Photo by: Ryan Brennecke/ University of Mo
Montana born and raised, Montana ’til he dies
5/2/2025 8:04:00 PM | Women's Basketball
It was MJ Bruno who broke the seal, who let everyone finally see behind the curtain when she yanked it wide open in an emotional moment behind the microphone following Montana's one-point, last-second loss in the championship game at the Big Sky Conference tournament in Boise nearly two months ago.
After the program's former coach took a leave of absence in mid-January, leaving Nate Harris as acting head coach and the Lady Griz adrift in the choppy, unpredictable waters of uncertainty, the program went dark, on purpose, emerging from the shadows only to play out the season's remaining games.
The Adams Center took on the feel of the Vatican, people watching for signs of what was happening, smoke from a chimney, the color indicating what might be going on behind closed doors. No signals would be forthcoming.
All people had to go on were those remaining games, the signs positive early on, Montana winning five of its first seven with Harris at the helm, then turbulent waters, four straight losses by a combined 76 points, including a 32-point setback at Montana State, when it felt like the program might just capsize.
It's no wonder Montana, the No. 6 seed only after playing its way out of a first-round game with some tight wins the final week of the regular season, was largely overlooked in Boise, people anticipating a title-game match-up between the league's two best teams, Montana State and Northern Arizona.
Then, all of a sudden, it happened, the season going from forgettable to memorable in a span of 50 hours. Montana looked like it might be the third-best team in Boise after throttling No. 3 Idaho in the quarterfinals, holding the Vandals to 54 points.
Then it looked like the Lady Griz might be the second-best team in Boise after halting the seemingly unstoppable Lumberjacks, the No. 2 seed, in their tracks, after turning a balanced team into one that had only one option down the stretch while Montana had Mack Konig, an even better option.
Then it looked like Montana might do the impossible and knock off the juggernaut that was Montana State in 2024-25, a team that played like the best squad in the league from November until that afternoon in Boise when the Lady Griz had the Bobcats on the ropes.
Dani Bartsch had hit the shot of her life, a 3-pointer from the top of the key with seven seconds left to give her team a one-point lead. All Montana had to do was force one more miss, not a stretch considering the Lady Griz had held the Bobcats to 21 points over the first 19:53 of the second half.
They got the miss, just not the rebound. That's why the press conference was so emotional, after Montana had done everything right for nearly 40 minutes, until Montana State made one final play, a shot so off the mark that it actually worked out perfectly for the Bobcats on the put-back.
It was the only question of the postgame press conference that really mattered: How on earth did this team go from floundering to flourishing in a Lady Griz season like no other, when it went from a head coach to an acting head coach to an interim head coach over the course of a few weeks?
How was it that the Lady Griz were able to weather it all, persevere and arrive in Boise not beaten down by the entire ordeal but somehow still believing in themselves, that they had as good a shot as anyone at winning the championship?
"When things kind of hit the fan, Nate was the one who stepped up for us, brought a positive attitude every day, fought for us every day," said Bruno at the postgame press conference, once and for all removing the curtain. "Even when things didn't go our way, he never gave up on us.
"He stood by us. He believed in us even when other people didn't. That's why we're playing in this game. We are this good and fought so much because of him and his belief in us and the way he backed us every day and made us better every day. Nate is an incredible coach. We were blessed."
He was the right coach for that volatile two-month period, before he was named the program's head coach shortly after the season, this guy who was all in on joining the New York City Fire Department before Nate Larson was hired at Montana Tech in 2006 and reached out to Harris, former Oredigger.
What would he think about giving coaching a shot? "Yeah, I love hoops, why not?" Harris told him. "The journey started there," then continued to Fresno Pacific, MSU Billings, Montana State, Angelo State in Texas and finally back to Missoula in 2021 and this past January when he had to become firefighter.
The Lady Griz had been held to 50 points at home against Idaho, scored 46 at Northern Arizona, against a team that is fine giving up 46 in a half as long as it scores 47, then lost 57-49 at Northern Colorado, a performance that had people asking, will this team win another game this season?
With Montana sitting at 5-10 and 1-3 in league, this after coming off a promising season that ended in the WNIT, Harris was thrust into the role of acting head coach. Turns out he was the right person to shepherd the Lady Griz through the darkness and toward a light only he could see in the distance.
"I'm somebody who's never going to lose hope," he said. "I'll always think there is a way. We're going to find a way, just stay the course, just keep moving forward. This year's group is a perfect example of that."
It was hard to see from the outside and from the team's results because there was no real upward trajectory, no suggestion. After that ugly four-game losing streak, Montana squeaked by Sacramento State at home, a game the Lady Griz needed to win just to avoid playing a first-round game in Boise.
Two days later, one week before Boise, Montana trailed woebegone Portland State 23-10 after the first quarter, in Missoula no less, and was down 39-34 at the half. Nothing screamed WORLDBEATERS that afternoon or two days later when the Lady Griz ended the season with a loss at Eastern Washington.
Over the previous decade, Montana State had become the new Montana, the Selvig-era program that was either winning the Big Sky every year or on the short list of contenders. And this Bobcat team was one of its best ever, bringing a 29-3 record into the Big Sky title game.
Montana State had been playing championship-level basketball for months. Montana reached the final game in Boise by getting there just in the nick of time, tortoise to MSU's hare, though Harris went to a different analogy in the locker room prior to the game.
"I told them before the game, this is not David-Goliath. We don't need a miracle. This is a story of a team that peaked early and stayed at that level all season against a team that was here and got to here and got to here and got to here and now we're here," Harris says, using his hands as a visual.
