Like an oil spill, history seeps into everything surrounding the Montana Lady Grizzlies. It’s impossible to avoid the echoes of the past at Dahlberg Arena, where Robin Selvig won so many conference championship trophies – 22 regular-season and 21 tournament – over 38 years that it’s a shock to walk through the halls without seeing them littering the floors.
This year, Montana honored the legendary coach late in the season by naming the floor at Dahlberg after him in a weekend of ceremony that included 60-plus Lady Griz alumni lining up on the court to pay homage.
“I don’t know that there’s many schools in the nation that have an alumni network like the Lady Griz do,” senior forward Carmen Gfeller said. “When you come into Dahlberg to celebrate a coach who obviously has banners hung and is a legend, and you have 300-plus women of all ages, all walks of life there to support him, it’s so cool.”
But the only thing stronger than memory is the passage of time, and with each year, the threads connecting the program to that past become more and more frayed. It’s now been eight years since the Lady Griz won a Big Sky trophy, when Selvig’s penultimate team swept the regular season and tournament in 2014-15.
Brian Holsinger, the third head coach to take the reins at Montana since Selvig’s retirement, has elevated the importance of Montana’s history under Selvig all season, even as he tries to bring the program into a new era.
“One of the main reasons I wanted to come here was because it’s a unique history,” Holsinger said. “It’s just different. You have a Hall of Fame coach who created something so unique and special with these fans and with the program. That’s why I’ve worked really hard to stay connected with that because it just doesn’t happen everywhere.”
With each year that passes since Selvig retired after an unbelievable 865 victories, though, that legacy gets farther and farther away. Lady Griz who played under Selvig talk about the chain, built stronger by each successive class of players, that stretches all the way back to the beginning, wrapping anyone who touched the program into a family. As the Lady Griz struggled to settle on a succession plan after Selvig, going from his former star Shannon Schweyen to a one-year bridge with Mike Petrino to an outsider in Holsinger, those connections became harder to make. Links in the chain started disappearing.
There are no players left in the program who intersected with anyone who played on the 2014-15 championship team, and only two who played with anyone who was on the team in 2015-16, Selvig’s final year coaching.
And given Sammy Fatkin’s jagged career trajectory – starting at Arizona only to transfer to Montana as a sophomore, sitting out the entire 2020-21 season only to come back to the team for her final two years of eligibility – the one player who now carries that legacy on her shoulders, the Lady Griz’s strongest link back to the past, is Gfeller, the fifth-year senior from Colfax, Washington.
“I just really want to reiterate how much gratitude I have for this university and the Lady Griz basketball program. I’m just so appreciative of the hard things that I’ve been through, and like I said, I’ve come out with really, really great friendships and just learned so much about myself,” Gfeller said. “I wouldn’t want to go through challenges without having Montana across my chest, and I’m just really proud to be a Lady Griz.”
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For someone who’s been the most stable thing about the last era of Lady Griz basketball, it’s ironic that Gfeller very nearly didn’t play hoops in college at all.
She was originally a volleyball player and a good enough one, even as a freshman, to convince Colfax’s legendary volleyball coach, Sue Doering, to push off her retirement for four years.
“One of the things I prayed about was when I was going to leave coaching,” Doering said. “I had prayed, OK, Lord, if you want me to stay, then Carmen is going to come up to me and say, Coach, I really want to play volleyball in college and if she does that, then I would stay until she graduates. … Anyway, the next day as I was walking across the gym, Carmen comes up and goes, Coach, I’m so excited. I think I really want to play volleyball in college.”
With Gfeller growing to 6-foot-1 with plenty of athleticism, Doering has plenty of other stories about her volleyball career, including the time she had 37 kills in the state championship game as a freshman. In a small town like Colfax, though, great athletes play every sport (in addition to volleyball and basketball, Gfeller made it to the state finals in the 100 hurdles as a senior).
“Super athletic, you know, just like any coach would wish for,” said Doering, who won 13 state titles in 29 years at Colfax. “Coachable, positive, hard worker, good leader. She came to practice every day with a great attitude.”
Gfeller had a connection to basketball and to Montana though her brother, Brandon, who scored 756 points over a four-year Griz career and was a four-time academic all-Big Sky selection and won the Grizzly Cup (“given to an overall student-athlete who represents the Grizzlies in class, the community and competition”) as a senior.
After winning state titles in both volleyball and basketball as a senior, Carmen followed in his footsteps, turning down offers to walk on to at least one Pac-12 school, and becoming the one who got away for at least one other Big Sky coach.
“I’ve loved Carmen’s game since the beginning,” Idaho coach Jon Newlee said. “I’m not very smart. I didn’t do a very good job of recruiting her out of high school, as local as she was. She came out at the same time as Beyonce (Bea) did and I thought we only needed that at one spot.”
It took a couple years to see the source of Newlee’s regret. After playing in 27 games as a freshman (when she played with Jace Henderson and McKenzie Johnston, who were both on Selvig’s final team), Gfeller redshirted her sophomore year.
The next year, in 2020-21, three things happened. First, Petrino, who’d been an assistant for the prior four years, took over for Schweyen as the head coach, Montana’s second coaching change in four years after not going through one for the prior 38. The Lady Griz lost their last player who’d played under Selvig when Johnston exhausted her eligibility (although the connections remained – Henderson and Jordan Sullivan were both assistant coaches). And Gfeller emerged from her redshirt season a completely different player, averaging 14.3 points per game, sixth in the conference, on 53/35/88 shooting splits, plus 5.4 rebounds.
