The women's team has shown the effects of a nearly 500-mile ride across Montana in their cramped SKC van, blown a 19-point second-half lead and lost, 90-80, to Little Big Horn College. And now the men are picking up where the ladies left off.
Little Big Horn races to a 7-0 lead in the first
is up 19-4, much to the delight of several hundred fans on the Crow Reservation.
On the sidelines, SKC coach Zach Camel looks down his bench.
He doesn't need binoculars.
It is the team's first game since Christmas break, and two players did not return to classes, leaving Camel with just seven players to finish the season.
The number of players he and women's coach Juan Perez can keep after tryouts is limited to the number of seats in two vans that carry the teams to their games.
Out on the Apsaalooka Center court, Camel's depleted squad is up against some of the best-known basketball names, not just in Indian Country but in all Montana: Elvis Old Bull Jr. Bobby Takes Enemy. Little Big Horn's coach, Gordon Real Bird Sr., is a Montana legend in his own right, having guided Elvis Old Bull Sr. and Lodge Grass High School to three straight Class B state championships in the 1980s.
Old Bull Jr. - "E.J." to fans on the Crow Reservation - will go on to score 30 points this January night, and the rout is on.
Or is it?
All at once, the SKC players get their legs under them, shaking off the long ride earlier in the day that had caught up to the women's team. Joseph Chartraw, a forward from Neah Bay, Wash., and the Makah Reservation, finds his shooting touch. So does Howard Walker, a forward from Polson and the Flathead Reservation, and - appropriately - guard Pius Takes Horse, who hails from Wyola and the same Crow Reservation where this game is being played, and is himself a former Little Big Horn player.
Takes Horse has added inspiration. His 5-year-old son, Chance Aaron Anthony, who lives with his maternal grandparents in Billings and who Takes Horse doesn't get to see very often, is in the crowd.
Center Andrew Zimmer of Polson, the only nontribal player on the team, starts crashing the boards. Ed Running Rabbit, who played his high school ball at C.M. Russell in Great Falls, starts flicking beautiful no-look passes to open teammates.
The Bison are running, pressing, sharing, shooting and, most importantly, hitting. Suddenly, they are incredibly fun to watch. Almost as suddenly, they are ahead, taking their first lead at 31-29 with 8:40 left in the first half on a pair of free throws by Justin Tonasket, a guard from Omak, Wash., and the Colville Reservation.
Little Big Horn College will never lead again. After falling behind by
15 points, SKC outscores the Rams 119-95 the rest of the way to post a 123-114 victory.
Outside in the bitter cold eastern Montana night, Camel warms up the men's team van. One by one the players wander out from the Crow gym. Takes Horse, who has lots more family to say hi to in addition to his son, is the last.
They will spend the night in Billings and the men's and women's teams will return to Crow Agency the next evening to do it all over again with two more games against Little Big Horn College, a National Junior Collegiate Athletic Association member that competes in the Mon-Dak Conference.
SKC plays most of its games on the road. Members of no conference, the Bison play a ragtag and independent schedule of junior colleges, tribal colleges and Frontier Conference junior varsity squads - and compete in the Kicking Horse Job Corps basketball league back home as well.
There are no basketball scholarships at Salish Kootenai College, and no gym either.
Not yet, anyway.
But basketball there is, and for
16 men and women - many of them fathers and mothers, some as old as 28 - SKC gives them a chance to keep playing the sport they don't want to leave behind while furthering their education.
The women's team from Salish Kootenai College unloads at Little Big Horn College's Apsaalooka Center in Crow Agency after the nearly 500-mile trip from Pablo.
------------------
She is a single mother of two children, ages 8 and 6, is carrying 18 credits this semester, maintains a 3.5 grade point average, is on the Salish Kootenai College student Senate, is putting in 450 hours as an AmeriCorps volunteer, practices nightly with her teammates and has already ridden more than 7,000 miles in a van this season to play basketball.
Twenty-eight-year-old Angie Redstar, a Nez Perce tribal member and business major, loves this game.
"I'll play it until my legs go dead," Redstar says. "It keeps me alive. Basketball has kept me in school, it's kept me from drinking, it's kept me from doing drugs - it's kept me from everything ... except getting pregnant."