"It just took us longer to get there. We took a longer route. They were there in December. We got there yesterday, but we're there and we don't need a miracle. We just have to go out and do the things we've done all week."
If his indefatigably positive nature set the course, it was his upbringing in Montana that provided the motivation, a man of the state, born in Sidney, raised to the age of 5 in Poplar, then a year in Lewistown, another in Colstrip, his educator parents going from district to district before landing in Ronan for good.
He and his friends, always to be found at the school gym on Friday and Saturday nights, this interest in basketball evolving to a love, then an obsession, turning a wrestling town into one that might just make room for basketball as well, after back-to-back state tournament appearances.
As a senior, a match-up in the Class A championship game between Browning and Mike Chavez and Ronan, the school's first title-game appearance in 42 years, when it beat Fort Benton in 1960, the Belgrade Events Center filled to capacity before the consolation game had even tipped off.
"Browning was a really, really good team. It was a blast, something I'll remember forever," says Harris, whose game, both athletic and academic, caught the attention of some schools in the Ivy League. "I was a momma's boy. I knew I wasn't going to go that far away from home."
He had it all figured out. He'd play basketball at Montana Tech while working toward becoming an engineer, then he'd get a well-paying job and he'd go through the rest of his life happy and fulfilled, on cruise-control. That's how it works, right?
"I tried to make it work, but I couldn't wrap my head around being an engineer," he says. "Do I really want to spend my life doing this? I thought you were supposed to feel awesome and happy every day as an adult.
"That's the way young people think. You're going to pick a career and never have a bad day and you're going to be happy all the time."
The events of 9/11 had him, years later, after graduating from Tech with a degree in mathematics, applying to the New York City Fire Department, an organization that loves former college athletes in its firehouses and would have loved Harris's equanimous nature, his coolness in the face of high stress.
Then Larson called, Harris found his true calling and he's never looked back. "When I was at Tech, I was like, wait, this can be a job? When I was growing up, basketball is what we loved. I never tied that to, oh, I can coach. It's an outlet for this hoops obsession. That's why I'll always find joy in what we get to do."
So, he wasn't born to coach, but has there ever been a guy better suited for it? He's got the jones for the game, a mindset that will never waiver from the belief that anything, with any group, is possible, and would you believe even his math degree has come in handy?
His understanding of numbers, of how things generally regress or progress to the mean, means he won't freak out when a team that is shooting 27 percent from the 3-point line for the season goes 7 for 11 from the arc in the first half. He's analytical like that, based in fact, black and white.
"You can't overreact to outliers," he says. "Part of coaching is determining what is real and what isn't real, what's going to last and what isn't going to last."
That team that shot 7 for 11 in the first half? He knows it's not likely to last, but if it does, good for them. That's sports, where someone wins and someone loses every time a game tips off. Accept that. Or don't at your peril.
"The one thing about coaching is that it's a zero-sum business. One team wins, one team loses. Somebody gets the job, somebody gets fired. It's not all good for everyone," he says.
"For as much as it was terrible for us on that Wednesday (in Boise at the Big Sky tournament), it was good for Montana State. Had that shot not gone in, it would have been completely flipped. You have to embrace that."
And he's got something else, another intangible. "He has such an ability to bring out the best in people, and he cares about people so much. He's confident and smart, but he has this ability to make people feel important and like they matter.
"It's this awesome combination that translates really well into what he does," says Elise Harris, the coach's wife, a Missoula girl, raised in the same family home from birth until she left it, following Harris to Fresno Pacific just months after their first date.
"He was really good friends with a friend of mine. He would come back to town a lot. He asked me out on a date. I said no. I wanted to stay friends. I didn't want to ruin that. Six months later I reached back out to him. I think I changed my mind," she told him.
"Once I took down that wall of wanting to be friends, it took me about a week to know this is the person I want to be with. He made me a better person because he saw things in me I didn't see in myself. The more time I spent with him, I found myself being this better version of myself."
It's easy to view a coaching career as a climb up the professional ladder. Montana Tech leads to Fresno Pacific which leads to MSU Billings and so on, but it's the empty space, without the safety net, that's found between the rungs that gives coaching its stress.
It's how a now Division I head coach ends up working at a fireworks warehouse in Missoula a few years into his coaching career, resumes sent out to just about every opening in the country, the couple's first child on the way, no insurance to fall back on, the due date just weeks away.
But Henley was going to be born in Montana, the Harrises were certain of that, and she was, not long after Harris accepted an assistant job at MSU Billings, coaching in the women's program under Kevin Woodin. "Kevin swooped in and saved us," says Harris. "It was one of those God things."
One might also come to believe it was His plan to get Harris out of the men's game and into the coaching and leading of young women, something that feels like it's such a natural fit today that it's hard to imagine Harris still on the other side.
"He's good with the ladies," says Elise, who would go on to have three more daughters, giving her husband, who is surrounded by women at his day job, the same thing at home.
"There are a lot of emotions all of the time at our house. It's up, it's down. I'm emotional, so I'm up, I'm down. He's just so steady and brings so much balance. His players are still kids, so they bring in all their emotions that they're carrying. Navigating that day in and day out takes a special person.
"We do have a boy dog, so there is a little more male energy at the house."
He didn't find making the move from the men's to the women's game difficult at all. Quite the opposite. "I found coaching women to be refreshing," he says. "They are so much more mature than young men of the same age in terms of knowing what they want and understanding the process."
It was on the court where he discovered a puzzle where he hadn't had one to solve before, at least one quite this complex. It activated that mathematical, spacial part of his brain that he hadn't had to use in coaching to this point.
