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LadyGriz Nate Harris new head coach of the Lady Griz!

HelenaHandBasket said:
All it takes is a black coach. But in all seriousness, do people think they have purposely neglected to consider black players? It is also apparent that people think recruiting a black male athlete is the same as recruiting a black female athlete.
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Yes, we don't actively recruit Black girl's basketball players @ The University of Montana. During that 7 year or 10 year championship drought for The LG, how many Black women's basketball players have been LG ?

And in all seriousness, a Black coach focused on recruiting Black and other minority girls would be a huge help !!!
 
billingsgriz said:
Yes, we don't actively recruit Black girl's basketball players @ The University of Montana. During that 7 year or 10 year championship drought for The LG, how many Black women's basketball players have been LG ?

And in all seriousness, a Black coach focused on recruiting Black and other minority girls would be a huge help !!!
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So you can unequivocally say that Griz coaches reached out to zero black players over the last 10 years. Also, not having any doesn't prove that contact wasn't made. I also agree, that having a black coach would help, but it doesn't guarantee anything and can't overcome several of the other factors that make it difficult to recruit black female athletes to Missoula, to Montana.
 
There is a reason that schools in states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota mostly struggle with attracting black female basketball players.
 
HelenaHandBasket said:
So you can unequivocally say that Griz coaches reached out to zero black players over the last 10 years. Also, not having any doesn't prove that contact wasn't made. I also agree, that having a black coach would help, but it doesn't guarantee anything and can't overcome several of the other factors that make it difficult to recruit black female athletes to Missoula, to Montana.
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Yes, we have recruited exactly 0 😱 star Black girl's basketball players either out of high school or for its first five years starting in 2019, the transfer portal. Hopefully that changes in 2025 !!!

LG: All White girls all of the time, 2015-24. ( Maybe we very. very, very secretly recruited 50-60 Black girls that no reporter, GRIZ alum or fan heard of because unlike our recruiting of the White girls we signed during this decade, recruiting of Black girls is super-duper top secret and we just don't know about this classified effort and, doggone it, we went 0 for 60 !!!)

And this secrecy also applies to " several of the other factors that make it difficult to recruit Black women athletes to Missoula" that apply strictly and only to Black girls and not also to young White, Hispanic and Asian women and women in general or to the many Black male student-athletes that we have successfully recruited to play football and basketball to UM for decades !!!
 
If any girl we recruit is interested, I am sure the process gets quite complex quickly with scholarships, academic offerings, housing, redshirting or playing right away, etc.
 
BigSkyBreakdown said:
We, Me, I is not important. Have nothing against Harris. Was only adding that if LG wanted to change recruiting the way the thread turned that Harris would need to hire a black assistant.

We did mention names of potential candidates. We also gave credit to Harris and staff for doing a solid job in the tourney.

Carry on.
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We thank you for your answer. We are a fan of Harris and think the right choice was made.
 
Da Boyz Mom said:
The continuing assertion that it should be relatively easy to recruit young black female basketball players, just tells me y'all don't understand anything about young women. The end.
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As a guy, I believe I speak for all men when I say you could comfortably remove the qualifying adjective "young" from your sentence. We don't -- nor will we ever -- understand women. Young. Old. Middle age. Any woman. Complete mystery.
 
HelenaHandBasket said:
All it takes is a black coach. But in all seriousness, do people think they have purposely neglected to consider black players? It is also apparent that people think recruiting a black male athlete is the same as recruiting a black female athlete.
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What a ridiculous response. No one said it was that simple, only that it's worthwhile.

And the fact is I have never seen a single out of state female African-American player mentioned as being on our recruiting radar basically ever. Feel free to correct me if you have information to the contrary.

Everyone knows one of Robin's weaknesses was his inability/lack of desire to expand his recruiting footprint beyond a very small region.

What I can say for certain is that we've had 2 or 3 black Lady Griz in the entire history of the program. And that is totally ridiculous in my opinion. Certainly we can do better than less than one every decade.
 
Da Boyz Mom said:
The continuing assertion that it should be relatively easy to recruit young black female basketball players, just tells me y'all don't understand anything about young women. The end.
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Where is this assertion that it should be relatively easy? No one has claimed that in this entire thread.

What is not complex is the assertion is that if you don't have a minority coach on staff, it's going to make it much harder to recruit other minorities to a program with a history whiter than snow. How is this hard to understand?

All I know is having 2 black players in the entire 40+ year history of a Division 1 program is an extremely low bar that we should strive to improve. Do you disagree?
 
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billingsgriz said:
There are many affluent black as well as Hispanic ( Josh Vasquez) and Asian families in the Pacific NW ( Seattle-Tacoma, Portland-Vancouver) and California ( SanFrancisco-Oakland, San Jose , LA ) that can afford to send their girls to compete in AAU, as well as some inner-city families that cannot, but they can play and do play on their high-school teams without requiring a lot of money, right ? And did all of the Native girls from Montana that Robin Selvig recruited play AAU ball ?

