MISSOULA – The confetti was festive and the fireworks were bright, but Montana’s heart and hustle stole the show Saturday afternoon.
The Lady Griz basketball team rallied from a 15-point deficit to beat Northern Colorado, 60-49, in the Big Sky Conference tournament championship at electrified Dahlberg Arena. The win gave Montana its third NCAA tournament berth in five years.
“Unbelievably good win and it was an unbelievable game,” said Montana coach Robin Selvig, whose team trailed 29-16 at halftime. “They I thought were pretty dominant the first half. We were having a hard time. They’re really good right now, really well-coached.
“… I was really wondering how we were going to turn it around second half. Somehow these guys just put together maybe the best run of basketball we’ve had in a long time for about 10 minutes.”
Montana (24-8) will wait until Monday at 5 p.m. to find out when and where they will play their NCAA opener. The announcement will be made on ESPN.
“It’s still kind of hard to believe,” said Montana senior guard Kellie Rubel, whose was named tournament MVP. “I think it’s going to be good I can actually sleep tonight. That was really nice. We just played such good defense, played like every possession was our last possession. It was a ton of fun.”
Though no one was willing to divulge exactly what was said in the Montana locker room at halftime, suffice to say it was inspirational. The Lady Griz appeared inferior in almost every facet in the first half – a step slow on defense and lacking in confidence on offense, where they connected on 8 of 31 shots.
There were no magical adjustments that turned the tide in the second half. Montana simply muscled its way to the rim for countless high-percentage bunnies and found a way to shut down Northern Colorado’s dynamic senior center, Stephanie Lee.
The Bears (20-12) went from shooting 50 percent in the first half (12 for 24) to 21.7 percent in the second (5 for 23). And although Northern Colorado senior guard D’Shara Strange managed to finish with a game-high 23 points, her team took 17 fewer shots because the Lady Griz cleaned up on the boards, 47-26.
“First half (Lee) shot a couple around me and she made them,” Montana post Carly Selvig said. “But it’s just sticking with it and being able to adjust to what she’s doing … They tried everything they could but we just persisted.”
The game was decided during an eight-minute stretch in the second half. The Bears led 41-29 with 11 minutes remaining and then crumbled under the weight of a determined Lady Griz team and a season-high crowd of 3,811.
“The first half they looked like (the ball) was a hand grenade when they caught it,” coach Selvig said of his sputtering offense. “Then the second half all of a sudden they knew what to do with it. There really was a look on every single kid’s face like we’re going to get this done. I didn’t know how they were gonna but they did.”
Montana scored on five straight possessions – that included two buckets by Kayleigh Valley, two by Maggie Rickman and one by Rubel, to cut its deficit to 43-39 with 9:16 remaining. Then after coming up empty once, the hosts put together a string of six successful possessions, banking on six points by Valley, four by Rickman and two by Rubel.
Meanwhile, Northern Colorado went cold offensively. The Bears made just one shot from the floor in the final 11 1/2 minutes, that coming on a 3-pointer by Kyleigh Hiser with 36 seconds left.
“I really think the crowd and the atmosphere extended the run,” coach Selvig said. ” … It was a lot of really nice plays to get the crowd going. It would have been a pity that we got 4,000 of them to show up and end at halftime there. They might not have come back.”
Northern Colorado first-year coach Kamie Ethridge knows what it’s like to play and coach in front of a boisterous crowd. She earned a gold medal as a member of the 1988 United States Olympic team and a national championship as a player at Texas. Prior to coming to UNC, she served as an assistant coach for 18 years at Kansas State.
She said she’s been in buildings that were “just as loud,” but even she had to admit the atmosphere at Dahlberg Arena was “great.”
“When you get to that point you need hand signals – you really can’t hear – I think that played a big part of it (Saturday),” she said. “It just slows you down a little bit and all of a sudden your energy, how you enter offense all of a sudden is just a beat slower. That’s what happened to us in the second half. We became a very stagnant offense.”
The Bears led for almost 29 minutes before Valley hit a pair of free throws with 5:29 left to give her team a 47-45 advantage. Rubel and Valley followed up with buckets that stretched the lead to 51-45 and then Strange missed a couple free throws at 3:44 that seemed to take the wind out of her team.
The Lady Griz responded with baskets by Selvig and Valley and suddenly they were up 10 with two minutes remaining.
“Credit to Montana,” said Ethridge, whose squad is hoping for a WNIT berth after seeing its 10-game win streak come to an end. “They knew what they had to do to make us pay for how we were trying to guard them.”
Rickman paced the Lady Griz with 20 points, 18 coming in the second half on mostly close-range shots. Rubel and Valley chipped in 14 points and the former also grabbed a team-high 11 rebounds.
Rubel and Valley were joined on the all-tournament team by Strange, Lee, Adella Randle-El of Sacramento State and Hayley Hodgins of Eastern Washington.
Coach Selvig is looking forward to seeing his team take the floor for the 21st time in the Big Dance on either Friday or Saturday. Unlike previous years, when predetermined sites were used for first- and second-round games, a new model will be used. The top 16 teams in the field, as determined by a committee following this weekend’s conference tournaments, will host first- and second-round games.
“We’ll see who we’re going to draw,” coach Selvig said. “Maybe this is the team that’s going to get one that we haven’t got for a while.
“We’ve come close a couple times and we’ve got some butt-kickings, too. You know we’re going to be a low seed but we got a little scare into Georgia (in 2013) and we almost got UCLA (in 2011). I know one thing – no team is going to play harder than us.”