Growing up in Seattle, Travis Decuire had ample opportunity to play basketball with other kids his age. But his dad, hoping Travis would capitalize on the talent he displayed at an early age, wasn’t certain if that was the best way to mold him into a successful player.
So every Saturday DeCuire would wake up and go to a local gym. He played with men much older, bigger and stronger. DeCuire took his lumps and bruises, but eventually learned a different, more effective way to play on his way to becoming an all-conference point guard at Montana.
Now, many years later, Montana’s basketball coach is taking a similar approach as he continues to expand his vision for pushing the Grizzlies into college basketball’s upper echelon.
[restrict paid=”true”]
In addition to an all Division I 2016-17 schedule that includes trips to Ole Miss, Oregon, USC and a venture to the Virgin Islands that could result in multiple games against Power 5 conference teams, the Grizzlies’ future scheduling will continue to send Montana into the gyms of teams playing at a level DeCuire hopes his team will soon attain.
“For us, that’s kind of what our program is going through right now,” DeCuire said, drawing a comparison to his early days growing on the court to the process he has set in place for Montana. “We’re playing at a high level. We’re playing against pros. We’re playing against teams that are projected to be very successful in the NCAA tournament. We’re going to take some lumps in the process, but it’s a growing process and we hope that three and four years into this deal we look back at it and say, ‘You know this program grew from that.'”
Though DeCuire couldn’t release exact details, Montana is currently positioned to play another exclusively Division I schedule in 2017-18. For a program that hadn’t competed entirely against that kind of competition in 58 years, doing so in back-to-back seasons is a change from the status quo.
And there is little reason to believe the Griz will start inviting non-Division I squads onto their schedule in Year 5 of the Travis DeCuire era.
“We always want to win as many games as we can, but for me winning in March is always the most important thing,” said DeCuire, sitting over a plate of biscuits and gravy at an off-campus restaurant. “How do you prepare your team for that? You have to take lumps early. It’s like the way I was raised.”
Montana will spend its 2017 non-conference slate traveling around the country playing a schedule that will feature five high-major games, including a trip east to play a team from the Big 10 and another from the ACC. There are tentative agreements with a few Pac-12 squads and the back end of the 2017 Legends Classic, a round-robin tournament in Los Angeles that will not only bring guard Michael Oguine back home, but also allow the Grizzlies to showcase themselves against a few mid-majors in a fertile recruiting ground.
But before they begin playing games that impact their record, Montana will embark on an August trip to Costa Rica that could last anywhere from five to 10 days. Paid for with the money they’ll receive from playing in the 2018 Great Alaskan Shootout, Montana will test itself against foreign teams from various countries.
“There will be some teams from Costa Rica,” DeCuire said. “They’re flying in teams. They’ll fly in maybe a Canadian team or an Australian team to make sure there is a good level of competition.”
The Costa Rica trip is made possible with an advanced payment from the company that puts on the Great Alaskan Shootout and the Paradise Jam in St. Thomas, which the Grizzlies will play in this November.
DeCuire is hoping playing in the Alaskan Shootout, a tournament consisting largely of other mid-majors, will give the Grizzlies a chance to jump start what is becoming a highly anticipated season. If the roster progresses the way the coaching staff hopes it will, Montana will begin that season with a bulk of its current team as seasoned veterans, and its incoming freshmen entering pivotal stages of their maturation process.
“Everyone thinks they can play at a high level,” DeCuire said, “so to create that opportunity to prove whether you can or you can’t is a huge recruiting tool.”
“At some point we hope to be able to get to a point where we go into games where we’re not saying we can win,” he later added, “but that we are going in expecting to win.”
[/restrict]Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.