"What you have to understand is that women's basketball is played on a much bigger floor than men's basketball," he says. "Not actually but there is a lot more space. It's the first thing you have to learn offensively and defensively.
"Offensively, you have to maximize that because it makes it really hard to guard. Defensively, you have to find ways to take it away because it's really hard to guard. Spacing is something that can really change the game. People who use it the best and take it away the best become the best teams."
In Harris's second year with Woodin, in 2012-13, the Yellowjackets went to Bozeman after Christmas and won at Montana State, 57-54, in one of those games a Division I program schedules as a sure-fire win to get its players out of holiday mode before league play heats up in early January.
The next year, MSU Billings led 31-21 at the half in Bozeman and held the lead until less than four minutes remained in the second half before Montana State rallied to win 59-48.
So Montana State coach Tricia Binford did what any coach who was trying to move up the standings in the Big Sky Conference would do. She reached out to Harris and told him to get to Bozeman. She wanted him on her staff.
After a perfectly average first year in 2014-15 – 15-15 overall, 9-9 in league – the Bobcats took the first steps toward what they've become today in 2015-16, winning the Big Sky regular-season championship outright and advancing to the WNIT.
It was the first year that the college game went from two 20-minute halves to four 10-minute quarters with the opportunity to advance the ball in late-game situations, and Montana State had a secret weapon on staff, John Stockton, who spent 19 years in the NBA maximizing special situations.
"I learned a ton from him in terms of streamlining information and making it as simple as possible," Harris says. "It can look complicated from the outside without it being complicated for your kids. It's just giving kids the freedom to make plays.
"He also gave us a head start on end of quarters and the advance, when to do it, when not to do it, how to manage 2-for-1's."
So much of that was revealed in the championship game in Boise, Binford on one bench, Harris on the other, Binford using her approach to the game and to coaching to create the Big Sky program everyone is now chasing.
"Where she is incredible is she is process-oriented," Harris says. "One moment, one practice, one day at a time." It's how Harris got his Montana team through January, then February and into March.
"We brought that into play from January 16 on. Hey, it's a process. Focus on being good today and doing the next right thing. I look up to her a lot and have a lot of respect for her. Now I have a lot of motivation to make this better than that."
What Binford has built in Bozeman comes with the ultimate compliment. When a person hears Montana State women's basketball, an image comes to mind, one Binford has been shaping for two decades at the school. Face the Bobcats and you know what you're going to get, night in, night out.
It's what Harris began utilizing at Boise, one of the reasons his team was so successful those three days in March.
"Down the stretch, we really honed in on, this is who we are going to be. To be really good, you have to have a really strong identity," he says. "To be successful in basketball, you have to be very determined, this is how we're going to play. Otherwise you're going to get lost trying to be good at everything."
Offensively, that meant spacing the floor and letting Mack Konig do her thing, which is getting to the basket, stopping and hitting the pull-up or drawing in help defenders and getting the ball to open shooters, with 3-point threats positioned all around the arc.
Defensively, that meant holding Idaho, Northern Arizona and Montana State to 54, 67 and 58 points, all well below those teams' season averages, none of them shooting 40 percent, two below 35.
"I think you saw a much more physical, a much meaner version of us on the defensive end than we'd been in a long time," said Harris. "That will always be our hallmark. We have to be a team that competes its way through difficult times and plays as hard as we possibly can every chance we get."
He probably still gets goosebumps when he remembers the former Lady Griz who were in Boise coming up to him and telling Harris that it reminded them of how they used to play. And that means something coming from the players in a program with 24 conference championships.
"That was maybe the best compliment we got our week in Boise. You guys really guard. You guys are defending. That's what we want to be moving forward. We got to 50-50 balls, we got on the floor, we were physical. That's going to be the focus of what we do. Physical, tough, mean," he says.
After getting bounced from the Big Sky tournament in Reno in 2015-16 after winning the outright regular-season championship, Montana State shared the regular-season title in 2016-17 and finished this time, winning in Reno and making the NCAA tournament.
After one more year in Bozeman, it was time to move on and try a new challenge, assistant at Angelo State with the strong likelihood that Harris would be head coach within a year or two of one of NCAA Division II's strongest programs.
"It was a chance to bet on ourselves and show our kids a different part of the world," says Harris.
Growing up, Elise assumed her adult life would mimic the one she had enjoyed, in the same house, with the same classmates from elementary to middle to high school, youth defined by roots and bonds and relationships, friends for life.
The Harrises lived in three different houses while Nate coached at MSU Billings, shuttling between rentals, three more in Bozeman. Now they were off to Texas. So much for roots. But what it did was solidify the idea that it's the family that makes the home, their love that binds it.
"It's not the house that makes the home, it's us being together as a family," said Elise. "I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't going to be like the life I had with coaching, where you buy a house and live there your whole life and have your kids grow up.
"My kids didn't have that but they are extremely resilient and adapt really well. They are very personable, easy-to-get-along-with kids for the most part because we've had to move and change. You give up some things but we've gained things in other areas."
Everything began to come full circle in the spring of 2021. Harris had gotten his shot at being a head coach, though the disruptions of COVID put a damper on everything it could have been, now the family was moving back to Missoula. Harris had been hired as an assistant with the Lady Griz.
It felt like a family reunion, parents, siblings, cousins, everyone back together.
Harris's mom was born in Missoula, his dad in Anaconda. His birthdays growing up meant special trips from Ronan to the big city of Missoula, where they had a Pizza Hut, followed by a Griz basketball game. Now he was officially one too. For Elise, it was a happy homecoming.