She giggles at that. The only member of the SKC women's team who is from outside Montana - Redstar hails from the Colville Reservation in Washington - she is the unofficial team comedian.
On the men's side, that role falls to Running Rabbit. On the long trip to the Crow Reservation, near an
on-ramp by Bozeman, a bearded hitchhiker had held out his thumb as Camel piloted the SKC van past the man.
"Pick him up," someone hollered from the back of the sardine-packed vehicle.
Camel gave an "are-you-kidding-me" glance to his players in the rearview mirror, to which Running Rabbit replied, "But Zach, maybe he can rebound."
At the age of 26, Running Rabbit is the oldest player on the men's team.
"They say I'm the oldest, and act the youngest," he says.
The father of a 15-month-old daughter, Raelei, he's bounced around a lot since graduating from Great Falls Russell in 1998, living and working in places such as Baltimore and Phoenix, and playing basketball for a year at both the University of Great Falls and MSU-Northern.
His sister, who is friends with Kodi Kuka, another CMR product who plays for the SKC women's team, suggested he check out the college in Pablo. He's in his third year, taking psychology classes, and is interested in becoming a school counselor and perhaps coaching.
"Basketball won't feed me the rest of my life," Running Rabbit says. "I've got to do it while I can."
Several of the players have found the Salish Kootenai tribal college a better fit after first enrolling at other public or private institutions. Carla McLean, one of five players on the women's team from the Blackfeet Reservation, went to the University of Great Falls, a Catholic college, after high school.
"I played there a semester, but I didn't care for the coaching," she says. "And I didn't feel comfortable there. Not to be rude, but the Catholic traditions and my belief system clashed."
Rikki Ollinger, also of Browning and who scored 19 points in the first game against Little Big Horn, calls her decision to enroll at Dawson Community College in Glendive out of high school "a big mistake."
Tonasket, the guard from the Colville Reservation, played at Wenatchee Valley Community College before transferring.
"I just didn't feel it was the place for me," he says. "I really like it here. It's not too big, not too small, and every Native American shares the same history. There's a laid-back atmosphere, everybody's willing to work hard, and you saw it (in the victory over Little Big Horn): Everybody's got each other's backs."
For Chartraw, who led the Bison with 27 points in the first win over Little Big Horn, basketball has been a ticket to life outside his isolated reservation, which sits on the tip of Washington's Olympic Peninsula.
"Where I come from, no one ever leaves," Chartraw says. "There are a lot of great athletes who never left Neah Bay. People just kind of expect you stay there your whole life and be a fisherman."
Chartraw also started his college career elsewhere, at Bellevue Community College, where he was recruited by assistant coach Bryan Brown, son of longtime Seattle SuperSonics player "Downtown" Freddie Brown. And he played AAU ball for former University of Montana player Travis DeCuire, who coached at the high school and junior college level in the Seattle area before becoming an assistant coach at Old Dominion University.
"Basketball has taken me everywhere I've ever been," says Chartraw, 20. "Miami, Texas, Memphis, New York, North Carolina - I've already been all those places just playing basketball."
Chartraw is one of two men on the trip who will become fathers within hours of returning to the Flathead Reservation - his girlfriend, Darralynn Hill, will give birth to a daughter the day after the men get back.
Women's coach and athletic director Juan Perez is in the same boat. The day after the loss to Little Big Horn, Perez calls his wife Jody. She is pregnant with their fourth child, due any second and, barring that, due to be induced about
12 hours after the women's game
tips off.
Perez has brought his brother, Silas, along on the trip to take over coaching and driving duties in case Perez has to catch a flight home for the birth, but Jody assures her husband the baby is cooperating and staying put.
Both Perez and Camel have day jobs. Perez is director of student life at SKC. Camel - whose older half-brother Marvin was boxing's cruiserweight world champion in the 1980s, and whose younger brother J.R. played for the Montana Grizzlies and helps him coach the SKC men's team - is head of the accounting department for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
Both men use vacation time from their other jobs to take their teams on the road.
They mostly practice at Two Eagle River High School, adjacent to the SKC campus, but on nights when Two Eagle has games or other events scheduled, the Bison are sent scrambling.
"Schools on the reservation have been real good about helping us out," says Perez, who looks forward to the teams having their own facility next year, when a 2,700-seat health and events center opens on campus.
