| Maya Metcalf, who averages 16.7 points, 8.1 rebounds and shoots 88 percent from the foul line, has been hard to stop for Cobber opponents this season. Concordia-Moorhead athletics photo |
By Riley Zayas
The Scoop on D3 Women’s Hoops
The first time the Concordia-Moorhead women’s basketball team boarded a plane this season, it turned out to be anything but an easy trip.
A canceled flight left them stuck in Minneapolis for an extra night, forcing the Cobbers to rideshare to and from a hastily arranged practice. Then came a red-eye flight the next morning to Texas, where upon arriving in Dallas, they boarded vans for another two hours in transit on country roads to Abilene. When the Cobbers finally arrived at the Hardin-Simmons gym for their Sunday afternoon game with Howard Payne, all that was left to do, in head coach Kim Wagers’ words, was “get out of the vans we rented and play a game.”
Even after all that, Concordia won, opening a successful 2-0 trip with a 71-55 victory. It spoke to an overarching theme evident from the beginning of what has been a 25-4 season: this is a team that rolls with the punches and always collectively steps up.
“The kids knocked it out of the park,” Wagers, Concordia’s seventh-year head coach, said looking back on that trip at the end of December. “There was no complaining. It was, ‘Alright, this is what’s happening. Let’s roll with it.’”
She knew she had a special group on her hands then, as her team followed it up a day later with a win over Hardin-Simmons, who also reached this year’s Sweet 16, weathering through the exhausting travel and unfamiliar environment with tenacity. But in many ways, it only affirmed what she was already well aware of. With this team, the pieces always fell into place.
Concordia did not come into 2025-26 as a team with favorable odds to be still playing on the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, as they will do Friday against Johns Hopkins in a sectional semifinal in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
They weren’t even necessarily a frontrunner in the MIAC, which was loaded with talented veteran players, of which Concordia had few. The Cobbers graduated 80% of their starting lineup from a respectable 16-10 season the previous winter, no loss bigger than two-time D3hoops.com All-Region forward Makayla Anderson, who had been a central figure on Concordia’s most recent NCAA Tournament team in 2024. Her absence in the post would surely be felt, but so would the voids in the backcourt, returning only one starting guard in Taylor Safranski.
From the outside, there were a multitude of question marks. But the team inside Memorial Auditorium held a much different sentiment. The same sort of grit shown in the handling of the Texas trip was seen on the practice floor in the days leading up to the Nov. 12 opener. As Wagers said recently, the real question wasn’t whether the talent was there to be successful. It was only a question of how the pieces would fit together.
“Our practices were so competitive and it was so constant,” Wagers said. “We never had to get after them about the compete level. I was like, “OK, we have something here.’ We had enough depth and we had enough pieces. We knew what we were losing and what we were bringing back, but those pieces coming back were going to be in very different roles than what they’d had in the past.”
Molly Musland counts herself amongst that group, a senior guard who had played in 79 career games going into her final collegiate season, but only started four. Over her first three years, the 5-9 guard’s minutes per game steadily rose from 9.6 as a freshman to 14.2 as a sophomore and eventually a slight uptick at 15.2 as a junior. But with the graduations off the previous team, Musland’s role expanded in a much bigger way starting in the preseason, as the LaMoure, North Dakota native was one of the experienced veterans Wagers called upon to step into a starting role for the first time. She hasn’t missed a start since — 29 straight games and counting — coming through for the Cobbers as one of their unquestioned leaders.
“Molly has been coming off the bench since she was a freshman, but stepped into a starting role and hit the ground running,” Wagers said. “She didn’t miss a beat. She’s been so consistent from an energy and effort standpoint, but also a performance standpoint. Our seniors have done a really good job of being really consistent day-in and day-out. That’s been really fun and awesome to see.”
In Saturday’s 68-65 second round win over Ripon, Musland showed that consistency when she hit a 3-pointer that pulled the Cobbers within a point of tying the score midway through the fourth quarter, setting up MIAC Offensive Player of the Year Maya Metcalf for a go-ahead layup on Concordia’s next possession. Later, with just 27 seconds left, Musland hit a turnaround jumper, stretching the Cobbers’ lead to 66-62 as Memorial Auditorium, Concordia’s home gym, went wild.
“It’s really nice for them to be in there when we have those late game situations,” Musland said of Concordia’s veteran contributors, herself being one of them. “They know what to do, don’t panic, and we just get the job done.”
The Cobbers, who Musland says are “a team who likes to pride ourselves on defense”, needed one final stop on Saturday night to seal the win. Ripon had the ball down 3, and the competitive edge Wagers talked about seeing in the preseason showed up again. Musland and her teammates forced back-to-back 3-point misses from the Red Hawks, making history for their program in the winning effort while at the same time extending their season by another week.
“It’s always special to win the last two games on your home court,” Musland noted. “To beat Ripon down to the wire there really meant a lot to our team, just to show the other D3 teams in the nation how hard we’ve been working all season.”
