Lady Griz Orientation :: Kate Holmquist

There will come a time early in the season, maybe in the opener, certainly by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, when you see Kate Holmquist play and you'll say to yourself or to the people you're with: that might be one of the best point guards I've ever seen.

That's a lot of weight to put on a freshman's shoulders, but it won't be hyperbole on your part. And she can handle it, this daughter of two standout athletes, Rob's even-keeled nature combining with Jaime's fieriness to bring to the world a point guard who is both hyper-competitive and always in control.

Stacie Johnson, who would coach Holmquist for four seasons at Maple Grove High in Minnesota, first saw the point guard when Holmquist was an eighth grader. A former college point guard herself, Johnson didn't need long to realize what she was seeing on the court in front of her.

"It was fun to see a natural point guard who was so knowledgeable and so young and had this basketball IQ that was unbelievable for a kid her age," Johnson said this week.

Johnson then had a front-row seat for the last four years as Holmquist became one of the top players in Minnesota, which is saying something. In a state that annually fills college rosters nationwide with elite talent, Holmquist this past spring was one of six finalists for the Minnesota Miss Basketball award.

She played off the ball early in her high school career, bumped there by Jordan Ode, now playing at Georgia Tech, then later took the reins of the Crimson, helping Maple Grove to fourth-, second- and fourth-place finishes at the Minnesota Class AAAA state tournament.

"To see her grow and mature in the four years I was able to be with her was pretty remarkable. Her basketball IQ is some of the best of the best. She plays it, she sees it, she understands it," said Johnson, who watched Holmquist hit a school-record 10 3-pointers as a sophomore against Armstrong High.

"She's one of the best 3-point shooters I've ever coached. She can get it stationary, she can get it off the dribble. She can create for herself and score at three levels, and that's unique for a high school player."

That's a fine way to introduce you to Kate Holmquist, but that's 30,000-foot-view stuff. To get to the true story, the real goods, we'll need to descend, then descend some more, angling away from the Twin Cities and heading southwest to the small, 10-block by seven-block town of Jeffers, Minnesota.

We need to get to the roots of this story, but there are none to be found, the three Pudenz girls having dribbled them into oblivion on the court their dad, Alan, built for them, complete with painted lines and a pair of stadium lights so the sisters could go until someone finally had enough and called the police.

Could you blame them (the neighbors, not the girls)? It was 1 a.m. and the games were still going on and people had to get to work in the morning. It was basketball as life, as joy, as everything. Nothing else mattered.

That was the environment Gene Roebuck, the hall of fame coach at North Dakota, stepped into, in Jeffers to do a home visit, trying to convince the oldest of the three girls, Tracey, that she should come play college basketball in Grand Forks for the then Fighting Sioux.

His visit was made well over three decades ago but he can still remember what he came across. "Little did I know there were two younger ones in the household," he said, Tiffany and Jaime probably outside on the court, unwilling to stop for any visitor, even the one who would be their college coach as well.

And probably interrupting the visit. Out of bounds! Was not! Was too! "We'd get mad at each other and wouldn't finish the game," Jaime told ESPN in 2000 of her battles with Tiffany. "The competitiveness between us (was) too high."

It was one of those only-in-a-small-town stories, how Gary Gillis built a dynasty, leading Storden-Jeffers to 53 straight wins while Tracey was playing, to a Minnesota state title that was bookended by a pair of runner-up finishes.

Every girl in the area wanted to be a Lady Chief, every younger sister wanted to be like her older sister. Or sisters.

"They are the reason I played. Girls basketball was the thing. I was always in the gym with them, always at their games. When you're the youngest kid, you're dragged everywhere. I didn't mind," Jaime says.

Tracey committed to Roebuck, as Tiffany and Jaime later would as well, starting a decade of dominance for North Dakota from 1990 to 2000. In 10 years with at least one Pudenz on his roster, Roebuck's teams would go 265-38.

"I don't know of any … situation in college athletics that can compare to what those three … accomplished at UND," Roebuck said in 2000 in an interview with ESPN.

