BOISE, Idaho – In the 10 years since the Idaho women’s basketball team made it to the NCAA Tournament for the last time, the Vandals have had plenty of close calls.
In 2019, a shocking shooting performance against Portland State’s 2-3 zone knocked the No. 1 seed Vandals out in the semifinals, ending the careers of the legendary “Splash Sisters,” Mikayla Ferenz and Taylor Pierce.
The next year, they were back in the championship game and slated to play Montana State before the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the tournament – and the rest of the world – the night before the chipper.
In 2021, they made it back to the final day of the Big Sky Tournament, only to be wiped out by rival Idaho State in one of the most lopsided title games in conference history.
That loss marked the end of an era as Jon Newlee’s final great team at Idaho. The longtime head coach, who had been with the Vandals since 2008, stayed for two more seasons but went under .500 in both. In her first and only season at the helm, Newlee’s successor Carrie Eighmey similarly went 15-16 in 2024. When Eighmey left after the season, leaving the program with just two returning players, it looked like rock bottom – who knew when the once-proud program would return to the top?
Yet the unknown assistant coach promoted to replace Eighmey turned out to have been the best possible hire – and on Wednesday, Arthur Moreira and the Vandals were back on the biggest stage. This time, there were no disappointments, as the second-year head coach and his deep, resilient team took Idaho back to the NCAA Tournament with a 60-57 win over Montana State.
The win was their 29th of the season, breaking a program record originally set in 1984-85.
“It means a lot, because they deserve it,” Moreira said. “There’s a really rich tradition in women’s basketball. We play in, in my opinion, the most beautiful arena in the country. And we have a lot of support. Our community’s awesome. Our fans are awesome. We have the best band in the country. … They deserve to get on that flight that the NCAA is going to fly us out and play in that first round. It’s a special place.”
Moreira is not the only Big Sky coach in recent memory to effect a quick turnaround. Mark Campbell memorably coached Sacramento State to a March Madness berth in his second year in 2023 before leaving after the season for TCU.
But the sheer unlikelihood of Moreira’s journey is unmatched. Campbell, after all, grew up in Bellingham, Washington, and played at Division-I schools like Cal Poly and Hawaii before becoming a highly-regarded assistant at Oregon who helped recruit Sabrina Ionescu and Satou Sabally to the Ducks.
Moreira not only grew up in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as a basketball-obsessed outlier in a soccer-mad country, he hardly played in Division II at Sonoma State before opting instead to begin a coaching career that’s taken him all around the West. Prior to becoming Eighmey’s assistant at Idaho, he spent seven seasons at San Francisco – a nice resume but hardly the sort of profile expected to completely turn around Idaho’s fortunes in two years.
In his first year, he took a completely new roster to 18 wins in a top-four seed in the Big Sky Tournament. In his second, he built a deep team anchored by junior point guard Hope Hassmann and fifth-year Brazilian posts Lorena Barbosa and Debora dos Santos, each of whom followed him over from San Francisco. Entering Wednesday’s game, the Vandals had won 17 games in a row.
“It’s two years, but you know, it feels like it was seven years with how much work we had to put in, and these girls had to put in,” Moreira said. “When we took over, there was only two returners on the team and only one that played. … So we kind of had to build it from scratch. I know there’s a lot of mixed opinions about the transfer portal, but I felt like we found a pretty good formula of bringing some really good freshmen out of high school and then mixing in with kids like Hope and kids like Deb that are great for the culture and are super talented players, and they allowed us to turn it around that quick.”
On Wednesday, Moreira matched up against a coach with nearly two decades more experience in their current job – Montana State’s Tricia Binford, who in her 21st season has become the unquestioned don of Big Sky coaches in the decade since Robin Selvig’s retirement at Montana. The Bobcats have won over half their games in 18 straight seasons, and went to the NCAA Tournament in 2017, 2022 and 2025. The latter of those appearances came with a conference-record 30-win season as Binford leaned heavily into an aggressive full-court defense.