It goes deeper than that. Much deeper. Harris's mom was born in Missoula, as was her dad, who owned Hamburger King by the train depot at the end of Higgins, as was his dad, as was his dad. If you throw Elise into the chain, then link on Henley, both born in Missoula, that's six generations deep.
"This has always been home, will always be home, this part of the state for me and this town for my wife," says Harris, who played at Montana when he was at MSU Billings, sitting just down the sideline from the legend himself, Robin Selvig.
"You're talking about one of the best programs in mid-major basketball. I remember when we coached against him in that game. I thought it was about the coolest thing I had ever done."
So, you'll understand why it was enough to make Elise Harris's hands shake if she allowed herself to think about it, all this pent-up emotion that would need an outlet, what could happen, what might happen, all of it out of her control.
Her husband had been put in the toughest of toughest positions in January. The SS Lady Griz was for the moment rudderless and steering toward potential disaster. His task: Steer it to safe waters, get through the season, then a decision would be made about the future of the program. Sleep well.
Elise had everything she wanted. Her four girls were growing up in Montana, coming up on four years of stability, family and friends were all around. Now this.
She came to accept it for what it was, a binary outcome, either they were going to pack up at season's end and leave it all behind for her husband's next position, or he was going to get the Lady Griz job and life could continue mostly without interruption.
There was no middle ground to find solace on. She knew joining him in this coaching lifestyle would be an adventure, but this was something else entirely. They had made the decision to go to MSU Billings. They had made the decision to go to Montana State, to Angelo State, to move back to Missoula.
This time it was out of their hands, the ones that would start shaking if she let herself keep thinking about it, everything that was at stake, for him and his career, for her and her family, the children finally putting down some roots of their own, friend groups emerging, everything she wanted for them.
An hour in that state of mind would be a bit much. Try two months, from mid-January to season's end in March, when each minute would take them closer to the decision someone somewhere would be making.
She lived and died with every result, watching the Lady Griz go through the highs and lows, wondering how it might affect the ultimate decision. She didn't sign her girls up for any spring sports, knowing they might be packing up and moving on.
She finally came to know some peace when Montana played so well in Boise.
For all the angst she had felt for nearly two months, a sense of calm and acceptance finally settled over her. This guy – her guy – the one she had tied her life to a decade and a half earlier was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. This was his calling. Montana was balling at just the right time.
"The one thing I did know after watching the conference tournament is that he is meant to do this," she said the afternoon her husband was named head coach of the Lady Griz. "I have always been, but even more than ever I was on board to support him no matter what."
It would have been a sweet video to see, the couple at home, the pressure along with them, as it had been for weeks, then the phone call coming, Nate sneaking off to another room but, as he tends to do, still talking loudly enough for Elise to hear every word.
"I heard him say, it would be such an honor. I knew he got it. It just felt light, like a weight off. My hands were shaking, I cried happy tears, hugged him. It was awesome."
Forget the video. That's a moment best shared privately by two people who have been by each other's sides through a lot, none more so than two months when nothing felt secure. A coach's life.
"It hasn't always been easy, just in terms of money, raising kids, me being gone, all the things that come with this. Her commitment to this is everything. I wouldn't be sitting here or even in coaching without her and her commitment to seeing this through," Harris says.
"She's handled things that would be unfair to ask anyone to manage. When people ask me about coaching, my No. 1 piece of advice is, marry well. I did that in spades. She is the best recruit I ever signed, the best person I've ever known and the best decision I've ever made, to tie my life to hers."
It will be different now, a bit more secure, a multi-year contract, ownership of the program instead of acting as lieutenant, but the stressors will still be there, just in different ways.
Montana played in its first Big Sky championship game in a decade in March in Boise, the Lady Griz one second away from hanging the next banner in the rafters of Dahlberg Arena, the banners that stop at 2015 getting quite dusty and dated.
All the banners that came before, under Selvig, the coach who made it look so easy, they came at a cost. He paid it, game days something to be survived, the sword of Damocles hanging by a thread for another day. And that for a guy who won 865 games.
But the rewards? He'll be reaping those for the rest of his days, the lives that his players have gone on to lead the gift they've given back to him.
"We get to make an impact that is so unique and so special," said Harris. "I will always find immense joy in coaching because of that. But nothing in this world is free. There is a price to be paid to make an impact. There is a price to be paid to leave a legacy.
"There is a price to be paid to do this, but there are also immense rewards to be able to make an impact on people for the rest of their lives."
This is no outsider taking over the program, someone uninitiated. He was there in 1994 when Montana hosted Boise State, both teams ranked among the nation's top 25, both on their way to the NCAA tournament, the Broncos, under point guard Tricia (Bader) Binford, getting in as an at-large.
He's coached against Montana while he was at Montana State and has coached the Lady Griz the last four seasons, the last two months of this past season a glimpse of what he can do once he has a full year with a group of girls.
"To sit back and think what it means to be the head coach of this program is wild," he says. "It's an honor. It's a little overwhelming, more than a little humbling."
He knows that since Montana's last NCAA tournament appearance, Idaho, Montana State, Northern Colorado, Portland State, Idaho State, Sacramento State and Eastern Washington all have left either Reno or Boise with a championship trophy.
Those banners overhead when he's working this summer with his first full-time Lady Griz team? They are not simply a nice piece of the past, to be remembered fondly as another time, never to be duplicated. They are not a suggestion. They are what is expected no matter who holds the head job.
"It's easy to run away from but the reason we get 2,500 fans on a Thursday night in January is because of Robin Selvig and the work that he and the young women that came before in this program did," said Harris.
"You never want to stand on anyone else's shoulders and call yourself tall. We're going to do the work to earn everything that comes with being in this program. We're going to work every day to have that level of success because that's what this state deserves, that's what the university deserves, that's what this community deserves."