If Division I women's college basketball at the time had the Tennessee-Connecticut rivalry, Division II in the 1990s had North Dakota and North Dakota State, the latter having the upper hand for the first half of the decade, winning national championships in 1991, '93, '94, '95 and '96.

While first Tracey and then Tiffany tried to knock the Bison off their pedestal, Jaime was becoming arguably the best of them all, her 879 assists setting a new Minnesota state high school record, her resume popping with a single-game quadruple-double: 26 points, 10 rebounds, 10 assists, 11 steals.

When Tiffany was a sophomore at North Dakota, in 1995-96, and Jaime was a senior in high school, North Dakota went 26-6, half of those losses coming against North Dakota State, the last in the North Central Region title game in Fargo.

North Dakota was probably the second-best team in the country, as it was for a lot of those NDSU championship years, but it was its rival that had no trouble in the Elite Eight, once again winning the national title, 104-78 over Shippensburg.

The dynamic – and NDSU's dynasty – was starting to weigh on the family. After the loss in 1996, "I was crying and my mom was crying," Tracey said in 2000 to ESPN. "Jaime came up and said, 'Don't worry, we're going to win it all next year.'"

She could have had her pick of almost any school in the Midwest, but Jaime Pudenz wasn't going to back away from this fight, not when it came with standing-room-only crowds of 7,000 at the venerable Hyslop Sports Center and basketball that was the equivalent of mid-major Division I.

"I'd been around UND basketball for a long time, so my mind had been made up for a long time," she said. "You'd go to games and the place would be packed. It was super fun. I don't think anything could have changed my mind. I think everyone knew where I was going."

In 1996-97, when Tiffany was a junior and Jaime a freshman, North Dakota took an unbeaten record into Fargo and lost by 17 to North Dakota State. In the final game of the regular season, the Bison won 64-61 in Grand Forks when Jaime missed three free throws in the closing moments.

"Totally devastating. Growing up a UND fan, the only thing I wanted to do was beat NDSU," she said.

Nine days later, they would meet again in Fargo in the region championship that once again was the de facto national championship game, with the winner set to host the Elite Eight and certainly cruise to the title, what would be UND's first or NDSU's sixth overall and fifth straight.

North Dakota led at the half but North Dakota State pulled away in the second, building a 10-point lead with six minutes left. During a UND timeout, a premature announcement letting Bison fans know when tickets to the Elite Eight would go on sale was heard by everyone in North Dakota's huddle.

"We all heard it," says Jaime, who then proceeded to play Robin to Tiffany's Batman. In the most hostile of territories and with a weighty history on its back, North Dakota closed the game on an improbable 19-2 run. Legendary stuff, program-changing. The Bison had been pushed off the mountaintop.

Tiffany finished with 32 points and Jaime made it right by hitting two clutch free throws, more than making up for those missed 10 days prior.

Hosting the Elite Eight at Hyslop, North Dakota won its final three games by a combined 73 points to claim its first national championship. The Fighting Sioux went 62-2 over the next two years, winning two more national championships.

The three Pudenz sisters combined for seven all-conference awards, for 4,325 points, for 1,535 assists. Tiffany was an all-American as a senior and inducted into UND's Hall of Fame in 2010. Jaime, a three-time national champion, was an all-American as a junior and induced into UND's Hall of Fame in 2016.

Jaime's teams would go 115-11. Eight of those 11 losses came by six points or fewer. "She was so easy to coach. Everything was about the team," says Roebuck, who retired after the 2011-12 season and 628 wins. "Nothing was about her. That was the example she set for younger players coming through.

"She had that fire in her belly and had the emotion. Her temperament came through when competing."

It was a magical time to be an athlete on UND's campus. A month after North Dakota won the 1997 national championship, the UND hockey team did as well. Women's basketball won in 1998 and '99, hockey added another in 2000.

And over at Memorial Stadium, the North Dakota football team, with Robbie Holmquist on the roster, was laying the foundation for what would be a Division II national championship of its own in 2001. He was a team captain his final season in 2000.

"It was a really good time to be at UND. It was really fun," said Jaime, who was living in the dorms when her RA was dating a football player who happened to be friends with Robbie, who began hanging around until, well, here we are.

