BOISE, Idaho — There are two things to know about Dougie Peoples.
One, he loves the Butte community.
“Butte people will always hold a special place in my heart, and I’m always going to have them, I think, at the top of my list,” Peoples said.
And two, he loves playing in big games.
As a high school junior at Butte Central, Peoples hit one of the iconic shots in Montana basketball history — a 30-foot, buzzer-beating, game-winning 3-pointer in the 2022 Class A state championship game.
On Tuesday, he had another performance for the ages, making five 3-pointers in the NAIA national championship game to help College of Idaho streamroll Oklahoma Wesleyan for a 93-65 victory.
“There’s a national championship standard every year, and every year that I’m here I’m hopeful to compete for a national championship, so that’s a good feeling,” Peoples, now a sophomore at College of Idaho, told MTN Sports prior to the start of the NAIA tournament. “And being around guys with the same mindset, that they’re all winners and they all want to win, too, so I’m really fortunate to be a part of a program like this.”
Peoples is one of four Montanans making their own marks at College of Idaho, a small liberal arts school of about 1,100 students in Caldwell, Idaho, just outside of Boise.
The Yotes have the top men’s basketball team in the NAIA, and they’ve won at least 30 games in each of their past seven seasons, a feat no other college basketball team in the country, at any level, has accomplished.
“We think pressure makes diamonds, so we like all the pressure. We want all the smoke,” said Alex Germer, a 2021 Missoula Sentinel graduate who spent his first two years of college at Montana State and just completed his second season at C of I.
Germer didn’t arrive in Caldwell until the 2023-24 season, so he, like Peoples, missed the Yotes’ national championship to conclude the 2022-23 season. Scobey’s Caden Handran and Great Falls’ Drew Wyman, though, were critical components of that first championship-winning squad.
“You need a lot of skill and a little bit of luck to win it all,” Wyman said. “I mean, it’s six games of just battling against good competition.”
Wyman and Handran are part of a stellar senior class for C of I. In their four years, the Yotes won 135 games and lost just 12. They reached the quarterfinals in the 2022 NAIA tournament, won the 2023 national championship and lost in the national semifinals in 2024 before winning this year’s title.
For Handran, the winning ways go back further, as he never lost a regular-season game while in high school at Scobey and won two Class C state championships — a shared title during the COVID-impacted 2020 season and an outright championship in 2021. The Spartans also placed third in 2019 and fourth in 2018 during Handran’s high school career.
“Caden is the greatest winner I’ve ever been around,” said C of I head coach Colby Blaine, who got his coaching start under Steve Keller at Montana Western and has been in charge of the Yotes’ program since 2018. “If you look up his all-time records for the last seven years, I think he’s only lost 15 total games. You know, his freshman year he lost more games with us — five — than he had his whole high school career.”
During his Yotes career, Handran played in 144 games, starting his first two years before moving to a reserve role the past two seasons.
“I love coming off the bench,” Handran said. “Now I kind of get to see the flow of the game, what the defense is really doing. And our starting point guard now does a really good job, so I’ve embraced coming off the bench.
“It’s been fun for me kind of leading the bench unit a little bit, so it’s been really good just kind of embracing wherever they need me.”
Added Blaine: “(Handran) plays the game in a beautiful way, right? The way he distributes the ball, the way he thinks, the way he moves and the way he guards, it’s winning. … So, Caden has been instrumental in how we’ve developed our team.”
Alongside Handran every step of the way has been Wyman, the 2021-21 Gatorade Montana player of the year at Great Falls High. Wyman will leave C of I with 143 career starts, the most in program history, and 1,708 career points, the fourth-most.
The last year has been especially monumental for Wyman, a biomedical sciences major with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average. He not only helped the Yotes win another national title, he got engaged to be married and has been practicing for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) for physician assistant school.
“I think it’s attending the College of Idaho, you learn how to do hard things,” Wyman said of balancing being a student-athlete with the responsibilities of adulthood. “Our basketball team, we hold ourselves to a high standard, and I hold myself to a high standard in the classroom, in my relationships. Anything I’m going to do, I’m going to do it to the best of my ability.”
“(The Montana players) have been instrumental in showcasing to our guys that not only can you be fierce competitors but that you can enjoy the experience and slow down and let other people be a part of it and build your teammates up,” Blaine said. “They’ve learned that in their own high schools, in their own towns, in their own families.”
Handran, Wyman and Germer now pass the baton to Peoples — and soon to two-time Gatorade Montana player of the year Reynolds Johnston of Missoula Loyola, who has committed to play for the Yotes next year.
Both will bring their Montana toughness and spirit to C of I as it looks to continue its dynastic run.
“I think that there is pressure being at the standard where we are, where our program is,” Peoples said. “We put pressure on ourselves to win, too. … We carry our weight and then we know we’ll have success.”
Where more big games will await.