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| Molly Musland became a starter this year and is second on the team in scoring, while shooting 42 percent from three-point range. Concordia-Moorhead athletics photo |
They have gone from a team that came into the year replacing four starters to one standing amongst the final 16 teams in the NCAA Tournament. By doing so, Concordia is in the Sweet 16 for the first time since 1993, when the tournament field was still 32 teams and the Cobbers were just five years removed from a national championship. If the moment needed any further significance, Concordia’s 25 wins are the program’s most since that national title-winning season in 1988.
Wagers, the 2025-26 MIAC Coach of the Year, said the historical significance still hasn’t quite sunk in.
“To be honest, I have not thought a whole lot about that,” she said Tuesday. “As coaches, we’re always thinking, ‘Onto the next, onto the next.’ So I think it’ll be a fun reflection before the team banquet after the year has ended and we can catch our breath a little bit and think back about some of those things.”
That said, the tradition of the program is something they are all well aware of. Hanging in the rafters above Memorial Auditorium are the two national championship banners from Concordia’s titles in 1982 (AIAW) and 1988, reminders of the history made decades before by teams who practiced and played under the same roof the Cobbers do today. The significance is not lost on Wagers, who says she often looks up at the banners just before her team tips off a home game.
“We talk a ton about tradition within our program,” she noted. “Every year, we celebrate the alumni on our alumni day and we’re able to talk about those things, like it being the 21st NCAA Tournament appearance this year. Our kids may not fully grasp what that all means quite yet, but they will as they come back as alumni.”
In the present, they’re making memories they will remember for years to come as well. For Musland and Safranski, their journey together on the court began well before the senior duo — both North Dakota natives — arrived at Concordia. They played together for the first time on a sixth-grade summer team and now as fellow starters for the Cobbers, are two wins away from the Final Four.
“It’s like the best-case scenario,” said Musland of playing alongside Safranski, Concordia’s starting point guard and assist leader. “Playing with someone since sixth grade, they’re one of your best friends, and to do something as special as making the Sweet 16 in our final year playing together is a dream come true for both of us.”
Musland and Safranski are part of the strong North Dakota contingent on the Cobbers’ roster, representing a state that has no Division III programs of its own. With Concordia’s campus on the Minnesota-North Dakota line as the MIAC’s westernmost institution, Wagers has found many of the program’s stars across the border in her time as head coach, successfully pulling in talent while recruiting against a slew of NAIA scholarship-offering programs. Four of the Cobbers’ five starters in the second round tournament win vs. Ripon hailed from the state.
“It is a little bit different than some of our league schools,” Wagers said of Concordia’s location and recruiting into North Dakota. “The local basketball up here is outstanding. We’ve had really good luck with some small-school North Dakota kids but also the Fargo-area and Bismark-area North Dakota kids. Most are coming from within 200 miles of campus, which is fun and helps our crowd when the local kids choose to stay and play.”
Amongst those local North Dakota products starring for the Cobbers is Metcalf, the immediate-impact Division II transfer from MSU-Moorhead, who averages a team-leading 16.7 points per game and 8.1 rebounds in addition to her 2.5 blocks per contest. A 6-2 forward from West Fargo, North Dakota, just across the river from Moorhead, the do-it-all sophomore has filled the void left by Anderson in the post to a remarkably high degree.
“Maya has really elevated our program,” Musland said. “You don’t see it that much at the D-III level where you get a post that can finish around the rim and also shoot it from the 3-point line. She can do both. She was the MIAC Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year; a player like that doesn’t come around so often.”
“She’s a great passer,” Wagers added. “That is something people don’t really notice about her. We’ve always tried to play through our post players, and Maya just stepped in and didn’t miss a beat. It was unbelievable how fast she picked up our system and how well she played with everyone right away.”
With Metcalf’s presence in the post, and a stellar backcourt featuring seniors in Musland, Safranski, and Taya Jeffrey, Concordia is well-balanced entering its third game of the tournament. Getting there required a full 12-hour day of travel on Wednesday, akin to that of the Texas trip earlier in the season and some of their lengthy cross-state bus rides in MIAC play. If past experience is any indication, Wagers is confident her squad is more than capable of handling that part of this sectional weekend.
“Traveling all day tomorrow is not ideal from a coaching standpoint, but I have no doubt our crew is going to be ready to go,” Wagers said Tuesday. “We spend hours on the bus in the MIAC because we’re the outlier [geographically], so every trip is quite the journey. And I was so proud of how they handled the Texas trip. Our crew will be really focused and dialed in to controlling what they can control and showing up with energy and effort.”
Upon arrival, Johns Hopkins presents an even bigger challenge, as the Blue Jays are 27-1 as the tournament’s No. 5 overall seed. If it turns into a defensive battle — and it very well may with JHU allowing the third-fewest points per game amongst Sweet 16 teams — the Cobbers will be ready.
They are in this position for the first time in over two decades and intent on making the moment count.
“[Johns Hopkins] plays really good defense, so this week in practice we’ve been focusing on toughness with the ball, and toughness physically and mentally,” said Musland, who ranks second on the team in steals. “We’re going into Friday with collective confidence, knowing that they’re a good team, but so are we. We’re ready to bring it.”