And if she ever had children, if she ever had children who played sports, if she ever had children who played sports well enough to do it at the college level, that's what Jaime wanted for them, if not the national championships then at least the overall environment of a sports-mad college town.

The bridge from then to Kate Holmquist at Montana today was in motion. "Kate is so serious and driven that you have to assume something is causing that," says Lady Griz coach Nate Harris. "That generally doesn't happen by accident. You can tell her parents, especially her mom, achieved at a high level.

"She's a very serious one, a very driven one. If she's going to work, she's going to work because she has such great examples at home."

Rob wanted to be in law enforcement, preferably at the federal level, applied for the Secret Service, while Jaime finished off her elementary education degree by student-teaching in Grand Forks.

He got a job, so the newlyweds packed up and moved to Washington D.C., hardly seeing each other as Jaime taught, before she returned to the Midwest after Tiffany was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease.

She would eventually return to D.C. and put teaching to the side, joining the Secret Service herself. "He was gone all the time. Now we can be gone together. Maybe I'll see you more if I do the same thing," Jamie said.

They would return to the Midwest, a minute away from Tracey and her family in Sioux Falls, 100 miles from Jeffers, then relocate to the Twin Cities, she today working for U.S. Bank, he in executive security for Target. Along the way, Kate arrived, then, two years later, Drew.

The background is certainly all instructive but this is still a story about Kate Holmquist and basketball. "I would coach her and things came super easy and natural for her," says Jaime. "Skills stuff just clicked for her. Show her something once and she was able to do it."

For years they were just mom and dad. It wasn't until 2016, when the family returned to Grand Forks for Jaime's induction into the UND Letterwinners Association Hall of Fame, that Kate began to realize that her mom had been a pretty big deal.

Wait, she is the program's all-time leader in both assists and steals? And she scored 1,614 points? What's that? She one time scored 44 points at South Dakota State in a road win while hitting nine 3-pointers? My mom? MY MOM!

"All of our family was there. It was pretty cool. All her teammates were coming up and talking to us. That's when it started to click," says Kate.

Everything was an option for the two kids growing up, as long as it didn't involve ice skates for Kate, a revelation that begged for a follow-up question that wasn't asked, and she gave club soccer a go, club volleyball through her freshman season at Maple Grove, but nothing was like basketball.

But that had to be her, all her. "She kept steering toward basketball. I kept telling her, you don't have to do this. I always gave her an out because I wanted her to find her own way," says Jaime.

They both admit to some headbutting over the years, not a surprise given their similar wiring. "Early on I was pretty hard on her. Later I backed off. It got to be too much pressure and she didn't need that. It became more watching and supporting her."

Both paths taken had their advantages. Because Storden-Jeffers had an enrollment of around 80 at the time, Jaime began playing varsity as a seventh grader and was starting by the time she was in eighth grade. She already had nearly 600 career points by the end of her freshman year.

Kate? Well, she grew up in basketball heaven, the Twin Cities. Want to play on one of the best teams in the Nike Girls EYBL? North Tartan is the spot for you. Want to play on one of the best teams in the Under Armour circuit? Head over to Minnesota Fury.

She started in fourth grade at North Tartan, alongside Maddyn Greenway, who was named Miss Minnesota Basketball in the spring and is off to Kentucky as one of the nation's most sought-after recruits. To get more time at the point, Holmquist would eventually move to Fury.

Johnson, Holmquist's assistant coach at Maple Grove, grew up playing in Hutchinson, in Lindsay Whalen's wake, then played collegiately at MSU Mankato from 2002 to '06. She rolled right into an assistant job at Minnetonka High before four years ago moving to Maple Grove.

Hardly matters where you go, the girls' basketball is strong. "It's been fun for me to see the game evolve so much and so quickly," she says. "To be part of it at such a high level really fills me up. To see how it's evolved has been really run to watch."

When Holmquist was a junior at Maple Grove, the entire starting five was made up of players who would go on to play Division I college basketball. And Hopkins still was better in the state championship game. They had five starters on their way to Power 4 schools.

"It's crazy," said Jaime. "My son has two kids on his high school team who are going to Wisconsin. There is a ton of talent, but then you have to wait your turn. Or do you want to be at a smaller school where you can play earlier?"

