BOISE, Idaho — A generation in the making – it seems like an invisible goal when trying to communicate such gravitas to the current generation making up the ranks of men’s college basketball.
Danny Sprinkle has never worried about the state of society, refusing to fall for an common ailment among a great many college coaches: wasting time complaining about the a current landscape of college basketball ripe with transfers and players who mimic NBA superstars by always prioritizing what is best for the individual instead of his team.
Instead, one of Montana State University’s most passionate and driven alumn, who also happens to be an in-state product and one of the Treasure State’s favorite sons….and also happens to be the head coach of the MSU men’s basketball team refuses to succumb to any narrative about the failings of the young men who make up one of America’s most rapidly changing sports.
Mid-major college basketball coaches can blame the one-time transfer rule or the mystical, ‘evil’ transfer portal. And it happens often.
Or the lens can become centered upon embracing opportunity and using the rapidly changing landscape to your advantage.
Build a culture and you’ll build a team. Believe in a vision and you can inspire those around you. Work tirelessly until your dreams come true.
When Sprinkle was first introduced as Montana State’s head coach on April 5 of 2019, he spoke his dream of the program he once starred for as a slick-shooting, smooth-talking guard from Montana’s Capital City into existence.
And on Saturday evening in Boise, Idaho, Sprinkle and the Bobcats completed their coronation as Big Sky Conference champions.
“I had a vision when I got the job. And I’m relentless with our players with that vision,” Sprinkle said after his team’s 87-66 victory over Northern Colorado on Saturday night here. “And anything less than that vision is not acceptable. From showing up on time to the weight room to showing up on time to class, the little things, they add up the discipline, that’s what wins big games like this.
“And it’s not all just basketball, it’s doing the right thing. We talk a lot of hard work works. It is hard work to bus back and get back at 3 a.m. in the morning be at eight o’clock class. But yeah, we’re still checking their classes, because they need to know that’s important.”
Saturday evening, Montana State built a double-digit lead less than nine minutes into the game and kept it at least that wide, pulling ahead by 25 points (71-46) with seven minutes left of the Big Sky Tournament championship game.
As the clock wound down at Idaho Central Arena with 4,134 fans mostly partisan to MSU accentuating the best championship game atmosphere since the Big Sky moved its tournament to a neutral site, Montana State super senior Abdul Mohamed started to un-tuck his jersey and unleashed excitement as Montana State could taste a net cutting more than 25 years in the making.
Xavier Bishop came to Montana State as a transfer from Missouri-Kansas City, sitting out a year while Harald Frey ran the show during Sprinke’s first season at the helm.
Amin Adamu followed Dan Russell, the former head coach at Casper College (Wyoming) when Russell joined Sprinkle’s staff as an assistant.
Mohamed also played at a Wyoming JC, spending two years at Gillette College and earning All-American honors. He then spent two seasons at North Texas before graduate transferring to Montana State. Last season, he helped the Bobcats reach the Big Sky Tournament title game but also had to watch as UNT advanced to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, one of the latest Cinderella stories that make this time of year so compelling.
If not for the completely unique time we all live in, Montana State’s 65-55 loss to Eastern Washington in the BSC title game last March would have been a heartbreaking end to the Bobcat careers of all three.
Instead, Bishop and Mohamed decided to come back for a sixth college basketball season, Adamu came back for his fifth and the trio got to play on a roster bolsted by a league MVP version of junior center Jubrile Belo plus the pivotal addition of RaeQuan Battle, a former four-star recruit who spent time at the University of Washington before transferring to MSU on the way to earning Top Reserve honors his first season in the Big Sky.
“When you speak, please refer to us as champs,” Mohamed gleefully suggested to the group of roughly 20 media members on hand to watch the super-senior trio plus Belo sit at the press table exuberantly expressing their excitement for about 15 minutes.
“It’s so surreal man, you live your dream. As a kid being from Canada, I used to watch YouTube videos of guys who went to march madness, one shining moment so I was just taking it all in and I still can’t believe it right now. It’s gonna take me a couple of days but I got to wake up. Right now I’m just dreaming and I don’t want to wake up.”
That cumulative maturity, veteran leadership and the drive for mounting one last championship charge led the Bobcats to partying like it was 1996 on Saturday night.
“All the work we put in this summer this fall and just to continue working during the season,” said Bishop who surpassed 1,800 points in his college career and scored 18 points to go with eight assists in the championship game on the way to earning Big Sky Tournament MVP honors. “Last year we had a lot of motivation when we were on the stage in the championship and we didn’t complete the goal.
“But man just Selection Sunday, like Abdullah said, It’s stuff you dream of as a kid and it’s like we’re living our dream. And I mean, we’re blessed. We’re blessed. Yeah, that’s all we can say. We’re blessed. Chicken wings, chicken wings.”
ESPN college hoops analyst Fran Fraschilla talked to the Montana State team before they lost in overtime to Colorado in Boulder. Fraschilla told the MSU squad, ‘There’s going to be a time in January or February where there is some adversity. You gotta remind these guys, can you smell the chicken wings? Because everyone at Selection Sunday has chicken wings.
“You have to be able to see past what you are going through right now. You have to see that end goal.”
On Sunday evening, Montana State returned to Brick Breeden Fieldhouse for one last reunion to celebrate this season’s historic team. The Bobcats have 27 wins under their belts and take a No. 14 seed into Friday’s NCAA Tournament matchup against third-seeded Texas Tech at 11:45 MDT in San Diego, California.