In the teams’ first matchup, that pressure undressed the Vandals, forcing 25 turnovers in a 99-66 Montana State win in Bozeman – still Idaho’s last loss.
In their second, Moreira struck back with his own defensive adjustment, stashing his center on poor-shooting Bobcats point guard Jamison Philip and telling them not to leave the paint. The tweak short-circuited the MSU offense as Philip couldn’t cash in enough open shots and the rest of the Bobcats repeatedly drove into a wall under the hoop. Montana State shot just 30 percent in a 73-70 overtime loss that gave Idaho a one-game lead in the conference race.
Five weeks after that pivotal victory, it was Moreira’s adjustments that again put his team in perfect position for the win.
With nobody guarding her outside of the paint, Philip took 14 shots, the most for Montana State, but made just four. Taylee Chirrick and Addison Harris, the Bobcats’ star sophomores, couldn’t find space and finished a combined 7 of 19 for 19 points. On offense, the Vandals pushed the ball vertically like the ‘99 Rams against Montana State’s press and slipped their bigs into space in the halfcourt, turning MSU’s aggressive traps into 4-on-3 advantages and open corner 3s.
“I don’t mean this in the wrong way at all, but one of the talks in the locker room was like, do not respect their defense too much,” Moreira said. “Sometimes when you play a team like that, you’re so scared of their pressure that you take aggression away. Our goal in that first half was to attack them, you know, if they’re going to press us, let’s attack them.”
Idaho took the lead with a 6-0 run to close the first quarter and never allowed Montana State to lead again, despite the Bobcats’ best efforts.
The Vandals closed the third quarter on a 5-0 run and Ana Beatriz Passos, who led the Vandals with 12 points, opened the fourth quarter with a layup to put them up 55-44.
As the Montana State half of a large crowd got increasingly and desperately loud, the Bobcats began to grind their way back into it. In fact, Idaho wouldn’t make a field goal for the rest of the game after Beatriz Passos’ bucket.
Isobel Bunyan’s 3-pointer for Montana State with under four minutes to go closed the deficit to four as, for the first time in the game, Idaho scrambled to break the Bobcats’ defensive pressure.
Another 3-pointer by Montana State’s Ella Johnson with 54 seconds to play slashed Idaho’s lead to one, 58-57, before Hassmann made one free throw on each of the Vandals’ subsequent possessions to push it back to 60-57.
With a three-point lead, Moreira had visions of Montana State’s overtime win against Eastern Washington in the semifinals the day before, when MSU’s Brianne Bailey swished a leaning 3 from the left wing to force overtime before the Bobcats’ narrowly escaped, 79-77.
This time, it was Johnson rising up from nearly the same spot on the court – and Barbosa’s arm reaching up to block the shot. Hassmann fell on the ball with 1.1 seconds left, and even though the point guard missed both her ensuing free throws, it didn’t matter.
As the buzzer sounded, Moreira sprinted gleefully into a knot of players on the court, embracing his assistant coach as the confetti rained down.
Hassmann, who finished with 11 points, four rebounds and four assists, was named the tournament MVP, and joined on the all-tournament team by wing Kyra Gardner and dos Santos.
As the postgame press conference started, Idaho SID Austin Christensen plonked the Vandals’ second Big Sky trophy of the year on the table between Moreira and Hassmann. And with the trophy that represented the end of a decade of close calls and frustration next to him, Moreira reflected on an achievement that will last much longer than that.
“I feel like, because of the culture now in college, your players not staying very long, the word legacy has kind of gone away,” Moreira said. “And these girls now, even the ones that were here for one year, if they look down the line 20 years from now … this team is going to be down in the history books in a lot of categories. The win streak, I think 29 is also the most wins in school history.
“And maybe this team down the line can even go to the Hall of Fame. When they have their families, when they’re done with their careers, they’ll always have something to look back to. Not everybody can say that.”
