BOISE – It took Arthur Moreira 13 years and a journey of more than 6,000 miles to become a Division I head coach.
It’s taken him less than two seasons to win his first trophy.
In just his second season as the head coach at Idaho, Moreira – who became the first-ever Brazilian head coach in Division I women’s basketball history when he took the job – leveraged his international recruiting connections to build a roster stacked with talent. Then, he coached that team to 26 wins, including a staggering 15-game winning streak that’s still going as the Vandals prepare to open the Big Sky tournament Sunday against No. 9 Weber State.
Although Tricia Binford’s Montana State Bobcats chased them all the way to the line, a 75-64 win against Eastern Washington in Moscow on Monday meant that Moreira’s Vandals clinched the regular-season title with a record of 17-1, one game ahead of MSU.
It was the first trophy for Idaho women’s basketball since 2019, when Mikayla Ferenz scored 22 points per game and Taylor Pierce poured in 19 as the Vandals went 16-4 in the Big Sky regular season.
That campaign ended in heartbreak when the “Splash Sisters” went cold in a semifinal loss to Portland State.
This year, the Vandals return to Boise as the No. 1 seed for the first time since that season. Moreira was named the Big Sky Coach of the Year on Friday. The Vandals are riding a 15-game winning streak, the longest in program history
“(Moreira) is passionate about basketball, and he’s passionate about recruiting,” Idaho State head coach Seton Sobolewski said. “He’s been really able to use some of his Brazilian connections to boost his roster, and not just even Brazilian, he’s a good international recruiter.
“And then him and (associate head coach) Drew (Muscatell), they’re good with their game prep. They know what you’re going to do, and they know what to do to take it away. … It’s not surprising to me that he’s gotten it going this fast.”
The regular-season crown capped a stunning two-year turnaround for Idaho under Moreira, who might be the most unlikely head coach in all of Division I. Originally from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, he became a basketball fan by watching re-runs of the And1 mixtape tour on ESPN. Cut from his Division-II team shortly after coming to the United States, he instead grinded away as an assistant coach for over a decade, earning a reputation as an excellent recruiter.
When he was finally promoted to a head-coaching position a year ago after Carrie Eighmey unexpectedly left Idaho for South Dakota, he quickly picked up admirers around the league for salvaging an awkward situation. At one point, the Vandals’ roster had just three returning players, but Moreira cobbled together a starting lineup of five transfers, shaped the team around a physical defensive style and coached Idaho to 18 wins and the No. 3 seed.
The Vandals lost their opening game at the Big Sky tournament to Montana, but that surprising season turned out to be just a preview of what Moreira was capable of.
Given a full offseason to mold the roster, he transformed Idaho from a physical, defensive team into a fast-paced, high-scoring juggernaut. After finishing second in the conference in defense last year, the Vandals led the Big Sky in scoring this season by nearly four full points over second-place Montana State.
“Last year, I took the job here and didn’t have a lot of time to recruit, and we kind of had to adjust to the roster that we had,” Moreira said. “So I felt like we recruited a lot of tough kids, but they weren’t necessarily that skilled offensively, right? So we had to focus on our defense to win.
“But this year, we had a full offseason. I thought we did a great job recruiting how we actually want to play. … I said, I want to play fast. There’s a few concepts that I think will make us better as a transition team, and I think with the roster that we have, we have to focus on creating more possessions, you know. And we’re deep enough, we’re athletic enough that I think if we commit to this, when it gets late in games, teams are going to be tired. That’s when we’re going to be able to separate, you know?”
Point guard Hope Hassmann, a returner who’s taken on a bigger role this season after Olivia Nelson graduated, leads the team with 14.3 points per game, but five Vandals are scoring in double figures. Hassman landed on the Big Sky’s first-team all-conference squad.
That includes sharpshooting wing Kyra Gardner, a Washington State transfer who dropped 26 points on her former school in a season-opening win, and two Brazilian post players in 6-foot-5 Lorena Barbosa and 6-foot Debora dos Santos. Gardner was named the Newcomer of the Year in the Big Sky last week while dos Santos was named the top reserve.
Moreira originally recruited the Brazilian duo to San Francisco, where he was an assistant coach for seven seasons. At Idaho this year, they never share the court, but together Barbosa, a prodigiously skilled athlete who battled injuries at USF, and dos Santos, an all-WCC selection with the Dons, combine to give the Vandals 40 minutes of top-tier post production every single night.
“I always note that they don’t get as much credit as they deserve, because their numbers aren’t crazy, right? Because we haven’t played them together at all this year yet, we just rotate them in and out,” Moreira said. “So they’re always fresh, and they’re super efficient. The stats don’t jump out. But when you combine it to one position, we’re getting, like, 25 and 15 out of our center. … So it’s just a huge game changer for us.”
In a mid-major league where teams sometimes struggle to recruit even one competent post player, that gives the Vandals a sizable advantage.
“Barbosa, at 6-5, her mobility at her size, and ability to hit the 3, and then dos Santos came from the WCC, where she was first-team all-conference with 18 points, 12 rebounds,” Sobolewski said. “And they’re just monsters. They’re so hard to match up with, and they’re older and experienced. They’re both fifth-year kids.”
With one of Barbosa and dos Santos always on the floor, the Vandals lead the conference in rebounding by huge margins as Moreira often sends all five players crashing to the offensive glass in his quest for more possessions – more opportunities to score.
Add it all up, and Idaho has lost just once since December 13, a stretch of 19 games. And the Vandals even avenged that one loss, a 99-66 blowout to defending conference champs Montana State in Bozeman, with a 73-70 overtime win over the Bobcats in Moscow a month later.
“I think that kind of just flipped the switch, and it got us the girls’ attention – not that we didn’t have it before,” Moreira said about the Montana State loss. “But there’s times that we have to buckle down and follow the game plan, you know? And I felt like after we got whooped that bad, when we practiced the next day or two days later, their attention to detail was different, their focus was different. They were locked in. And that kind of flipped our season.”
After beating the Bobcats in the rematch, they cruised to the title, winning their last eight games of the season by double digits.
And now Moreira might be just three more games away from completing a stunning rebuild.
“I mean, when players come here, I pretty much told them, if you guys come to Idaho, we’re going to win the conference,” Moreira said. “I’m building a team to win the conference. I don’t believe in rebuilds. I want to be competing for the top of the league every year.”
Idaho takes on Weber State at noon today in Boise, Idaho. The Wildcats cruised past Portland State 76-53 on Saturday
