Freshman Schoening off and running for Lady Griz

The following feature ran in GoGriz.com recently.

MISSOULA, Mont. — On to the next. It’s what Lady Griz freshman Madi Schoening heard from her dad while he rebounded for his daughter during her countless shooting workouts growing up. He used it as a constant reminder to forget about any misses and focus entirely on the next shot. Always look forward.

Whether she’d swished 10 straight or clanked a few in a row, the most important shot was always the next one coming off her fingers. In other words, have a short memory.

On to the next has also become the unexpected go-to mantra this year for the Montana women’s basketball team, which is approaching its Big Sky Conference schedule without any of its returning starters from last season.

Kayleigh Valley was lost for the season with a knee injury less than a week into preseason practices, Alycia Sims before the first game was over. Mekayla Isaak is out until after Christmas with a broken hand.

The unexpected shake-up in personnel has led to Montana using an all-underclassman starting lineup the last four games. The team’s top six scorers are freshmen or sophomores.

The best way to approach it: play, learn from the result, whether it was a win or a loss, and start preparing for the schedule’s upcoming opponent. Don’t dwell on outcomes, only on getting better. On to the next.

“We know we have a big challenge in front of us,” says Schoening, a physical five-foot-nine guard who was going to play this season but who has started all nine games because of the injuries. “We’re ready to take it on.”

Seven underclassmen have made starts. A true freshman is the team’s top-scoring reserve.

“Our development is really speeding up for all of us,” says Schoening. “We’re way more advanced as freshmen than we would normally be because we’re getting so much playing time. A lot of us were in high school not very long ago. Now some of us are starting at the college level.”

That includes Schoening, who graduated last spring from Sandpoint High in northern Idaho after a victory-heavy prep career as a soccer and basketball standout, and some success in track and field.

She led the Bulldogs to state titles in soccer as a sophomore and junior, the basketball team to third-place finishes as a junior and senior. In the spring of 2015: a fifth-place finish in the long jump at the state track and field meet.

The hand-written sticky notes on her mirror back home that kept her focused on her goals had her working toward getting playing time in her first year as a Lady Griz. They mentioned nothing about becoming the first true freshman since Katie Baker in 2009-10 to start a season opener.

Despite early foul trouble, Schoening finished with six points, seven rebounds and a pair of assists in 14 minutes as Montana got past Great Falls to open the regular season. Through nine games she is averaging 5.7 points and 4.0 rebounds while playing 20 minutes per game.

She shot 20 percent through the team’s first four games but broke out with a 12-point performance, going 4 for 8 from the field, 2 for 3 from 3-point range, against Utah State in the championship game of the Lady Griz Classic.

Against Rocky Mountain on Monday, Schoening came up one rebound shy of a double-double, finishing with nine points and 10 boards.

Expect more where that came from. Schoening scored 1,418 points in four years at Sandpoint High, second in school history behind Alli Nieman, who would go on to total 2,140 points at Idaho from 1996-2000 and is still the Vandals’ all-time leading scorer.

As a senior Schoening averaged 19.1 points, 6.9 rebounds, 3.8 steals and 1.8 assists per game. As a junior, against Lakeland in an Inland Empire League game, she poured in a school-record 49 points, making 16 of 23 shots, seven of her eight 3-pointers, and going 10 for 12 from the line.

“I don’t know what happened in that game. My shots just started falling really easily,” she says. She reached her per-game scoring average of 20 by halftime and remembers thinking, Wow, let’s see how far this can go.

In the second half, the threes started dropping from all over the court, just as she’d practiced during all those sessions with her dad, using a shooting workout she’d picked up at a camp in Seattle.

It’s the same shooting workout she relies on today. Ninety minutes to get through the full thing, 45 for the condensed game-day version she squeezes in a few hours before tip.

“I was at 49 with a few minutes left, and I wanted to get 50 so bad,” she says. “My coaches took me out and said I’d done enough. They humbled me pretty good.”

Schoening’s journey to Montana began in Boise as the first of two daughters for Ross and Charity. The family moved upstate to Lewiston after Schoening had finished kindergarten.

It put the Schoenings closer to family, closer to Kamiah, where Ross and his own dad, Jack, had played high school basketball. Both wore number 34 for the Bears in their maroon uniforms. Today Madi wears a maroon 34 for the Lady Griz, the color a coincidence but not the number.

Prior to Madi’s freshman year of high school, the family relocated even farther upstate to Sandpoint after Ross became a branch manager for Alliance Title and Escrow.

As so often happens in recruiting, it was a matter of happenstance that led Schoening to Montana.

The mother of one of her teammates was Margaret Williams, one of the best point guards in Lady Griz history, who dished out 511 assists, the fourth-best career total in program history, while playing for Montana in the mid-80s.

“I talked to her all the time about the program. She was super excited about me possibly playing here. She thought I would fit in well,” says Schoening.

Williams reached out to Shannon Schweyen, then an assistant under Robin Selvig, and told her about Schoening, a loyal former Lady Griz looking out for the program’s best interest.

Schweyen traveled to Boise for the Class 4A state tournament Schoening’s junior year. The Bulldogs would defeat Kuna but lose to eventual champion Century High of Pocatello in the semifinals. Sandpoint defeated Rigby in the third-place game.

“Shannon said she was going to come watch me play, so I was freaking out,” says Schoening. “There was a lot of pressure that weekend.”

Schoening was voted the Inland Empire League MVP as a junior and senior, and though Century once again ended Sandpoint’s quest for a state title in the tournament semifinals last winter, Schoening’s prep career wasn’t done.

A few weeks after the season, Schoening played in the annual Idaho High School All-Star Game. It gave Schoening her long-wished-for matchup against Destiny Slocum, who is doing just fine as a college freshman. She is the third-leading scorer for Maryland, which is 11-0 and ranked No. 4 in the nation.

Slocum was the two-time Gatorade Player of the Year in Idaho and a McDonald’s All-American at Mountain View High in Meridian.

“We never played each other, but I kept hearing about her. I really wanted to do well against her,” Schoening says. “My team’s coach knew it, so he put me on her. I made it as a challenge to myself. I was playing against someone going to Maryland. I wanted to see how I could do against her.”

She did just fine. Slocum finished with 13 points and nine assists. A nice outing. Schoening: 26 points, MVP honors and a 100-94 win.

It’s what Schoening can do when she just plays, which she has yet to really do at Montana, and you can’t blame her. She is trying to learn a whole new system and get used to new teammates and a higher level of basketball.

“I’ve just been really stressed about being in the right place at the right time and worried about what to look for on different plays,” she says. “I haven’t really been looking for myself.

“The coaches have been telling us we can’t be freshmen anymore, and that pushes us, because we don’t have upperclassmen to rely on. Weirder things have happened than an underdog team coming back and making a difference.”

It’s an unusual combination, pairing Montana and its 24 conference championships with a descriptor like underdog, but that’s the reality for this year’s team, which approaches the start of league with just a single win against a Division I opponent.

But that’s looking backwards and dwelling on the past. There are still 20 games on the schedule ahead, then the Big Sky Conference tournament in Reno. Almost three full months to go.

Every game, starting on Sunday against Wyoming, then continuing on Wednesday against Colorado State, is a new chance to compete. A fresh start, with past results meaning nothing. On to the next.