The drive from Pocatello to Ogden is not the kind of thing that glossy travel guides are written about. The brown sage grass scrub of Southeast Idaho transitions into the sprawling sameness of the Salt Lake City exurbs – backdropped, to be fair, by the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains. The biggest tourist attraction on the route is Preston High School, where Napoleon Dynamite was filmed.
It’s about two hours of shut-your-brain-off-and-get-it-done driving – and then, after four more hours of that, you’ve made it to Cedar City.
Southern Utah isn’t the farthest-flung school in the spread-out footprint of the Big Sky Conference – Northern Arizona is even farther south, and Northern Colorado is isolated on the edge of the Great Plains, a full seven hours drive east of Ogden – but it might be the most out-of-place. The T-Birds had no history or existing rivalries with other Big Sky schools when they left the Summit League and Great West Conference (in football), the former a mostly Midwestern conference with schools as far east as Missouri and Illinois, to join the Big Sky in 2012.
The other teams in the conference soon learned to dread traveling to Cedar City which, unlike Flagstaff or Greeley, isn’t a short drive from one of the biggest airports in the country. Like the new kid at the lunch table, Southern Utah struggled to fit in.
North Dakota, the other team that joined with SUU in 2012 as full-time members, suffered from similar geographic and historic isolation and has already moved on, ironically to Southern Utah’s old home in the Summit League. UND also joined the Missouri Valley Football Conference.
The Thunderbirds are taking a new journey after the 2021-22 season, exiting the Big Sky Conference to join the Western Athletic Conference as the new-look WAC finishes bringing football back.
“At least we don’t have to go to Cedar City,” Idaho women’s basketball coach Jon Newlee quipped. “It’s a rough trip getting out there, so that’s nice.”
Southern Utah found success in its brief tenure in the Big Sky, mostly coming on the football field where the Thunderbirds won two conference championships in three years between 2015 and 2017 under Ed Lamb and Demario Warren. SUU made the FCS playoffs three times during that run and had a slew of players get shots in the NFL, including safety Miles Killebrew getting selected in the 4th round of the 2016 NFL Draft and cornerback LeShaun Sims going in the fifth round that same year.
Those two were on the same defense as James Cowser during his exceptional career that saw him set the all-time Division I records for sacks (59) and tackles for loss (80) in an individual career. He played three seasons for the Oakland Raiders. Sims (Cincinnati Bengals) and Killebrew (Pittsburgh Steelers) are still playing in the league.
The school’s basketball teams, on the other hand, have mostly struggled – not surprising when joining a conference that had existing powers like Montana and Weber State on the men’s side and a host of rotating contenders on the women’s side.
In their final year in the league, though, both Southern Utah teams have a chance to take a trophy with them on their way out at this week’s Big Sky Tournament in Boise.
After winning 20 games just once (in 2013-14) and finishing above .500 three times as a member of the Big Sky, the Thunderbirds’ women’s team clinched the No. 3 seed with a 14-6 conference record and will play the winner of the Idaho-Portland State game at 8 p.m. Tuesday. It’s the second year in a row SUU has showed well after struggling mightily when first joining the league.
In Tracy Sanders’ third year as head coach, SUU also owns wins over Idaho State and Montana State, the two teams ahead of the T-Birds in the standings.
The Thunderbirds won just 10 conference games over the four seasons from 2015-16 to 2018-19, but Southern Utah’s turnaround coincided with the hiring of Sanders, a former St. Mary’s star and assistant coach who took the Thunderbirds to 18 wins in 2019-20, her first year at the helm.
When leading scorer Liz Graves, a former BYU and Weber State transfer who averaged 17 points at SUU, left after the COVID-impacted 2020-21 season, Sanders remodeled the Thunderbirds into the most democratic team in the league.
All four of Southern Utah’s top scorers – Darri Dotson, Cherita Daugherty, Daylani Ballena and Lizzy Williamson – average between 10 and 11 points per game, and Madelyn Eaton comes off the bench to add 8.9.
“I feel like we have a lot of versatility this year,” Sanders said. “You know, the past couple years that I’ve been here we’ve had kind of one prolific scorer that we had to center everything around, and the ball kind of stopped when it was in their hands. So I think this year we just have a lot more weapons.”
In a year of transfers and turmoil across the conference, all five were on the team a year ago, and all except Williamson played big minutes.
Williamson, a 6-5 redshirt sophomore center from Adelaide, Australia, would likely be competing with Idaho State’s Tomekia Whitman for the Big Sky’s Most Improved Player Award if that award was given out. After scoring 27 total points a year ago, she’s averaging 10 points and 8.2 rebounds per game and combining with Dotson (previously Darri Frandsen, and the daughter of Southern Utah’s all-time leading scorer Cherri Frandsen) to give the T-Birds the best twin towers in the league.
