MISSOULA — When Helena Capital upset Billings West in the first round of the Class AA boys basketball state tournament earlier this month, the celebration was somewhat bittersweet for Bruins coach Guy Almquist.
Almquist and West coach Kelly Darragh have a friendship that extends well beyond the Class AA coaching fraternity. They were teammates at Carroll College in the 1990s.
“It’s tough. Kelly’s a really good friend of mine. He does a great job with (West). … We don’t want to knock each other out, of course, but that’s how the lineup was,” Almquist said after his fourth-seeded Bruins defeated the East division champion Golden Bears 57-47 at Dahlberg Arena on March 7. “We’re both great competitors. Our teams are great, competitive teams. That’s just kind of the nature of the beast.”
Class AA is flush with knowledgeable, experienced coaches, and — like Almquist and Darragh — many of them came up through the Frontier Conference. Of the eight head coaches at this year’s state tournament, six of them played at least one season in the Frontier.
A seventh, Missoula Sentinel first-year coach Sam Beighle, originally committed to Carroll after a standout high school career at Sentinel. He then signed with Montana Tech but ultimately opted against playing college basketball. His lead assistant and former Spartans head coach Jay Jagelski played college basketball at Carroll.
Almquist, Darragh and Missoula Hellgate coach Jeff Hays are also former Fighting Saints. Butte coach Matt Luedtke and Great Falls CMR coach John Cislo played at Montana Western, and Michael Claxton, who led Bozeman Gallatin to the State AA title, spent time at both Montana Tech and Montana State-Northern.
“I do think at that time in the Frontier, there was very good coaching going on with some legendary coaches in our state with coach (Gary) Turcott (at Carroll), coach (Mark) Durham that was over at Western. Tim Walker was my head coach (at Northern),” said Claxton, a Chester native. “I think there was really quality coaching in that time, and there were coaches that had a long tenure.”
Turcott, especially, has had a strong influence on the Montana high school coaching ranks. After coaching at the high school level himself at Chinook and Great Falls, Turcott was named Carroll’s head coach in 1990. He turned the Saints into a Frontier Conference power and coached them to the 1997 NAIA men’s basketball national tournament, the first appearance in program history.
Almquist, a Missoula native, was the Frontier Conference MVP that season and the lone senior on the Carroll team. The Saints featured four other Montanans, including Darragh, then a freshman from Great Falls.
“I think (Turcott) was a tremendous mentor to many of us,” said Almquist, who scored 1,151 points during his Carroll career as one of the most prolific 3-point shooters in program history. “And I think one thing he really did is not only care about us as players, he cared about us as people. And I think all of us try to do the same thing and pay that forward a little bit.”
“All the coaches here (at the State AA tournament) are really, really good guys. They probably had coaches who were really great mentors, as well, not only about basketball but being good young men,” Luedtke said. “I think that all of us were probably better for playing for some of those guys. And in the Frontier, obviously, back when most of us were playing, all those guys were just really, really great human beings, really good guys to learn from about basketball and about being good people.”
Luedtke has the distinction of playing at three different collegiate levels. After he was the 2000 Montana Gatorade player of the year at Ronan, Luedtke started his college career at NCAA Division I Montana. He followed then-UM assistant coach Pryor Orser to NCAA Division II Colorado School of Mines before finishing his career at NAIA Montana Western.
Luedtke still has his name in the record books at both Colorado Mines and Western for his 3-point shooting.
“What I took away from that is there’s really good players everywhere,” Luedtke said. “I don’t think that it really matters what level you’re at if you’re a student of the game and you love to play and you want to stay competitive and continue to do it. I mean, you can’t play forever, so I think a lot of us understand that you get to go and coach and that keeps you in the game.”
Luedtke, who coached Choteau to back-to-back Class B boys state titles in 2015 and 2016, has been the head coach at Butte High since 2019. The Bulldogs have qualified for the state tournament all five years of his tenure and placed fourth this season after losing to eventual champion Gallatin in the first round.
Gallatin, which opened its doors in 2020, has made state each of the past three seasons under Claxton and broke through this year to defeat Sentinel in the title game.
Darragh, a CMR graduate, has been at West since 2014; Hellgate’s Hays has been at it for 14 seasons at his alma mater; Almquist has led Capital for 18 years; and Cislo has been the head coach at CMR for 20 years. Hays, Almquist and Cislo have each won multiple state championships.
“They’re just good guys that I think work hard and deserve the best,” Cislo said. “Kelly Darragh is an old Rustler. Now he’s a danged Bear, but it is what it is. It’s just kind of a bond because I think we go through all the same stuff at the same time and same stresses and talk week to week.”
“It's really one of the things that's very joyful about coaching, is being able to have that bond with other coaches in the state and especially who played Frontier or played at Carroll, for me personally, that bond will last forever,” Almquist added.
