BILLINGS — As teammates at Scobey High School, Kortney Nelson and Gracee Lekvold were the perfect combo: ultra-competitive Class C guards working in unison to win no matter what.
But if Spartans coach Jedd Lekvold, Gracee’s dad, pit them head-to-head in practice, things could turn on a dime.
“During practice, we wanted to, like … cut each other’s heads off,” Gracee Lekvold said, exaggerating as if to underscore the point. “We’re both way too stubborn and competitive.”
But their friendship is shatterproof.
Nelson and Lekvold each described their closeness as an inseparable, intertwined, maid-of-honor type bond. They even wear the same No. 14, although they say that’s just an ancillary coincidence.
And now that each is an integral part of her team’s success at the collegiate level — Nelson at NCAA Division II Montana State Billings and Lekvold at NAIA Rocky Mountain College — they take immense pride in the other’s good fortune.
Nelson, a fifth-year senior, has helped MSUB to a 24-5 overall record and a 13-3 mark in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference heading into her final weekend of home games, which begins Thursday against Simon Fraser and concludes Sunday with senior day versus Western Washington.
Lekvold, a senior in her fourth year at Rocky, is a catalyst of the Battlin’ Bears winning their first outright regular-season Frontier Conference title since 1988 and earning the No. 1 seed for the league’s postseason tournament, which opens Sunday in Great Falls. RMC finished its schedule with a 19-9 record and went 11-4 in the Frontier.
“Gritty,” Nelson said as a word to describe Lekvold. “I mean, I think you can see it just in the way she plays. She is a very fierce competitor. Always has been. I remember many times in practice we'd go at it a lot, maybe not in the best of ways. But she is a very hard competitor.”
Said Lekvold of Nelson: “She's just mentally tough, physically tough. When you have that mentality, it's pretty hard for another person to come in and say, ‘I'm going to score on you.’ She’s going to say, ‘No, no.’ If you want someone on your team, it’s going to be her.”
Nelson moved to Scobey from Opheim — relocating 45 miles from one small northeast Montana town to another — in the seventh grade. Though she and Lekvold had played basketball against each other as early as second grade, it was then that the two became close with sports competitions, social gatherings and weekend-long sleepovers.
On the court and a year apart in school, Nelson and Lekvold helped Scobey reach the Class C state tournament in 2019 and 2020.
In 2019, when Nelson was a junior and Lekvold was a sophomore, the Spartans made the semifinals but fell to Roy-Winifred, which featured current MSUB standout Dyauni Boyce and current Rocky player Madeline Heggem.
Scobey went on to take third place that year.
The following year the Spartans lost to Belt in the first round but had a shot at third place before the tournament was halted in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After that, Nelson departed for the Yellowjackets. Lekvold, one year behind, would soon make her way to Rocky. Despite playing on separate teams at diverse levels, the duo got the chance to compete against each other every year as part of the annual Rimrock Rivalry series between their respective schools.
Their college coaches, Kevin Woodin at MSUB and Wes Keller at Rocky, have gotten all they could have wanted from Nelson and Lekvold. And they are well aware of what the other team got, also.
“Gracee is a winner, a lot like Kortney. And I know they’re very good friends,” MSUB’s Woodin commented. “Her ability to play within the team concept is impressive to me. Her defense and rebounding, like Kortney’s, is special.”
“They’re just tough,” said Rocky’s Keller. “They’re going to leave their imprint on the game. They know how to win. You can bet your bottom dollar that if there's a loose ball late in the game, one of those two is going to come up with it.”
The 5-foot-8 Nelson is a part of a senior class at MSUB — along with Boyce, Aspen Giese and Chloe Williams — that has won 94 games (and counting), the most for any class in program history. Last year the Jackets were within three points of making the Division II Elite Eight.
Lekvold, 5-5, was a key component to a run by Rocky to the Round of 8 in the NAIA national tournament as a freshman in 2022 and has since been charged with guarding the opposing team’s best player ever since.
Both have been named defensive player of the year — Nelson last year in the GNAC and Lekvold in 2023 in the Frontier. Lekvold was also her league’s freshman of the year in 2022. Nelson is a fierce rebounder in spite of her size. Both have been named second-team all-conference.
Though it will be difficult to say goodbye to basketball, Nelson and Lekvold seem set on their future plans.
Nelson has studied elementary education but is taking graduate classes in school counseling this year. Lekvold is studying both health and human performance and psychology but also has plans for grad school.
The future is almost here, but they’re not done with basketball just yet. And with the high stakes of the postseason at hand, Nelson and Lekvold hope for nothing but the best for each other.
“I just hope this chapter ends how she wants it to and that (the Bears) succeed in everything that they can,” Nelson said. “Taking basketball away is a lot. But I think that whatever she does in the future she’ll succeed because she has the drive to do it.”
“I hope they can go as far as they can,” Lekvold said of Nelson and MSUB. “I feel they have the keys to do it. When you have competitors like Kortney and when you have that mindset, I think they have the chance to do something really special.”
