Former Whitworth coach Matt Logie leads Montana State to NCAA Tournament in first year on job

BOISE – At the red-eyed hour of 12:45 a.m. MDT, last call for the Montana State Bobcats – the happy inquisition in the interview room – was complete. As he stood to leave, Tyler Patterson saw his name on a piece of cardboard at the microphone and brightened.

“Can I take this nameplate?” he asked.

Go crazy, man. You’re the champs.

“All right!” he rejoiced.

Watching this unfold was his coach, Matt Logie, who broke into another wide smile on a night full of them.

“It’s the little things,” he said with a chuckle.

Is it ever. All the little joys relished and all the little disappointments overcome during a basketball season – and a career – come wafting back amid the celebration of the biggest possible moments, and Matt Logie was going to drink in all of them.

For a dozen years – starting with eight wildly successful seasons at Whitworth University – he’s been a mainstay in college basketball’s sock hops. Now, in his first year as a head coach in Division I, he’s in the Big Dance, under some of the most improbable circumstances.

But then, it’s that improbable time of year.

His Bobcats – who entered the Big Sky Conference Tournament as the No. 5 seed with a 14-17 record – outscored rival Montana 41-9 over a stretch of just 14 minutes on Wednesday night, and clinched a third straight trip to the NCAAs with an 85-70 victory.

“All my guys at Whitworth, all my guys at Point Loma,” Logie said as the confetti came down, “this is for all those guys, too.”

The Bobcats will join other Cinderellas in the bracket come Sunday – Longwood and Wagner having stepped into those shoes already. But in some respects, Logie and the Bobcats have the most compelling story of them all.

They certainly have the ultimate dues-payer as a coach.

The grandson of Mercer Island coaching legend Ed Pepple, Logie followed in those footsteps immediately after scoring his last collegiate basket at Lehigh. But after eight years as a D-I assistant, he took a hard left and got himself hired at Whitworth, where he won 24 games a year and took the Pirates to the Division III tournament eight times.

It wasn’t a rebuild. Warren Friedrichs and then Jim Hayford had established Whitworth as a winner, and Logie was always quick to acknowledge what he was building on.

“Tradition never graduates,” he noted on the day he was hired.

The same was true when he moved on to Point Loma (California) Nazarene, where he followed Spokane native Ryan Looney after the Sea Lions had reached the Division II title game – and promptly went 82-23 in four years there.

That got him the MSU gig – where athletic director Leon Costello explained hiring a small-college coach by saying, “All he does is win.”

But this time, tradition went into the transfer portal.

The Bobcats had made back-to-back NCAA trips, which made coach Danny Sprinkle a hot commodity – and he remains so at Utah State. Two of his MSU players followed him there, and when Logie arrived in Bozeman on April 17, 75% of 2023’s scoring was gone.

“He was the last Division I coach hired in the cycle last year,” Costello said, “and the portal had been open for a month. But I started to see the guys he was bringing in – guys he’d had relationships with before. I knew I was hiring a great teacher.

“Guys were coming back to him, and that tells me a lot about character.”

Brian Goracke followed Logie from Point Loma, and Eddie Turner III (Columbia) and Brandon Walker (UT Arlington) joined holdovers Patterson and Big Sky tourney MVP Robert Ford in the starting lineup. And the Bobcats endured predictable transitional pains.

They lost to NAIA neighbor Rocky Mountain. They were swept by the rival Grizzlies. Two days after upsetting regular-season champion Eastern Washington, the Bobcats lost to ninth-place Idaho in Bozeman.

“It was a roller coaster at times,” Logie admitted, “but it really does come down to this week in the conference. Our guys really poured themselves into the process, and that’s hard to do when you’re not getting the results.”

March brought the results in with a roar.

After beating preseason favorite Weber State in the regular-season finale, the Bobcats turned around and did it again in Boise – with a 66-point second half, an omen of what was to come.

“We talk about ‘avalanche basketball’ and trying to create those for our team,” Logie said. “It just started to roll downhill for our team.”

Maybe no Bobcat can appreciate the process more than 6-foot-10 John Olmsted, who transferred in from Arizona State where he’d scored all of 11 points in four years. Things weren’t going much better in Bozeman – he had eight points the entire month of February.

In March, he’s had games of 15, 15 and 16 – and in the title game had four spectacular dunks.

“He’s the same guy every day,” Olmsted said of his coach. “Whether things were going good or we were struggling, he was all about helping us get better.”

For Logie, the process began at a young age, and the small-college bonds have been formative.

“I got into coaching to pay it forward,” he said, “because my family was a basketball family. That set the blueprint for what I believed this should be about.

“Those Whitworth guys – they’re all a part of this. I talk to those guys a lot. They’ve been texting me throughout this year and this week, and a couple were here tonight. That’s what it’s about at the end of the day – relationships.”

Logie got the Whitworth job at age 30, and has now been in the coaching game for 20 – and will be making his 13th trip to an NCAA event. This one, he conceded, is different.

“You have to put yourself out there when you take on this role,” he said, “and having people believe in you is special – whether you’re a player and it’s a coach’s belief, or you’re a coach and it’s players believing. This one takes the cake in that regard – just the scale of it.

“But all those experiences that led up to this felt just as joyous because of the journeys we were on and the people we were with.”

And all the little things.