Montana Lady Griz coach Mike Petrino spent the two weeks leading up to his team’s home opener on the road.

OK, not really on the road. But away from home. His oldest of two daughters had hung out with a friend, you see.

“And when she got home, she got a call from the friend, and the day before her friend was hanging out with somebody else who now had (COVID) symptoms,” Petrino said this week. “Because of the world we live in, my wife and I decided I would stay at a hotel.”

That didn’t last long: He truly went on the road to coach his team at Utah State on Nov. 25. But on the way back he learned his daughter had symptoms. So he moved in with in-laws.

This was his life until Monday, when North Dakota’s women’s team came to Dahlberg Arena.

“Monday was a great day,” he said. “We got to play a game, got to play a home game, got a win and I got to see my family.”

Montana’s 86-72 win over the Fighting Hawks was led by Carmen Gfeller and Sophia Stiles’ 48 combined points, and helped by a strong supporting cast. Petrino played 11 of the 12 girls he dressed - three more Lady Griz are banged up, including sharpshooter Bria Dixson, who hurt an ankle in practice after hitting two threes at Utah State.

Another player with a sore ankle was post Abby Anderson, who hadn’t practiced all week until, as the home opener approached, she participated in a scrimmage drill.

“Eight trips up and down the floor in a 5-on-5,” Petrino said. Anderson played 30 minutes Monday and scored 13 big points.

As Petrino begins his first college head coaching job the circumstances hark back some to his predecessor’s: Shannon Schweyen saw more injuries than success in her four seasons at the helm.

Now Petrino has a team with seven holdovers, eight new faces and continued injury worries. The roster also includes Schweyen’s daughters Shelby (injured) and Jordyn (a silky three on Monday). It’s different.

“Nobody liked the circumstances of what happened in the spring,” Petrino said. “But we all feel like we have an obligation to make this trip together and make this a memorable year.

“It’s a huge challenge in itself, and then you had COVID. … it’s the biggest challenge I've had in 27 years of coaching.”

Petrino is a Flathead High School grad who began his coaching career as a 20-year-old Flathead Valley CC student, leading a couple junior high teams in Kalispell. By the fall of 1993 he was girls’ freshman coach at Flathead High for Joe Antonietti.

A couple years later he was helping out at Billings Central for first girls’ coach Brian Costello and then boys’ coach Gene Espeland. He counts himself fortunate that he was able to pack two seasons of coaching into each year for eight years, before Montana made its hoop seasons concurrent in 2002-03.

To that end he continued to work girls’ basketball camps in the summers during a decade coaching boys’ hoops at Central Catholic in Portland – including five years as head coach. When the opportunity came to join the college ranks with Wyoming women’s coach Joe Legerski in 2011, he jumped at it.

Now we’re here: Schweyen hired him for her first staff in 2016. It’s a strange time, with facemasks and empty arenas and countless possible hurdles on the horizon.

Smoothing things out is the 6-foot-1 Gfeller, whose talent had Mountain West schools in pursuit and Pac-12 Washington State giving chase late. Hailing from a town (Colfax, Washington) of a little under 3,000, Gfeller made her first of five official visits to UM.

“You don’t want to be the first one,” Petrino notes, but it helped that her brother Brandon played for the Griz men’s team.

She’s now the second Lady Griz to start a season with back-to-back 20-point games - Anita (Novak) Selvig was the first. Gfeller also had an injury redshirt, as had Stiles. A roster that stays healthy would be a boon for a coach with “interim” in his title.

Petrino is bummed about cancelling two Big Sky Conference home games with Southern Utah – a program, he notes, that played Wednesday against William Jessup.

“This entire group has 80 minutes together,” he says, and those minutes are among the things he can control, along with productive and competitive practices and staying positive.

“You still get into this because of relationships,” he said.

One of the first players he coached was Kalispell’s Ryan Wardinsky – a baseball player at Texas A&M who became a Phillies’ farmhand for a time. Among the texts Petrino got after Monday’s victory was one from Wardinsky, who lives in Texas and scouts for the Marlins.

“Seventh grade boys’ basketball,” Petrino said. “Ryan sent me a picture of their daughter wearing a Lady Griz jersey.”

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or at fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com.