• Hi Guest, want to participate in the discussions, keep track of read/unread posts access private forums and more? Create your free account and increase the benefits of your eGriz.com experience today!

LadyGriz Nate Harris Cuts

I believe I heard all were cut. Do we know if the ones not cut have agreed to come back? The portal opens April 7th.
 
JusticeForLadyGriz said:
All of them
Click to expand...
I can appreciate your sympathy for the girls. It is a business though and the world is a tuff place. Ive told my daughter since day one that life is unfair, how you deal with it is what matters. She hates it but shes understood early that life is gonna kick you when your down. Hopefully these girls can use this as a pivot point in their lives and make lemonade of lemons.
 
The Big Sky is now a farm system. This "approach" of churning through players (recruit, cut, repeat...) is just like playing the lottery every year and that hardly seems like a strategy. Given the cuts, why on earth would a decent player (either from high school or as a transfer) commit to UM?

Maybe in the absence of winning the lottery a better strategy could be to recruit players, train and develop them (I believe the word for that is "coaching"), and have them ready to contribute as the years go by (see MSUB over the last 15 years and many consecutive 20 win seasons)? Expecting a player to come in and have major impact in the first year seem sto be wishful thinking.
 
alabamagrizzly said:
I can appreciate your sympathy for the girls. It is a business though and the world is a tuff place. Ive told my daughter since day one that life is unfair, how you deal with it is what matters. She hates it but shes understood early that life is gonna kick you when your down. Hopefully these girls can use this as a pivot point in their lives and make lemonade of lemons.
Click to expand...
How is the UM business model working these days? Maybe being decent and fair would be a better approach.
 
BigBurd said:
How is the UM business model working these days? Maybe being decent and fair would be a better approach.
Click to expand...
Working pretty poorly if the record is your key indicator. Generally in business when things are going poorly, changes are made. If decent and fair means not sacrificing to make the changes necessary for success, then this may allow the business to eventually close due to continual monetary loss.

Theres a reason nice guys finish last. They're not willing to do the dirty work that sometimes is necessary for success.
 
There isn't a part of this process that doesn't suck. As I said in my earlier post this isn't 1990 anymore.

Montana had burned through any capital it had as the conference power and any recruiting cache well before Nate took over the program midway through last year. So I don't think locally or regionally this program has any cred to speak of. The have one, maybe two players on the current squad that would start anywhere else in the conference. Far cry from 15 years ago when you could make the argument that player number 6,7,8 could play and start anywhere else in the conference.

Where we are at isn't Nate's fault. As I said earlier it isn't those girls fault either. I've coached enough to know that Nate has to live in two worlds simultaneously. A world where he's responsible for 20 year young adults who've entrusted him with literally everything, and one that is very much cut-throat that is results oriented. He doesn't have Binford's or Selvigs cache where they could absolutely weather a few down years just to stand by his players.

Could Nate held on to the whole roster? Absolutely, honor the scholarship offer and let those girls work through, but the results wouldn't be appreciably better next year. He could do the right thing by those girls and he'd be given his walking papers at the end of next season for being a nice guy. He can thank Schweyen and Holsinger for that as the athletic department and the Main Hall have zero tolerance anymore for any of the hi-jinks that have waylaid this program since Selvig left. He's gotta get his poop in a group and unfortunately these girls are paying for the sins of others. That is absolutely the harsh reality of 2026 Division 1 womens basketball.

But you are delusional if you think what Harris did is some sort anomaly. I guarantee in programs that have expectations, and you were given an ultimatum to improve they would cut their own kid to save their job. We've seen it play out on our own campus. Travis is brutally honest with players and most of the time those players exit the program and move on to other places and their is barely a whimper for the Mens fans. Bobby made a career out of making kids who he didn't have a spot for in spring ball or the following year so miserable they'd quit during winter conditioning.