Don't worry, Montana. Nate Harris, Montana to the core, is up for it. He won't stop until he makes you proud.
After the program's former coach took a leave of absence in mid-January, leaving Nate Harris as acting head coach and the Lady Griz adrift in the choppy, unpredictable waters of uncertainty, the program went dark, on purpose, emerging from the shadows only to play out the season's remaining games.
The Adams Center took on the feel of the Vatican, people watching for signs of what was happening, smoke from a chimney, the color indicating what might be going on behind closed doors. No signals would be forthcoming.
All people had to go on were those remaining games, the signs positive early on, Montana winning five of its first seven with Harris at the helm, then turbulent waters, four straight losses by a combined 76 points, including a 32-point setback at Montana State, when it felt like the program might just capsize.
It's no wonder Montana, the No. 6 seed only after playing its way out of a first-round game with some tight wins the final week of the regular season, was largely overlooked in Boise, people anticipating a title-game match-up between the league's two best teams, Montana State and Northern Arizona.
Then, all of a sudden, it happened, the season going from forgettable to memorable in a span of 50 hours. Montana looked like it might be the third-best team in Boise after throttling No. 3 Idaho in the quarterfinals, holding the Vandals to 54 points.
Then it looked like the Lady Griz might be the second-best team in Boise after halting the seemingly unstoppable Lumberjacks, the No. 2 seed, in their tracks, after turning a balanced team into one that had only one option down the stretch while Montana had Mack Konig, an even better option.
Then it looked like Montana might do the impossible and knock off the juggernaut that was Montana State in 2024-25, a team that played like the best squad in the league from November until that afternoon in Boise when the Lady Griz had the Bobcats on the ropes.
Dani Bartsch had hit the shot of her life, a 3-pointer from the top of the key with seven seconds left to give her team a one-point lead. All Montana had to do was force one more miss, not a stretch considering the Lady Griz had held the Bobcats to 21 points over the first 19:53 of the second half.
They got the miss, just not the rebound. That's why the press conference was so emotional, after Montana had done everything right for nearly 40 minutes, until Montana State made one final play, a shot so off the mark that it actually worked out perfectly for the Bobcats on the put-back.
It was the only question of the postgame press conference that really mattered: How on earth did this team go from floundering to flourishing in a Lady Griz season like no other, when it went from a head coach to an acting head coach to an interim head coach over the course of a few weeks?
How was it that the Lady Griz were able to weather it all, persevere and arrive in Boise not beaten down by the entire ordeal but somehow still believing in themselves, that they had as good a shot as anyone at winning the championship?
"When things kind of hit the fan, Nate was the one who stepped up for us, brought a positive attitude every day, fought for us every day," said Bruno at the postgame press conference, once and for all removing the curtain. "Even when things didn't go our way, he never gave up on us.
"He stood by us. He believed in us even when other people didn't. That's why we're playing in this game. We are this good and fought so much because of him and his belief in us and the way he backed us every day and made us better every day. Nate is an incredible coach. We were blessed."
He was the right coach for that volatile two-month period, before he was named the program's head coach shortly after the season, this guy who was all in on joining the New York City Fire Department before Nate Larson was hired at Montana Tech in 2006 and reached out to Harris, former Oredigger.
What would he think about giving coaching a shot? "Yeah, I love hoops, why not?" Harris told him. "The journey started there," then continued to Fresno Pacific, MSU Billings, Montana State, Angelo State in Texas and finally back to Missoula in 2021 and this past January when he had to become firefighter.
The Lady Griz had been held to 50 points at home against Idaho, scored 46 at Northern Arizona, against a team that is fine giving up 46 in a half as long as it scores 47, then lost 57-49 at Northern Colorado, a performance that had people asking, will this team win another game this season?
With Montana sitting at 5-10 and 1-3 in league, this after coming off a promising season that ended in the WNIT, Harris was thrust into the role of acting head coach. Turns out he was the right person to shepherd the Lady Griz through the darkness and toward a light only he could see in the distance.
"I'm somebody who's never going to lose hope," he said. "I'll always think there is a way. We're going to find a way, just stay the course, just keep moving forward. This year's group is a perfect example of that."
It was hard to see from the outside and from the team's results because there was no real upward trajectory, no suggestion. After that ugly four-game losing streak, Montana squeaked by Sacramento State at home, a game the Lady Griz needed to win just to avoid playing a first-round game in Boise.
Two days later, one week before Boise, Montana trailed woebegone Portland State 23-10 after the first quarter, in Missoula no less, and was down 39-34 at the half. Nothing screamed WORLDBEATERS that afternoon or two days later when the Lady Griz ended the season with a loss at Eastern Washington.
Over the previous decade, Montana State had become the new Montana, the Selvig-era program that was either winning the Big Sky every year or on the short list of contenders. And this Bobcat team was one of its best ever, bringing a 29-3 record into the Big Sky title game.
Montana State had been playing championship-level basketball for months. Montana reached the final game in Boise by getting there just in the nick of time, tortoise to MSU's hare, though Harris went to a different analogy in the locker room prior to the game.
"I told them before the game, this is not David-Goliath. We don't need a miracle. This is a story of a team that peaked early and stayed at that level all season against a team that was here and got to here and got to here and got to here and now we're here," Harris says, using his hands as a visual.
"It just took us longer to get there. We took a longer route. They were there in December. We got there yesterday, but we're there and we don't need a miracle. We just have to go out and do the things we've done all week."
