Three coaching changes in the offseason have impacted the upcoming Frontier Conference basketball season and all have a ripple effect from North-Central Montana.
In early March, it was announced that Rocky Mountain College had parted ways with its longtime head men’s basketball coach Bill Dreikosen. After 25 years, the Hingham native left with the most wins in program history as well as its run in the 2008-2009 season, winning the NAIA title. The longest tenured Frontier Conference men’s basketball coach is now MSU-Northern Lights’ Shawn Huse, who will go into his 24th season for 2025-26. Hired in Dreikosen’s place is Danny Neville, who was last at Langston University in Oklahoma as the associate head coach and before that, the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He took the Jimmies to the NAIA tournament four his last five seasons as the head coach.
A couple of weeks later, the University of Montana Western announced a change in leadership to its women’s basketball team. Two seasons in, former player Britt Cooper was let go. The Harrison native will always be known as the catalyst to the Bulldogs’ 2019 NAIA National Championship. Western’s search concluded with the hire of Ryan Sullivan on April 15. Sullivan is a Bulldog alum of both the men’s basketball and football programs. He has ties to North-Central Montana, having coached at Cut Bank High before moving to Sheridan, WY to take over that high school’s girls’ basketball program for the last two seasons.
With the Frontier conference expanding to 14 teams starting next school year, another program that will have a new head coach will be the Dakota State men. Their now-former head coach Darren Tighe departed to become the new head man at NCAA Division II University of Mary. New Trojans AD Bud Postma announced Kevin Williamson as Dakota State’s new men’s basketball coach this past Tuesday. The former dual-sport Providence Argo recently spent one season at nearby Dakota Wesleyan and led that program to an NAIA tournament for the first time in five years.