There are going to be a 1,000+ players in the portal come the 7th of April. Many of them are the products of similar conversations... 'You don't fit in our future plans and it'd be better if you sought a different place to finish out your college career. ' Some are going to leave because they want a shot they weren't going to get where they were at. Will it matter to many of them as to why there are five open slots here? Bet not very many. There is a girls hoop player near where I teach who moved three different schools in four years in the Riverside County area just to position herself to get a D1 scholarship. Has been the norm in boys hoops for years. It's that cut-throat and competitive these days at the high school level. If you don't think that attitude doesn't exist within D1 college level, then I don't know what to tell you.

This is the ugly side of college athletics. If Harris offered five girls starting minutes and a bag of cash, you'd be amazed what people would ignore just about anything to get D1 roster spot again. What Harris did isn't even close to what some other coaches do with their rosters to manipulate openings. He was upfront, made it abundantly clear. Again it is unfortunate that these girls have to find a home and as I said earlier, I wish them only the best.
 
Grizfan-24 said:
There isn't a part of this process that doesn't suck. As I said in my earlier post this isn't 1990 anymore.

Montana had burned through any capital it had as the conference power and any recruiting cache well before Nate took over the program midway through last year. So I don't think locally or regionally this program has any cred to speak of. The have one, maybe two players on the current squad that would start anywhere else in the conference. Far cry from 15 years ago when you could make the argument that player number 6,7,8 could play and start anywhere else in the conference.

Where we are at isn't Nate's fault. As I said earlier it isn't those girls fault either. I've coached enough to know that Nate has to live in two worlds simultaneously. A world where he's responsible for 20 year young adults who've entrusted him with literally everything, and one that is very much cut-throat that is results oriented. He doesn't have Binford's or Selvigs cache where they could absolutely weather a few down years just to stand by his players.

Could Nate held on to the whole roster? Absolutely, honor the scholarship offer and let those girls work through, but the results wouldn't be appreciably better next year. He could do the right thing by those girls and he'd be given his walking papers at the end of next season for being a nice guy. He can thank Schweyen and Holsinger for that as the athletic department and the Main Hall have zero tolerance anymore for any of the hi-jinks that have waylaid this program since Selvig left. He's gotta get his poop in a group and unfortunately these girls are paying for the sins of others. That is absolutely the harsh reality of 2026 Division 1 womens basketball.

But you are delusional if you think what Harris did is some sort anomaly. I guarantee in programs that have expectations, and you were given an ultimatum to improve they would cut their own kid to save their job. We've seen it play out on our own campus. Travis is brutally honest with players and most of the time those players exit the program and move on to other places and their is barely a whimper for the Mens fans. Bobby made a career out of making kids who he didn't have a spot for in spring ball or the following year so miserable they'd quit during winter conditioning.

There are going to be a 1,000+ players in the portal come the 7th of April. Many of them are the products of similar conversations... 'You don't fit in our future plans and it'd be better if you sought a different place to finish out your college career. ' Some are going to leave because they want a shot they weren't going to get where they were at. Will it matter to many of them as to why there are five open slots here? Bet not very many. There is a girls hoop player near where I teach who moved three different schools in four years in the Riverside County area just to position herself to get a D1 scholarship. Has been the norm in boys hoops for years. It's that cut-throat and competitive these days at the high school level. If you don't think that attitude doesn't exist within D1 college level, then I don't know what to tell you.

This is the ugly side of college athletics. If Harris offered five girls starting minutes and a bag of cash, you'd be amazed what people would ignore just about anything to get D1 roster spot again. What Harris did isn't even close to what some other coaches do with their rosters to manipulate openings. He was upfront, made it abundantly clear. Again it is unfortunate that these girls have to find a home and as I said earlier, I wish them only the best.
Click to expand...
All true in today's NCAA landscape, the one main common denominator in this mess is the AD, what if any pushback is he getting, with bad hiring decisions, he's ultimately responsible for the program.
 
Griz til I die said:
So if we have 6 girls returning plus the incoming freshmen class, then how many spots does that leave us to recruit the portal?
Click to expand...
Griz can have a total of 15 players, can add 5, the question is are those 5 spots fully funded, partial scholarships or asking portal players to come but pay your own way. This is Nate's chance to swing big, there are going to be good players in the portal.
 