If his indefatigably positive nature set the course, it was his upbringing in Montana that provided the motivation, a man of the state, born in Sidney, raised to the age of 5 in Poplar, then a year in Lewistown, another in Colstrip, his educator parents going from district to district before landing in Ronan for good.
He and his friends, always to be found at the school gym on Friday and Saturday nights, this interest in basketball evolving to a love, then an obsession, turning a wrestling town into one that might just make room for basketball as well, after back-to-back state tournament appearances.
As a senior, a match-up in the Class A championship game between Browning and Mike Chavez and Ronan, the school's first title-game appearance in 42 years, when it beat Fort Benton in 1960, the Belgrade Events Center filled to capacity before the consolation game had even tipped off.
"Browning was a really, really good team. It was a blast, something I'll remember forever," says Harris, whose game, both athletic and academic, caught the attention of some schools in the Ivy League. "I was a momma's boy. I knew I wasn't going to go that far away from home."
He had it all figured out. He'd play basketball at Montana Tech while working toward becoming an engineer, then he'd get a well-paying job and he'd go through the rest of his life happy and fulfilled, on cruise-control. That's how it works, right?
"I tried to make it work, but I couldn't wrap my head around being an engineer," he says. "Do I really want to spend my life doing this? I thought you were supposed to feel awesome and happy every day as an adult.
"That's the way young people think. You're going to pick a career and never have a bad day and you're going to be happy all the time."
The events of 9/11 had him, years later, after graduating from Tech with a degree in mathematics, applying to the New York City Fire Department, an organization that loves former college athletes in its firehouses and would have loved Harris's equanimous nature, his coolness in the face of high stress.
Then Larson called, Harris found his true calling and he's never looked back. "When I was at Tech, I was like, wait, this can be a job? When I was growing up, basketball is what we loved. I never tied that to, oh, I can coach. It's an outlet for this hoops obsession. That's why I'll always find joy in what we get to do."
So, he wasn't born to coach, but has there ever been a guy better suited for it? He's got the jones for the game, a mindset that will never waiver from the belief that anything, with any group, is possible, and would you believe even his math degree has come in handy?
His understanding of numbers, of how things generally regress or progress to the mean, means he won't freak out when a team that is shooting 27 percent from the 3-point line for the season goes 7 for 11 from the arc in the first half. He's analytical like that, based in fact, black and white.
"You can't overreact to outliers," he says. "Part of coaching is determining what is real and what isn't real, what's going to last and what isn't going to last."
That team that shot 7 for 11 in the first half? He knows it's not likely to last, but if it does, good for them. That's sports, where someone wins and someone loses every time a game tips off. Accept that. Or don't at your peril.
"The one thing about coaching is that it's a zero-sum business. One team wins, one team loses. Somebody gets the job, somebody gets fired. It's not all good for everyone," he says.
"For as much as it was terrible for us on that Wednesday (in Boise at the Big Sky tournament), it was good for Montana State. Had that shot not gone in, it would have been completely flipped. You have to embrace that."
And he's got something else, another intangible. "He has such an ability to bring out the best in people, and he cares about people so much. He's confident and smart, but he has this ability to make people feel important and like they matter.
"It's this awesome combination that translates really well into what he does," says Elise Harris, the coach's wife, a Missoula girl, raised in the same family home from birth until she left it, following Harris to Fresno Pacific just months after their first date.
"He was really good friends with a friend of mine. He would come back to town a lot. He asked me out on a date. I said no. I wanted to stay friends. I didn't want to ruin that. Six months later I reached back out to him. I think I changed my mind," she told him.
"Once I took down that wall of wanting to be friends, it took me about a week to know this is the person I want to be with. He made me a better person because he saw things in me I didn't see in myself. The more time I spent with him, I found myself being this better version of myself."
It's easy to view a coaching career as a climb up the professional ladder. Montana Tech leads to Fresno Pacific which leads to MSU Billings and so on, but it's the empty space, without the safety net, that's found between the rungs that gives coaching its stress.
It's how a now Division I head coach ends up working at a fireworks warehouse in Missoula a few years into his coaching career, resumes sent out to just about every opening in the country, the couple's first child on the way, no insurance to fall back on, the due date just weeks away.
But Henley was going to be born in Montana, the Harrises were certain of that, and she was, not long after Harris accepted an assistant job at MSU Billings, coaching in the women's program under Kevin Woodin. "Kevin swooped in and saved us," says Harris. "It was one of those God things."
One might also come to believe it was His plan to get Harris out of the men's game and into the coaching and leading of young women, something that feels like it's such a natural fit today that it's hard to imagine Harris still on the other side.
"He's good with the ladies," says Elise, who would go on to have three more daughters, giving her husband, who is surrounded by women at his day job, the same thing at home.
"There are a lot of emotions all of the time at our house. It's up, it's down. I'm emotional, so I'm up, I'm down. He's just so steady and brings so much balance. His players are still kids, so they bring in all their emotions that they're carrying. Navigating that day in and day out takes a special person.
"We do have a boy dog, so there is a little more male energy at the house."
He didn't find making the move from the men's to the women's game difficult at all. Quite the opposite. "I found coaching women to be refreshing," he says. "They are so much more mature than young men of the same age in terms of knowing what they want and understanding the process."
It was on the court where he discovered a puzzle where he hadn't had one to solve before, at least one quite this complex. It activated that mathematical, spacial part of his brain that he hadn't had to use in coaching to this point.
"What you have to understand is that women's basketball is played on a much bigger floor than men's basketball," he says. "Not actually but there is a lot more space. It's the first thing you have to learn offensively and defensively.