“This has really been a feeling I could not describe, honestly because I’ve been waiting for moments like these my whole life and to finally do it with my brothers, especially coming all this way from London, we’ve actually made it man,” said Belo, MSU’s hulking MVP center from the United Kingdom who also earned Big Sky Defensive Player of the Year this season. “We’ve done everything that we said we were going to do after that last championship game.”
Sprinkle assembled a roster from quite literally all over the globe. Battle comes from an Indian Reservation in Western Washington. Mohamed and Kellyn Tynes are from Canada. Belo, Adamu and Osobor are from the United Kingdom, as is assistant coach Chris Haslam.
Bishop hails from Springfield, Illinois, a 5-foot-7 Mighty Mouse who’s father once played football for the Montana Grizzlies. Sophomore Nick Gazelas, an unsung hero in the championship game by scoring 15 points, went to junior college in rural Texas. Tyler Patterson, a skinny sophomore sharpshooter from outside Seattle, also showed his sniper skills in the championship game.
Borja Fernandez, a stretch power forward who played many more minutes as a freshman last season, hails from Spain while Sam Lecholat came to Montana State as a former Wyoming Gatorade Player of the Year and made an impact on the rotation.
Alex Germer, a Missoula Sentinel product who’s father Chad is the offensive line coach for the Montana Griz football team while Alex was the MaxPreps Montana Player of the Year last year, is one of two Montana natives on the team along with Bozeman High alum and walk-on Carter Ash.
Patrick McMahon, a swingman from Palmer, Alaska who was also a Gatorade Player of the Year as a senior, got into the game in the first half on Saturday and even scored a bucket (it was called off).
That’s the type of trust Sprinkle has in his players and the type of trust he’s cultivated in them for him. It didn’t matter that Belo was hobbled by a knee injury for close to two weeks or that Battle spent the week in Boise sick or that Bishop rolled his ankle in MSU’s regular-season finale against Northern Colorado a week to the day between matchups in Bozeman and Boise.
Montana State’s Senior Day celebration in the Brick a little more than a week ago culminated with Battle hitting a 35-footer at the buzzer to lift Montana State to an 87-85 win over UNC, a play that was the No. 1 play of the night on SportsCenter that evening. MSU has never turned back, riding the momentum of a wicked hot streak inspired by an 80-74 loss to rival Montana in Missoula on February 27.
So much of that extended focus into March comes from the moment Sprinkle unloaded the bus upon returning to Bozeman from Missoula. The head coach admitted that he was seething with anger after he thought his veteran players wilted under the pressure of playing their rivals at Dahlberg Arena for the first time with a hostile crowd on hand.
When they got back from the Garden City, Sprinkle took the team into their home arena and pointed to the banners of the only other Bobcat teams that advanced to the NCAA Tournament. He told his team that if they wanted to be remembered, they better close out the first outright Big Sky regular-season title for the program in 20 years on their home court. And they better focus if they wanted to advance to men’s college basketball’s biggest stage.
“One thing I can say is this program isn’t for everybody,” Bishop said when asked about Sprinkle “He challenges us, he makes us uncomfortable. And he expects perfection. Man, he pushes us.
“Just seeing somebody who’s so invested in us. I mean, it’s more than just a player coach relationship with him. And all he’s always looking out for us, always making sure we’re good. He’s our best friends but he goes is on us too, right? He the biggest thing is he believes in us. And we believe in him. He always has our back.”
A banner for Stu Starner’s ‘Cats of 1987 hangs, remembering a team that took the league by storm by employing the 3-pointer as well as anyone.
A banner hangs for the 1996 Bobcats, a team that Sprinkle helped shoot to the championship by hitting a then-record seven 3-pointers and scoring 30 points to lift MSU to the Big Dance with a win over Weber State in Bozeman.
And he pointed to the banner of the 2002 Bobcats, a squad that marked longtime head coach Mick Durham’s last great team (he resigned in 2006, giving way to more than a decade of mediocrity for MSU hoops).
Those Bobcats are the last team before this one to win 20 games in a season. Those ‘Cats fell short, losing in the last Big Sky Tournament hosted in Bozeman when Montana’s Dan Trammel had a tip-in dunk in the buzzer-beater to oust the Bobcats in the semis and spur the Griz into the NCAA Tournament for the first of eight times this century.
Now banners commemorating this unforgettable run under the guidance of one of the university’s most beloved alumni will hang at the Brick forever more.
“When we were on the court after we got back from Missoula, I said, You guys have no idea how many people who have put blood, sweat and tears into their teams aren’t on those banner,” Sprinkle said. “I made sure that they know that there’s nothing like a championship team. There’s nothing like it. It bonds people forever.
“Our text thread with our 1996 team, every day, they are texting me something . It’s a special bond. And when you go through some of these shared experiences like that, we’ve been through our retreat and the games and adversity, and when you win a championship, there’s nothing like it.
“These guys, 20, 30 years from now, they’re going to be able to bring their kids back their wives, they’re going to be able to look at that banner and know they were on that team. I told them no matter what hardships you go through in life, you’re going to be able to lay your head down when you are 40, 50. You’re a champion. And nobody can ever take that away from me, no matter how hard life gets.”