Griz til I die said:
So if we have 6 girls returning plus the incoming freshmen class, then how many spots does that leave us to recruit the portal?
Click to expand...
With a roster limit of 15, that would allow up to 5 recruits. This is assuming the 6 that are expected to come back actually do come back. Expectations may not be met if 1 or all the 6 expected to come back do not.
 
Grizfan-24 said:
Oh my lord. We are here again! Gruntled fans or parents. Disgruntled even.

First, I know for certain that prior coaches (including Holsinger) made cuts. Remember that Hoops spent four years eviscerating Holsinger for cutting Montana kids including Momberg. I also know that this team was given notice and it wasn't like this was a tightly held secret that roster changes were coming. Maybe they were surprised as to who was told to accept different roles, but I've heard enough to know this wasn't a surprise.

Second, it doesn't take much of a trained eye to know this roster wasn't talented enough to win games. They worked hard, but it wasn't a very complete group and missing a ton of pieces. Most of those girls, unfortunately got caught in what has been a rather unchecked dumpster fire within the women's program going back at least 10 years. I'm sorry that they got caught in it.

Third, no self-respecting Division 1 basketball coach who was given very clear directions by administration to do x,y, and z is going to stand pat on a team who won 4 games in conference and got boat raced by your in-state rival by a bajillion points this year. If Harris doesn't doesn't respond with a sense of urgency based upon how the season went, they continue to get waxed by Bozeman on and off the floor, he's not the guy to rebuild the program if he can't see the gap between UM and MSU on the floor is longer than the distance in miles between the schools.

Fourth, as a person who has been around the program and watched since my days in elementary school in the 80's, this isn't what older fans expect of this program. That isn't the reason why any program should do anything, but as a 50 year old, would never have considered in my wildest dreams as a 10, 20 or even 30 year old that we'd be talking about the womens program being a mediocre at best team the Big Sky. Harris was put into a bad position and has to make tough decisions if he wants to get this program heading in the right direction. Hard to know after a year of an incomplete roster that was a product of the continuing dumpster fire. I don't know yet if Harris has the chops to figure this out, but he isn't going to do it being saddled with legacy issues. I get that sounds harsh, but I am tired of watching this team 'compete,' but not actually turn the corner. The only way this happens is he and others within the athletic department are willing to reassess and recalculate. That means that girls might be asked to recalculate whether they are willing to accept smaller roles and see the writing on the wall. Is it unethical? In 1990 maybe, but we are in 2026 and the landscape of college basketball is a million times more cutthroat than it was then. These girls are paying for not only Harris's mistakes, but a whole bunch of people who aren't around the program anymore. But at some point this program has to stop the free-fall and some of it has to be the realization that Holsingers philsophy didn't work in as much as Schweyens didn't either. Harris has to make his mark on the program. I hope he does things in the right way, but as a coach who made the choice once or twice to carry on traditions and legacy practices and not do things that were the best reflection of who I was, I'll give Harris the benefit of the doubt for seeing that he had to do things his own way. Bout the only way he'll be successful and consequently the program.

I wish them all the luck. Really I do. I do think it is unfortunate they got caught in the cross-fire.
Click to expand...
Good post. Small point for the record. My views on Holsinger and his actions were not focused on just MT players and Momberg. They were more on cutting players he couldn’t possibly have fully evaluated, some of whom he had never met, and on cuts by phone.

I also was very concerned that his treatment of Momberg would end the long track record of attracting many top Native American women to the LG. Have there been any since then?

I also had knew Holsinger get was not the first choice. A better choice hadn’t been able to get his wife move to Missoula.

I also supported Petrino.

I also knew negative things about Holsinger from people who knew or had run across him in the past. This was meaningful to me.

And then he didn’t bring in much for transfers. Don’t think he even filled all the slots that first year. So, he didn’t need or use the big cuts to bring in a bunch of better players.

Had he waited and given some of them a chance to show their stuff, and then cut them, that would have been fine. Or, if he had used the slots to make the LG a powerhouse the next season, I would have had less to say.

I thought, from what I had heard and what he did at the outset, that he was bad news. I was right.

Note that Harris waited to make his big cuts. I don’t know Harris or much about him. Note that I haven’t jumped him for this. Different situation than Holsinger.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top