"Offensively, you have to maximize that because it makes it really hard to guard. Defensively, you have to find ways to take it away because it's really hard to guard. Spacing is something that can really change the game. People who use it the best and take it away the best become the best teams."
In Harris's second year with Woodin, in 2012-13, the Yellowjackets went to Bozeman after Christmas and won at Montana State, 57-54, in one of those games a Division I program schedules as a sure-fire win to get its players out of holiday mode before league play heats up in early January.
The next year, MSU Billings led 31-21 at the half in Bozeman and held the lead until less than four minutes remained in the second half before Montana State rallied to win 59-48.
So Montana State coach Tricia Binford did what any coach who was trying to move up the standings in the Big Sky Conference would do. She reached out to Harris and told him to get to Bozeman. She wanted him on her staff.
After a perfectly average first year in 2014-15 – 15-15 overall, 9-9 in league – the Bobcats took the first steps toward what they've become today in 2015-16, winning the Big Sky regular-season championship outright and advancing to the WNIT.
It was the first year that the college game went from two 20-minute halves to four 10-minute quarters with the opportunity to advance the ball in late-game situations, and Montana State had a secret weapon on staff, John Stockton, who spent 19 years in the NBA maximizing special situations.
"I learned a ton from him in terms of streamlining information and making it as simple as possible," Harris says. "It can look complicated from the outside without it being complicated for your kids. It's just giving kids the freedom to make plays.
"He also gave us a head start on end of quarters and the advance, when to do it, when not to do it, how to manage 2-for-1's."
So much of that was revealed in the championship game in Boise, Binford on one bench, Harris on the other, Binford using her approach to the game and to coaching to create the Big Sky program everyone is now chasing.
"Where she is incredible is she is process-oriented," Harris says. "One moment, one practice, one day at a time." It's how Harris got his Montana team through January, then February and into March.
"We brought that into play from January 16 on. Hey, it's a process. Focus on being good today and doing the next right thing. I look up to her a lot and have a lot of respect for her. Now I have a lot of motivation to make this better than that."
What Binford has built in Bozeman comes with the ultimate compliment. When a person hears Montana State women's basketball, an image comes to mind, one Binford has been shaping for two decades at the school. Face the Bobcats and you know what you're going to get, night in, night out.
It's what Harris began utilizing at Boise, one of the reasons his team was so successful those three days in March.
"Down the stretch, we really honed in on, this is who we are going to be. To be really good, you have to have a really strong identity," he says. "To be successful in basketball, you have to be very determined, this is how we're going to play. Otherwise you're going to get lost trying to be good at everything."
Offensively, that meant spacing the floor and letting Mack Konig do her thing, which is getting to the basket, stopping and hitting the pull-up or drawing in help defenders and getting the ball to open shooters, with 3-point threats positioned all around the arc.
Defensively, that meant holding Idaho, Northern Arizona and Montana State to 54, 67 and 58 points, all well below those teams' season averages, none of them shooting 40 percent, two below 35.
"I think you saw a much more physical, a much meaner version of us on the defensive end than we'd been in a long time," said Harris. "That will always be our hallmark. We have to be a team that competes its way through difficult times and plays as hard as we possibly can every chance we get."
He probably still gets goosebumps when he remembers the former Lady Griz who were in Boise coming up to him and telling Harris that it reminded them of how they used to play. And that means something coming from the players in a program with 24 conference championships.
"That was maybe the best compliment we got our week in Boise. You guys really guard. You guys are defending. That's what we want to be moving forward. We got to 50-50 balls, we got on the floor, we were physical. That's going to be the focus of what we do. Physical, tough, mean," he says.
After getting bounced from the Big Sky tournament in Reno in 2015-16 after winning the outright regular-season championship, Montana State shared the regular-season title in 2016-17 and finished this time, winning in Reno and making the NCAA tournament.
After one more year in Bozeman, it was time to move on and try a new challenge, assistant at Angelo State with the strong likelihood that Harris would be head coach within a year or two of one of NCAA Division II's strongest programs.
"It was a chance to bet on ourselves and show our kids a different part of the world," says Harris.
Growing up, Elise assumed her adult life would mimic the one she had enjoyed, in the same house, with the same classmates from elementary to middle to high school, youth defined by roots and bonds and relationships, friends for life.
The Harrises lived in three different houses while Nate coached at MSU Billings, shuttling between rentals, three more in Bozeman. Now they were off to Texas. So much for roots. But what it did was solidify the idea that it's the family that makes the home, their love that binds it.
"It's not the house that makes the home, it's us being together as a family," said Elise. "I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't going to be like the life I had with coaching, where you buy a house and live there your whole life and have your kids grow up.
"My kids didn't have that but they are extremely resilient and adapt really well. They are very personable, easy-to-get-along-with kids for the most part because we've had to move and change. You give up some things but we've gained things in other areas."
Everything began to come full circle in the spring of 2021. Harris had gotten his shot at being a head coach, though the disruptions of COVID put a damper on everything it could have been, now the family was moving back to Missoula. Harris had been hired as an assistant with the Lady Griz.
It felt like a family reunion, parents, siblings, cousins, everyone back together.
Harris's mom was born in Missoula, his dad in Anaconda. His birthdays growing up meant special trips from Ronan to the big city of Missoula, where they had a Pizza Hut, followed by a Griz basketball game. Now he was officially one too. For Elise, it was a happy homecoming.
It goes deeper than that. Much deeper. Harris's mom was born in Missoula, as was her dad, who owned Hamburger King by the train depot at the end of Higgins, as was his dad, as was his dad. If you throw Elise into the chain, then link on Henley, both born in Missoula, that's six generations deep.
