BILLINGS — One by one the rebounds come to her and before you know it, before Kourtney Grossman knows it, she’s had another double-digit game in the box score.
Grossman, a sophomore at Eastern Washington University, insists there is no particular talent to what she does, grabbing those airborne basketballs by the bushel game after game.
In a way, Grossman is right. As she acknowledges, rebounding is a product of want. Of effort. And there are very few things that make Grossman feel more worthy, more grateful, than being able to give full effort.
What Eagles fans see now, what Big Sky Conference observers see now — the league’s top rebounder, the top double-double machine and one of just two in the conference — is a result of a resolve-challenging four years at Billings West High School. Four years and three surgeries, all on the left knee, that completely changed her relationship with basketball and even how she viewed herself.
“It almost detached me a little bit from the sport,” Grossman says. “Before, I found a large portion of my identity through basketball, and I think now … I still really care about basketball, but it’s not the most important thing in my life.”
Note that Grossman isn’t saying basketball isn’t important to her.
On the contrary, it very much is. Grossman couldn’t average 12.8 rebounds per game, fifth in all of NCAA Divison I and the only sophomore in the top 10, and 13.9 points per game if she didn’t care. She couldn’t have hauled in 23 rebounds in one game and then 22 in another this season if she didn’t care. And Grossman certainly wouldn’t have had a streak of 18 consecutive double-digit rebound games, a streak that ended last week at Weber State, if basketball wasn’t important to her.
The distinction is that each of those rebounds represents a moment. The total isn’t the important thing. What’s important to Grossman is she had the opportunity to grab that one single rebound, at that particular time.
Because so many of those moments were taken from her in high school.
“She just tried to find joy and success in the little things along the way,” says her mother and high school volleyball coach Kelly Grossman, who still chokes up years later talking about her daughter’s journey, “because she was out for so long and had to sit out through so many things.”
Even regular observers of Grossman’s high school career could be forgiven if they didn’t realize she never had a full year of athletic competition until her senior season. That’s because ever since her freshman days, Grossman’s name was ubiquitous on Golden Bears volleyball and basketball teams that were stocked full of talent, including many of her classmates who themselves went on to play NCAA Division I and II sports, as well as at the NAIA level. (Another perhaps forgotten sidenote: Grossman and Montana State standout Taylee Chirrick were teammates at West before Chirrick transferred to Roberts just before their sophomore season.)
Grossman was able to compete for West’s Class AA state championship basketball team during the 2022-23 school year and its title-winning volleyball team in 2023-24. But starting with her first ACL and meniscus tears in February of 2021, her freshman basketball season, there was a lot of heartache along the way.
She returned quickly from that first injury, driven by goal and not process, and was ready by fall volleyball practice. But the same injury occurred in October, sending Grossman back to the operating room.
It was then that Grossman saw a fork in the road. In recovering from her previous injury, Grossman, a “rule-follower,” according to Kelly, did all she was asked and more to get back as soon as possible. But was it worth it, just to have it all taken away again?
“You can be miserable for the entirety of your recovery, or you can find a way to look at things differently,” Kourtney says.
She chose the latter.
The weight room shifted from a necessary evil to a mental refuge. Instead of the goal being simply to get back on the court, Grossman started treating her rehab and lifting as accomplishments in themselves.
She took up hot yoga, and, like the weight training, the sweat built up from those sessions was the physical embodiment of accomplishment. Success was happening now, not somewhere down the line, somewhere in the distant future.
“You feel your goals are on pause, when, in reality, your goals are just changing,” Kourtney says. “You just need to find different goals to chase.”
By the time she arrived on the EWU campus, her new goals were simple. Eagles coaches told her the best way to get on the floor as a freshman was to rebound and play defense.
I can do that, Grossman thought. So that’s what she did.
Just her seventh game into that freshman season, she had her first double-digit rebound game against South Dakota State. Grossman was in the starting lineup the next game — unfortunate injuries to teammates made the move a necessity, almost — but she’s started every game since. Following her freshman season, Grossman was named the Big Sky's freshman of the year and an all-conference honorable mention for averaging 10.5 points and 10.5 rebounds per game.
Just like all those rebounds she’s gathered, Grossman grabbed a hold off her opportunity and hasn’t let go. In 51 games as a starter at Eastern Washington, she has recorded 31 double-double games and 37 double-digit rebound games.
These days, Grossman looks at practice as a privilege. She remembers when she was injured, hearing healthy teammates complain about practice, just wishing she could be out there. Whenever she is tempted to grumble now, she looks at her own injured teammates and “feels a little bit guilty,” and her thoughts return to gratitude that she can be on the court.
And that she learned other lessons along the way.
“I like to spend time reflecting on it so that I can know how to deal with things like that in the future and just take it as almost something to my advantage,” says Kourtney, who now reaches out to other athletes facing ACL tears and long recoveries. “That I was blessed to be able to go through that so that I will have those tools and be able to recognize some of those things in the future with other hard things that come up in my life.”
Kelly Grossman says her daughter has always been a grinder and work horse. In Kourtney's pre-surgery high school days, that hard work was meant to facilitate the fast-break, driving-and-slashing player that highlighted her athleticism. Her offensive attributes are still on display: Grossman has scored in double digits 24 times this season.
But embracing the grind accentuates another playing style now. Interior based, more physical on the defensive end. Sometimes, maybe a lot of the time, the grind isn’t even about basketball, like it all seemed to be about those high school days.
Kelly believes Kourtney’s injury tribulations both revealed and reshaped who she is.
“I can’t help but think that this is God’s way of saying it’s your turn now,” Kelly says. “Her personality has been what has gotten her through this journey. But I definitely can’t say that she would be the exact same person she is today if she hadn’t had to go through that.
“Tomorrow is promised to no one. She loves to make the most of every single day and every opportunity that she has.”
Those opportunities come in rebounds now, one at a time, and in more ways than one.