Dotson, a 6-1 forward, averages 10.9 points and 8.1 rebounds per game, and Southern Utah has the best rebounding margin in the conference with that duo complimenting steady point guard Ballena, wing scorer Daugherty and sharpshooting reserve Eaton.
“It’s a little frustrating at times, because I wish we’d have five or six people show up on the same night,” Sanders said. “I think we’re getting to that point, but I feel like we have a good combination of shooters and drivers and some post players.”
After winning eight of their first nine conference games, the Thunderbirds have been up and down, but they’ve won their last two games going into the conference tournament, including one against conference champion Idaho State.
The long winning streak right out of the gate turned some heads for the Southern Utah women. That’s never needed to be the case for the Southern Utah men, who haven’t been under the radar since they hired Todd Simon as head coach after a six-win season in 2015-16.
Simon first coached at basketball factory Findlay Prep in Las Vegas, where his teams went 192-9, before moving to an assistant role at UNLV, where he brought in multiple top-15 recruiting classes in his three years on the bench.
Fitting for someone with Simon’s Las Vegas background, it was a fascinating gamble, a bet that Simon’s recruiting connections could overcome his near-total lack of college coaching experience. The Thunderbirds couldn’t compete with Weber or Montana on resources or tradition – why not try a different route to the top?
So far, that path has been a slow one to success.
After another six-win season in Simon’s first year as his incoming transfers sat on the bench, the Thunderbirds have been one of the most talented teams in the Big Sky Conference every year. His second team featured a bevy of high-major dropdowns in Cam Oluyitan (Boise State), Dwayne Morgan (UNLV) and Andre Adams (Arizona State).
“We’ve been a beneficiary of (the transfer portal),” Simon said. “We’re still building a lot of our core around our incoming freshmen. But we just want guys that are the right fit for who we are, and it doesn’t really matter where they come from.”
It still took three years for SUU to get back to .500 under Simon, when the T-Birds finished 17-17 in 2018-19. They inched up to 17-15 in 2019-20, the final year for Oluyitan, Adams and Morgan.
By that time, Simon had already brought in the next wave of transfers. John Knight III (Utah State) and Tevian Jones (Illinois), along with high school recruits like Dre Marin, Maizen Fausett and Harrison Butler, led Southern Utah to a sparkling 20-4 record and a regular-season conference title in the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season. Jones, a bouncy wing and former 4-star recruit, became the first Thunderbird ever named to the all-Big Sky first team. Simon was named the Big Sky Coach of the Year last season.
“That was that was a big moment for us as a program, to kind of go through the trials and tribulations of last season and be able to win those games down the stretch, and so that was important,” Simon said.
The Thunderbirds were the No. 1 seed going into Boise, but after handling Northern Colorado in the quarterfinals, they lost 80-77 to Montana State in overtime in the semifinals in the game of the tournament.
It was a reversal of fortune for the Thunderbirds, who were used to being the ones pulling the upsets under Simon. They knocked out Tyler Hall and Montana State 108-105 in an all-time classic triple-overtime game in Simon’s second season behind a still-standing tournament record 43 points from Randy Onwuasor. The next year – the final year the tournament was in Reno – they upset No. 2 Idaho and Vic Sanders in the quarters. The year after that, with the tournament in its first year in Boise, they did it again, beating league MVP Jordan Davis and No. 2 Northern Colorado to go to the semifinals.
“There was certainly a bull’s eye on us,” Simon said after the Montana State loss. “We went from being the hunters to the hunted. They deserved it. We had a big target on us and when you have that target, you don’t have a huge margin for error.”
As defending regular-season champions who returned almost the entire roster – the T-Birds have nine seniors listed – the entire league was gunning for SUU again this year. Jones was named preseason MVP; Knight and Fausett joined him on the preseason all-conference team.
They lost their regular-season crown to Montana State, but still eased into the second seed with 20 wins and a 14-6 conference record. They’ll play the winner of the Portland State-Idaho State game at 5:30 p.m. Thursday.
That, then, is what is on the line for Southern Utah in Boise this week – the women hoping to burst out of obscurity and snatch a title from the anointed favorites in Idaho State and Montana State, the men hoping to win a years-long wager and break through after three straight semifinal losses.
Both know it’s their last chance. Both are looking for a fitting farewell.
“Those are fond memories,” Simon said. “We’ll miss competing against a lot of the coaches in this league, we’ll miss a lot of the faces that we see on the road, we’ll certainly miss all of those relationships. … The Big Sky is a tremendous conference. I don’t think anyone truly appreciates the level of basketball that’s in this league outside of the inner circle of officials and coaches and players.”
