If you met Shawn Huse following his 1995 graduation from Montana Tech, he would’ve told you that he was going to pursue what his degree was in: engineering.
“It was one of those things where I left school with engineering on my brain, but basketball in my heart,” Huse said. “I just kept following and chasing that round ball and thing kind of just fell into place along the way.”
What fell into place was life. Huse went on to earn two undergraduate degrees (one from Tech and the other from the University of Montana in mathematics) and one masters degree from the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He did end up teaching math and computer classes at Butte Central in the late 1990s.
Huse has the accolade of being happily married with three kids. Oh, and he has also won over 400 games in 22 seasons as the head coach of the same college basketball school. On Friday night, Huse will join five other individuals and one team as the latest to be enshrined into the Montana State University-Northern Athletics Hall of Fame.
“I’m very grateful for the people who nominated and selected me and felt that I was deserving of something like a Hall of Fame,” Huse said. “It’s crazy. I was not ever dreaming of anything like that.”
“It’s really cool. I’m just really honored, humbled, blessed, grateful, and appreciative to be going into a Northern Hall of Fame, where there are so many greats,” Huse continued.
Huse, who started his coaching career at Nebraska-Kearney, has been the Lights coach since the 2002-2003 season. He has three Frontier Conference regular season titles and two Frontier Conference Tournament championships to his name, along with numerous trips to the NAIA Men’s Basketball National Championship Tournament. He has coached countless players, including his nephew Adam, whose father Brad is, along with Shawn’s brother, the former men’s basketball coach at Montana State-Bozeman.
Whether it was the former 1,000-point scorer Adam from the 2010s or Pat Jensen from the 2000s tied to the most recent graduates Zack Martinez and Myles Dalton, those players and more have made an impact on the program and have shown the mentality that the former two-guard for the Orediggers displayed in the early 1990s.
“To be able to work with guys at (the NAIA) level, which I think is the best level in my opinion, our guys are still hungry at this level,” Huse said. “It’s a pretty pure level of basketball still.”
Remember at the top of this article how Huse has three kids? He and his wife, Stephanie, have been able to raise Molly (now a sophomore at the University of Montana who played multiple sports at Havre High), Matthew (a senior at Havre High excelling in golf and basketball), and Braxton, who will follow right behind big brother and big sister into athletics as he navigates through middle school. Huse said why the city of Havre has been so special and why they have decided to stay then, now, and well into the future.
“It’s just a great community,” Huse said. “We just realized early on right away that this really fits us.”
“We’re people that had to work very hard, coming up for everything that we earned in school and in sports,” Huse continued. “That’s the way it is at Northern and in our community.”
“What a great (and) supportive place to raise a family,” Huse said. “(My) kids are doing great and I’m so lucky that they’ve always been behind me in the support that we’ve got.”
What Huse has never lost sight of is the ability to keep going and never stop filling his mind with ideas on scheming and watching film.
“Things of course change. Rules change. The game changes. The strategies change,” Huse said. “But to me, I’ve always found that fascinating.”
“I just (have always) wanted to learn more. I (am) just a junkie of it,” Huse continued. “It’s meant so much to me my entire life, the game itself.”
Huse, along with his former player Andrew Sellers, former Lights player Thomas VanderMars, former Skylights basketball player Anna Bateman, former wrestlers Evan Hinebauch and Ted Hill, as well as the 2004 Lights wrestling team, will officially be inducted at the Student Union Ballroom on the campus of MSU-Northern on Friday night. They will also be honored with a halftime tribute during the Lights’ football game on Saturday afternoon against Arizona Christian at Tilleman Field.
For the full conversation with Huse ahead of his induction, find the New Media Podcasters link here.
