Lands going from Minnesota to Montana, hoping to make it right, make their daughter whole, to bring the true Jocelyn Land back to the surface after it felt like she had been buried.

"You could almost see the stress melt off of her as the visit went on," says Sara. "It was the people. She could relate to them. She was laughing with them. We watched her be herself again. That's how we knew this was the right fit. There was no hesitancy on her part. It was an easy choice."

She is a shooter, sure, but she is so much more than that. She plays a complete game, one Harris happily welcomes to his first full-season team.

"She's super versatile, but it's her ability to shoot it is what separates her. She has a chance to be a really, really good player in this league," Harris says. "I think she is someone who can have a big role for us."

It can be tough to find an escape at a school in an urban setting, just roads and sidewalks and parking lots and more and more buildings in every direction, the hardness of the environment just deflecting a girls' worries and concerns right back at her, the vastness of it all making her feel smaller by the day.

Then she lands at Montana and instead of warnings to stay away from neighborhoods right outside of campus, she turns and sees life-affirming mountains, with a river running through the heart of her new home.

"She's much happier at Montana. She's been on that river like daily. She's out there constantly," says Sara. "She walks outside and says, oh, it's mountains. Just that is a massive improvement." Home. Home at last.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Jocelyn Land

Aby Shubert

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