"This has always been home, will always be home, this part of the state for me and this town for my wife," says Harris, who played at Montana when he was at MSU Billings, sitting just down the sideline from the legend himself, Robin Selvig.
"You're talking about one of the best programs in mid-major basketball. I remember when we coached against him in that game. I thought it was about the coolest thing I had ever done."
So, you'll understand why it was enough to make Elise Harris's hands shake if she allowed herself to think about it, all this pent-up emotion that would need an outlet, what could happen, what might happen, all of it out of her control.
Her husband had been put in the toughest of toughest positions in January. The SS Lady Griz was for the moment rudderless and steering toward potential disaster. His task: Steer it to safe waters, get through the season, then a decision would be made about the future of the program. Sleep well.
Elise had everything she wanted. Her four girls were growing up in Montana, coming up on four years of stability, family and friends were all around. Now this.
She came to accept it for what it was, a binary outcome, either they were going to pack up at season's end and leave it all behind for her husband's next position, or he was going to get the Lady Griz job and life could continue mostly without interruption.
There was no middle ground to find solace on. She knew joining him in this coaching lifestyle would be an adventure, but this was something else entirely. They had made the decision to go to MSU Billings. They had made the decision to go to Montana State, to Angelo State, to move back to Missoula.
This time it was out of their hands, the ones that would start shaking if she let herself keep thinking about it, everything that was at stake, for him and his career, for her and her family, the children finally putting down some roots of their own, friend groups emerging, everything she wanted for them.
An hour in that state of mind would be a bit much. Try two months, from mid-January to season's end in March, when each minute would take them closer to the decision someone somewhere would be making.
She lived and died with every result, watching the Lady Griz go through the highs and lows, wondering how it might affect the ultimate decision. She didn't sign her girls up for any spring sports, knowing they might be packing up and moving on.
She finally came to know some peace when Montana played so well in Boise.
For all the angst she had felt for nearly two months, a sense of calm and acceptance finally settled over her. This guy – her guy – the one she had tied her life to a decade and a half earlier was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. This was his calling. Montana was balling at just the right time.
"The one thing I did know after watching the conference tournament is that he is meant to do this," she said the afternoon her husband was named head coach of the Lady Griz. "I have always been, but even more than ever I was on board to support him no matter what."
It would have been a sweet video to see, the couple at home, the pressure along with them, as it had been for weeks, then the phone call coming, Nate sneaking off to another room but, as he tends to do, still talking loudly enough for Elise to hear every word.
"I heard him say, it would be such an honor. I knew he got it. It just felt light, like a weight off. My hands were shaking, I cried happy tears, hugged him. It was awesome."
Forget the video. That's a moment best shared privately by two people who have been by each other's sides through a lot, none more so than two months when nothing felt secure. A coach's life.
"It hasn't always been easy, just in terms of money, raising kids, me being gone, all the things that come with this. Her commitment to this is everything. I wouldn't be sitting here or even in coaching without her and her commitment to seeing this through," Harris says.
"She's handled things that would be unfair to ask anyone to manage. When people ask me about coaching, my No. 1 piece of advice is, marry well. I did that in spades. She is the best recruit I ever signed, the best person I've ever known and the best decision I've ever made, to tie my life to hers."
It will be different now, a bit more secure, a multi-year contract, ownership of the program instead of acting as lieutenant, but the stressors will still be there, just in different ways.
Montana played in its first Big Sky championship game in a decade in March in Boise, the Lady Griz one second away from hanging the next banner in the rafters of Dahlberg Arena, the banners that stop at 2015 getting quite dusty and dated.
All the banners that came before, under Selvig, the coach who made it look so easy, they came at a cost. He paid it, game days something to be survived, the sword of Damocles hanging by a thread for another day. And that for a guy who won 865 games.
But the rewards? He'll be reaping those for the rest of his days, the lives that his players have gone on to lead the gift they've given back to him.
"We get to make an impact that is so unique and so special," said Harris. "I will always find immense joy in coaching because of that. But nothing in this world is free. There is a price to be paid to make an impact. There is a price to be paid to leave a legacy.
"There is a price to be paid to do this, but there are also immense rewards to be able to make an impact on people for the rest of their lives."
This is no outsider taking over the program, someone uninitiated. He was there in 1994 when Montana hosted Boise State, both teams ranked among the nation's top 25, both on their way to the NCAA tournament, the Broncos, under point guard Tricia (Bader) Binford, getting in as an at-large.
He's coached against Montana while he was at Montana State and has coached the Lady Griz the last four seasons, the last two months of this past season a glimpse of what he can do once he has a full year with a group of girls.
"To sit back and think what it means to be the head coach of this program is wild," he says. "It's an honor. It's a little overwhelming, more than a little humbling."
He knows that since Montana's last NCAA tournament appearance, Idaho, Montana State, Northern Colorado, Portland State, Idaho State, Sacramento State and Eastern Washington all have left either Reno or Boise with a championship trophy.
Those banners overhead when he's working this summer with his first full-time Lady Griz team? They are not simply a nice piece of the past, to be remembered fondly as another time, never to be duplicated. They are not a suggestion. They are what is expected no matter who holds the head job.
"It's easy to run away from but the reason we get 2,500 fans on a Thursday night in January is because of Robin Selvig and the work that he and the young women that came before in this program did," said Harris.
"You never want to stand on anyone else's shoulders and call yourself tall. We're going to do the work to earn everything that comes with being in this program. We're going to work every day to have that level of success because that's what this state deserves, that's what the university deserves, that's what this community deserves."
Don't worry, Montana. Nate Harris, Montana to the core, is up for it. He won't stop until he makes you proud.
Players Mentioned
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