Former Whitworth men’s basketball coach Matt Logie hired by Montana State, joining ranks of Big Sky coaches with Inland Northwest ties

Montana State’s hiring of Matt Logie as its new men’s basketball coach on Monday was a significant career achievement for the 42-year-old former Whitworth Pirates coach.

It also added to the count of Big Sky Conference coaches with a deep familiarity with and affinity for the Inland Northwest.

Logie, whose highly successful 12-year run as a college basketball coach included eight years at Division III Whitworth, is joining three other Big Sky head coaches who have deep ties to the region as a player or coach.

“I just think in general it points back to Spokane being a great hoops town and the Pacific Northwest in general having some really great coaches,” said Damion Jablonski, Logie’s long-time assistant who replaced him as Whitworth’s head coach in 2019. “It is definitely interesting that people will branch out from a similar tree.”

Logie, a 1999 Mercer Island High School graduate, brings to Bozeman a resume that includes a 194-35 record from 2011 to 2019 at Whitworth and an 82-23 record in four years at Division II Point Loma in San Diego. That combined winning percentage (.826) is third best among active coaches at four-year schools, according to a Montana State news release announcing his hire.

During his introductory news conference on Wednesday, Logie named and thanked each of his assistant coaches from Whitworth and Point Loma, including Jablonski.

“You guys were on the ground floor of this dream,” Logie said, “and I’m honored and grateful to represent you and all the investment you made together to have this opportunity for me and my family.”

The reason the Point Loma job opened in 2019 was because Ryan Looney left it to become Idaho State’s head coach. The 47-year-old Looney, who in January signed a contract extension through the 2026-27 season, graduated from Central Valley High School in 1994.

“I could thank Looney for leaving Point Loma, because that’s what got me the job here,” Jablonski said. “That’s the domino that started that.”

The dominoes go back even further. Jablonski was only able to join Logie at Whitworth because Jim Hayford vacated the Pirates’ head coaching job to become Eastern Washington’s head coach in 2011. Jablonski had been with Logie for a year as a fellow assistant at Division I Lehigh.

When Hayford left Whitworth, he named his former player, David Riley, as an assistant on his staff at Eastern, which eventually led to Riley’s promotion to Eagles’ head coach 10 years later, in 2021.

While Hayford was at Eastern, Alex Pribble served as an assistant for two of the seasons – from 2013 to 2015 – alongside Riley.

Last month, Pribble – who after his time at EWU was on staff at Saint Martin’s (in Lacy, Washington) and Seattle University – was named Idaho’s head coach. Pribble replaced one-time Eastern player Zac Claus.

If you include Montana Grizzlies assistant Zach Payne, who previously played and coached at Whitworth with Logie, then fully half of the Big Sky’s men’s basketball programs employ someone whose basketball career includes a formative stop in Spokane or Cheney.

“Zach’s another one of those guys who has got a great basketball mind and he’s willing to work,” said Whitworth athletics director Tim Demant, who has held that post since 2014. “People often look at these salaries of coaches when they’ve made it, but they don’t often recognize the sacrifices that it took (to get there).”

Following the intertwining coaching trails can be a little dizzying. Yet to Jablonski, these connections aren’t all that surprising.

Jablonski told the story of a time he attended the Final Four, hoping to network with big-name coaches and maybe land an assistant job. But that wasn’t the reality then and hasn’t been for him since, either.

“The truth is, you end up mostly networking with your peers, and as you grow in your profession, you all kind of do that simultaneously,” he said.

“Coaching is a very, very small world, and you sit next to everyone pretty much all summer recruiting,” Jablonski said, pointing out also how often he sees Gonzaga women’s basketball head coach Lisa Fortier and assistants Craig Fortier and Jordan Green, just around the neighborhood.

“Then guys are going after the same jobs and the same recruits,” he said, “and so the basketball coaching fraternity is pretty small and tight.”

Having hired many coaches during his career as an athletics director, Demant has come to approach the process with as much transparency as possible. Some coaches are content to remain at a Division III school; others, like Logie, Demant said, want to eventually lead Division I programs. Demant just wants to be sure he and his coaches are on the same page about those aspirations.

“He’s worked hard and he’s earned it,” Demant said of Logie, who was already Whitworth’s coach when Demant became Whitworth’s AD. “You could see that quality of coaching in him, and honestly, if you’re a great coach, you can coach at any level.”

Following the success of Hayford and then followed by the success of Jablonski, Logie’s run at Whitworth constitutes the middle chapter of a 16-year streak of 20-win seasons for the Pirates (not counting the COVID-shortened 2020-21 campaign).

That success doesn’t just happen accidentally, Riley said.

“The focus on just trying to be the best team you can be and getting to your potential more than the next opponent, that kind of mindset helps with consistency, win or lose or where the season is at,” Riley said in February, amid Eastern Washington’s 18-game winning streak. “Part of that is having a great blueprint and understanding what it takes. … That’s what tradition does for you.”

With the hiring of Logie, that blueprint has been brought to another Big Sky program, one that is coming off back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances.

On Wednesday, Logie laid out the four core values around which he plans to base the MSU program: trust, love, commitment and servanthood.

“Those have been the drivers of all the excellence that we have been a part of as a basketball family,” he said. “I believe it is our daily actions that fall in line with those values that make success possible, and when that happens, results follow.”

Logie’s time at Whitworth and Point Loma backs that up.

“I just think it’s awesome for (Logie),” Jablonski said. “Honestly, what we do here is pretty similar to the way he runs his organizations, because it was him and me together for the first eight years. It’s pretty neat to see that the formula we have can be successful in other places.”