You state the MSU and our UM girls have all played AAU Ball, and I totally believe you. And I am sure, based on what you stated about not all Black girls playing AAU ball is also correct and, therefore, a few to several of Ohio State's Black girls, and based on what I saw on the broadcast, The Lady Buckeyes starters were all Black, didn"t play AAU ball either but still thumped the Lady Cats, who according to you, all did and as the announcers noted, MSU couldn't handle Ohio State's athleticism and speed. So I guess what I am saying if a Black girl ( or Hispanic, Asian, Native or White girl ) starred on their girls' high-school basketball team but didn't play AAU ball, we should still recruit them !!! ( I am pretty sure not all of the Black girls on South Carolina and LSU that decisively defeated Caitlin Clark and her Lady Hawkeyes in the NCAA National Championship in 2023 and '24 probably didn't play AAU ball either.)

And since we recruit star Black football and men's basketball players, mainly from the NW and Calif. to UM, what is preventing us from doing the same with star Black girls' basketball players other than we simply don't recruit them ? ( And that's where a Black assistant coach-- Justin Green, football, Reuben Williams, basketball--that is a good recruiter would really benefit The LG !!! )
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All I'm saying is there is a bigger divide between the haves and the have nots in women's basketball than fb and MBB. Of course there are many black women that played AAU ball. In no way am I saying there were none. Angel Reese did in fact play AAU. It's well documented that her and Caitlin clark are actually friends from the AAU circuit. And of course there are many black and Hispanic AAU players. Esme on the Cats is Mexican and I would guess played AAU. My whole point is that the numbers to pick from are less. Let's go with baseball. Would you argue that there's equal numbers of black people to Hispanic and white in baseball? There are not. Because the best black athletes are usually playing football and basketball. And again travel baseball is expensive. I don't know the answer but to your topic how many griz black softball players are there? There are many black very good softball players out there in D1 college ball as well.

BG I'm not trying to argue for not having more inclusivity. We should have it. All I'm saying is we have less to choose from and those that are available go to the big dogs in the sport. Neither of us is Ohio State and likely never will be. NIL will make that more and more a fact.
And also getting someone from higher urban dense populations to come to more rural Montana isn't easy. Or from the warmth of the south to the cold.
 
Allezchat said:
All I'm saying is there is a bigger divide between the haves and the have nots in women's basketball than fb and MBB. Of course there are many black women that played AAU ball. In no way am I saying there were none. Angel Reese did in fact play AAU. It's well documented that her and Caitlin clark are actually friends from the AAU circuit. And of course there are many black and Hispanic AAU players. Esme on the Cats is Mexican and I would guess played AAU. My whole point is that the numbers to pick from are less. Let's go with baseball. Would you argue that there's equal numbers of black people to Hispanic and white in baseball? There are not. Because the best black athletes are usually playing football and basketball. And again travel baseball is expensive. I don't know the answer but to your topic how many griz black softball players are there? There are many black very good softball players out there in D1 college ball as well.

BG I'm not trying to argue for not having more inclusivity. We should have it. All I'm saying is we have less to choose from and those that are available go to the big dogs in the sport. Neither of us is Ohio State and likely never will be. NIL will make that more and more a fact.
And also getting someone from higher urban dense populations to come to more rural Montana isn't easy. Or from the warmth of the south to the cold.
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Well, our men's team is full of Black kids like Money Williams that indeed went from San Francisco-Oakland, a very dense urban population, to Missoula. Not all Black kids from big cities or their suburbs want to come to Missoula to go to school @ UM, but some do--these kids want out of the Big City. I have friends in The Bay Area and Vancouver, Washington tell me they no longer go to Downtown San Francisco or Portland because of all the problems with drugs, homelessness, and crime in these downtowns.

If we want to recruit Black star girl's basketball players and we should, Seattle-Tacoma, Portland-Vancouver, San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose and LA are probably our prime targets. And if we don't recruit some really good Black girls, our LG team will continue to struggle due to a lack of strength, speed and athleticism.

Despite NIL, Ohio State, Michigan and Oregon, both Travis DeCuire and Justin Green and Bobby Hauck continue to successfully recruit many star Black athletes, most from big cities or their suburbs. Without those Black student athletes on both our men's basketball team and football team, those teams would not be successful on the court or football field. Sixty years ago, if Don Haskins had decided not to first start calling the families of star Black boys' high-school basketball players in Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore and then by car, bus, train and plane travel up and down The East Coast recruiting those kids in person to attend a school they had never heard of in a place they couldn't even find on a map but instead stayed in his office in El Paso in extreme West Texas in the middle of nowhere repeatedly telling himself why he couldn't recruit Black kids to come play at Texas Western against schools in The Jim Crow South, he would have never left West Texas and New Mexico to recruit. There would have been no " Glory Road." But Coach Haskins had a " can-do" attitude instead of a " can't-do" attitude even though many Black families and their sons rejected him and Texas Western, some did not and found themselves on a bus, train or plane to El Paso to play for Coach Haskins and Texas Western and became part of basketball history.

I believe if we drop the " can't do" attitude and instead adopt the " can-do" attitude and like Coach Haskins, DeCuire, Green and Hauck, we too will be successful in recruiting some star Black girls' basketball players to UM. I would much rather be a Happy Warrior than Danny or Debbie Downer, wouldn't you ?
 
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