That’s the player she’s been since – a lethally efficient three-level scorer who’s equally as comfortable behind the 3-point line as she is underneath the basket.
She can relocate anywhere on the 3-point line after setting a screen, hopping into her shot and holding her high follow-through, even resetting her feet if needed for a stepback or to avoid a contest. She’s hitting 36.7% of her 3s for her career, and 39.2% after her freshman year.
That threat scrambles defenses and opens up her interior game off the roll. When she catches at the high post, she shows defenders just enough of the ball on a pump fake to get them off-balance and burrow into the lane, putting her shoulder into opponents to open up tough finishes through contact at the rim with either hand. She’s also shot over 80% from the free-throw line each of the last three years.
“I think she’s really expanded her game,” Newlee said. “She shoots the 3, she’s a tough kid inside, can really defend, tough physical rebounder, plays hard. … I think she’s a great player and has really done a great job of making herself great through the years.”
As a redshirt junior last year, Gfeller carried the Lady Griz to the best win of Holsinger’s career so far, scoring 34 points on 11 of 16 shooting to lead Montana to a shocking 71-57 win over a Montana State team that went to the NCAA Tournament. It was the second-most points ever scored by a Lady Griz player against Montana State, and she did it to snap a seven-game losing streak in a rivalry that Selvig once dominated against the Bobcats.
“She’s just so skilled,” Holsinger said. “Somebody has taught her along the way how to use her pivots, how to use fakes, and then she just has a really, really nice shot.”
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As her game developed on the court, Gfeller has become the bridge between Montana’s past and future. She’s the first Lady Griz star to play her full career post-Selvig – and maybe the last to have any connections to that era.
That’s never been more apparent than in this season of transition. Besides Fatkin and Gfeller, the only other upperclassmen on the roster are Gina Marxen, who was a multiple-time all-conference point guard running Idaho’s full-sprint offense before taking a year off and then transferring to Montana, and Katerina Tsineke, a pesky defensive guard from Greece who transferred over from East Carolina before Holsinger’s first year.
All year, Holsinger has been trying to reconcile those four with the timeline of the talented youngsters he’s brought in.
Freshman point guard Mack Konig, a top-100 national recruit out of Ontario, has increasingly pushed Marxen – again, a multiple-time all-conference string-puller – off the ball and into a spot-up only role. Konig won the conference’s Freshman of the Year award.
Another rookie, Libby Stump, plays so well at times that letting her go iso looks like Montana’s best offense – and other times threatens to shoot the Lady Griz out of games.
Helena’s Dani Bartsch, now a sophomore, has matured from a wildly athletic string bean into a wildly athletic string bean who’s a candidate for Defensive Player of the Year and single-handedly holds down the first line of Montana’s occasionally devastating 1-2-2 press, unfurling her condor arms to tip inbounds passes.
They’re a group that has the talent and potential to redeem the muddled mess of the last few years and clearly outline the next era of Lady Griz basketball.
Holsinger has made it clear that to achieve that potential, he thinks they need to keep a link to the last era.
Just as much as the coach, it’s been Gfeller’s responsibility, both on and off the court, to be that link.
“I’ve always been somebody who kind of likes to lead by example. That’s been more comfortable for me,” Gfeller said. “But in the game, I’m on the bench and the coaches are huddling, and Brian will say, Carmen, go get the team fired up. I’m just like, I don’t even know what to say. But he’s definitely held me accountable for that.”
“That, for her, has been a challenge,” Holsinger said. “She’s like, well, I feel like I can’t say anything when I don’t play my best. And I’m like, that’s not true. You’re already respected and you can say things.”
It’s also a responsibility that sits heavily. After a 76-74 loss to Northern Arizona in Missoula early in the conference season, Gfeller lingered on the court after the game in a tight knot with family, clearly emotional.
“I think emotion is good,” Gfeller said. “I know the team knows that I care, but having that visual aspect to it, I mean, it’s not for theatrics. It was genuine. When you’re a fifth-year senior, and you’re losing close games like that, especially ones that you know that you can win, it’s gonna hurt a little bit. But I hope that at the end of the day, it’s just inspiring and encouraging, and people see how much I care.”
Gfeller had plenty of reasons to pass on that burden. Growing up in Colfax, she didn’t dream of playing for the Lady Griz like so many girls who grew up in Montana and played for Selvig. How many other players would have transferred when on their third coaching staff in four years?
But instead of leaving, Gfeller has embraced the challenges and responsibilities that come with her history-soaked program. She recently announced that she would return for her extra COVID year of eligibility.
“I think every player probably goes through that what-if process,” Gfeller said, “and I did too. But I just remember thinking, anything that I would want anywhere else I already have. I already have great coaches. I already have great teammates, a great strength program, a crazy crowd every Thursday and Saturday night. I already had what I wanted. I don’t really see any reason to change that.”
It’s still unclear what the future will hold for the Lady Griz. What is clear is that future will owe a lot to a young woman who thought she would play volleyball in college instead.
“(The alumni) truly want nothing but the best for the current players, and they make sure that we know that,” Gfeller said. “For them to have that impact on the current players, that’s something that I aspire for. When I’m an alum, I just want people who are part of the Lady Griz to realize how loved they are, and how lucky they are to be a part of something so much bigger than basketball. … That’s something that Brian is really passionate about building, and I’m just really grateful that I have a small part in the grand scheme of things.”