Given her parents' experiences and given Minnesota Fury's history of producing Division I-ready players, the arrival of the recruiting process was more expected than a surprise. Her first call came from South Dakota, her first offer from, of course, North Dakota.

"It was like, wow, the opportunity is right there. All I have to do is say yes. That was pretty exciting," she said.

She was open to anything, anywhere. When she and her dad returned from a visit to Montana, her mom knew something had happened, something had clicked. "She came back and I could tell she liked it," said Jaime. "Really? Montana?"

Then Jaime came on the fall visit a couple months later, when Kate committed. "I went on her second visit. Okay, I totally get it. This is really nice. If this is where you want to go, we'll make it work."

She committed in November 2024. Two months later, her world got shaken by the announcement that Montana's now former coach was taking personal time off, right in the heart of the season. Harris was appointed acting head coach and immediately reached out to the Holmquists.

All he could tell them that he was here and that he hoped to be here beyond the end of the season, but he couldn't make any promises. Even his own life was now full of uncertainty beyond the next day on the calendar.

"It was very unsettling," says Jaime. "She had made her decision and was super excited about it, but she hadn't signed yet, only verbally committed. If they brought a new coach in at the end of the season, are they going to want Kate?

"Her biggest thing was she didn't want to go through the recruiting process again. That was her biggest thing. She was done with that. When Nate told us, she went into her room and didn't come out all night. It was just a shock. She really wanted to go to Montana, so we waited to see."

In March 2025, Harris, after leading the Lady Griz to a run to the Big Sky Conference championship game, was named head coach.

With that stressor out of the way, Holmquist was able to focus on her senior year of high school and what she does best, which is what her mom did best: play point guard.

"I've never tried another position," she says. "My mom had a lot of influence. It's just in my blood a little bit. She's filled all the roles for me. It's been really nice to have her."

Jaime was a crowd favorite at Hyslop, not just because of the winning but because of how she played. She was all heart and brought UND's fans along for the ride with her constant displays of emotion. She hid nothing.

That's one of the differences between mother and daughter. "Kate is super competitive but she is not super emotional. If she shows emotion, you know she is really excited. She is very calm. You won't know if she's up or down a majority of the time.

"She's a better shooter, a better ball-handler. But we've got similarities. Pass-first is how I taught her. Get the ball in people's hands."

Life's seasons are passing by and now the mom's influence comes from a distance for the first time, since Kate Holmquist moved to Missoula in June for most of the summer. It went from sitting down and talking it over in person to call me if you need me.

"I told her, you're going to get there and feel overwhelmed," Jaime says. "It's a lot. The speed is faster, it's physical, it's strong. Then you've got classes and weights. All those things are going to pile on top of you. That's my role now, to help her navigate it best she can."

She's got another week back home, time spent between the family home in Maple Grove and the cabin on Lake Geneva (the Minnesota version, not the European one), then she'll be back for the real thing.

By the time the fall semester is over and a short Christmas break arrives, she'll have played in enough college games that you'll be thinking to yourself: that might be one of the best point guards I've ever seen.

"She could have a highly decorated career here," said Harris. "She has all the skills and intangibles to be really successful. She is super competitive, super quick and is gifted offensively. She'll handle the ball a bunch for us and make a ton of decisions, but she's always done that.

"She had a great summer. She had stretches where she's looked like she's one of our five best players for sure. She is unbelievable in drills because she is so skilled. She has all the footwork, all the skills in the world. The process now will be how that translates into live game play."

There is one other intangible Holmquist possesses, something Johnson, her coach at Maple Grove, has seen become more and more rare as youth players are asked to devote more and more time to the business of basketball, the training, the traveling. When the fun is removed, so is the joy.

"In my years of coaching, I've seen a growing lack of kids who just love the game. Their passion falls away," she says. "You don't find a lot of kids who just love the game of basketball anymore. Kate just loves the game."

It's like she, too, was on that court in Jeffers, when all that mattered was the game, the competition, the love of it all, basketball as life. In a way she was. Her mom has made sure of it.

University of Montana Athletics

Related News

Players Mentioned

Kate Holmquist

Related Videos