The players are on a first-name basis with their coaches.
"The best thing is Zach," Chartraw says. "He's not just there for basketball, he's there for life. You talk to Zach, he'll tell you everything you need to hear."
About the only time Camel doesn't have much to say to his players is during a game.
"When you see a player slow down and look over at his coach during a game, that drives me crazy," Camel says. "That ought to happen in practice, not in a game. I'm not here to teach them how to run plays, I'm here to teach them how to make plays. That means getting the ball to the right spot, and we've got guys who can do that."
"It's way different than high school," Walker says. "Every game, everybody gets plenty of shots. I don't know what I'm averaging or what anybody else is averaging. We're just having fun."
Indeed, while an official book is kept, no one bothers figuring out their scoring averages or even checks to see how many points they scored that night.
And don't be fooled by the "just having fun" comment, either - to play at the pace they do requires the players to be in top condition.
Those things said, the players were tickled to wake up after their first games against Little Big Horn College and find the box scores in the Billings Gazette.
"We made the paper!" one of them said into a cell phone the next morning at breakfast.
The box score showed that six of the seven men scored in double figures and Tonasket was on the verge, with 8.
"But they spelled my name 'Torasket,' " he complained.
The next night Tonasket will be one of six Bison who again make double figures. Takes Horse almost makes it seven-for-seven, scoring 9.
"Everyone gets their points, and no one guy shines above the rest," Takes Horse says. "The chemistry on this team is awesome."
A 50-mile ride suits the women's team much better than the 500-mile ride did a day earlier, and SKC bolts to a 22-6 lead over Little Big Horn, watches it dwindle to as little as three points late in the game, then secures a 78-67 win behind 17 points from Genevieve Cochran of the Fort Belknap Reservation.
Kuka adds 16 and McLean 13, but the women won't stick around to watch the men's game. Minus Bobbie Woodworth, who stays behind to keep the men's scorebook, they pile in their van so Perez can get home in time to take his wife to the hospital by 6:30 the next morning to be induced.
Cochran, 25, has a 7-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter, but her husband, a heavy equipment operator, doesn't work during the three coldest months, making it possible for her to play basketball.
"We came up here for his work and I decided to go to college," Cochran says. "I knew some girls who I'd went to tournaments with, and just decided to try out."
There, she hammered Perez pretty hard during a practice, and says she knew it would seal the deal for her one way or another.
"I knew he'd either hold it against me, or want me on the team," she says.
One women's player, Carmelita Matt of St. Ignatius, does not make the trip to the Crow Reservation - she has to stay behind and take care of her two children, 3-year-old Kaydren and 2-year-old Tarae.
"It's hard juggling all this," she explains later. "I used to live and die basketball, but basketball is not the first priority any more."
But Perez can tell you how important the game was to Matt. She was pregnant her first year on the team and played five months into her pregnancy, through the AIHEC tournament and showing enough "I had to hide it from Juan," she says.
"The doctor OK'd it, but boy did it hurt," she says. "Juan was mad at me for not telling him, but mostly, I think he was just concerned for me and the baby."
As the women's van pulls out for the long ride home, the men take the floor against Little Big Horn for the second night.
The Rams only jump to a 5-0 lead before SKC responds. The Bison don't click with quite the same magic they had the night before, but still roll up a 62-46 halftime advantage and cruise to a 107-88 win behind Running Rabbit's 21 points, 19 from Walker and 18 from Zimmer.
Pius Takes Horse of SKC holds his son, Chance Aaron Anthony, after the first night's game against Little Big Horn. Takes Horse is from Wyola on the Crow Reservation, so when the SKC team plays there, he is mobbed by friends and family, including his son, who lives in Billings with his maternal grandparents.Somewhere down the line it may be different, playing basketball for the Salish Kootenai College Bison. If the school applies to join the Frontier Conference in the years ahead, it
will certainly change a lot of things - full-time coaches instead of part-time, eligibility for the players, the level of the opponents.
But one thing won't change. This
is their game, and they will play it so long as there is a place for them to
do so.
The Little Big Horn College Ram Express, an all-student drum group, plays before both women's and men's games at Apsaalooka Center.------------
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com. Reach photographer Tom Bauer at (406) 523-5270 or at tbauer@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)