The College of Southern Idaho won its 31st basketball game of the season last night, but so what? In Twin Falls, it's news when the Golden Eagles don't have a 30-win season.
The last time it happened was six seasons ago. Fred Trenkle, now in his seventh season as coach, was just starting out and coached a team that finished 25-7."I got the word we had to do a little better than that," said Trenkle last night after his Eagles ran their 1989-90 record to 31-2 and avenged one of those two losses by beating Dixie College 87-77. CSI advances to tonight's Region 18 championship game at the Utah Valley Community College gym. The winner goes on to the Junior College Nationals in Hutchinson, Kansas.
If it's the Eagles, no one will have to give them directions. They have a spring home in Hutchinson. They've gone to the 16-team nationals there 15 times in CSI's 22-year basketball history. They've been national champions twice (1976 and 1987), runners-up twice (1971 and 1975) and finished in the top eight another four times.
Ever since CSI put together its first team in 1967, it has been a two-year basketball powerhouse. One day it was Twin Falls. The next it was the junior college world. The Eagles started out by taking a flier on a young high school coach from Tulsa, Okla., named Eddie Sutton. They gave him a whistle and got out of his way.
Sutton was an overnight sensation and used his quick credentials - he wrought a powerhouse in Idaho from a school that didn't even exist until 1965 - to springboard to college jobs at Creighton, Arkansas and finally Kentucky, where his recent travails with the NCAA have turned him into an ex-coach.
But his old school is still going strong. When Sutton left Twin Falls, the tradition didn't. In the seasons since, CSI has kept on winning and kept on pole-vaulting its coaches and players to places people have heard of, like Kentucky, and like the NBA.
There have been 23 CSI players drafted by the NBA, including Rick Sobers, Bobby Barker, Tim Basset and Andre Wakefield, and coaches like Jerry Hale (Oral Roberts) and Boyd Grant (Fresno State and now Colorado State) have come, conquered and left for big fat contracts.
The school has failed to win 25 games just once. That was in 1983, when Tommy Weirich coached the Eagles to a 16-14 record and was promptly shown the way to the Utah border. Trenkle, who played for Sutton on the first two CSI teams and worked as an aide to Grant on the '75 and '76 teams that placed, respectively, second and first in the nation, replaced him.
Trenkle admitted last night there is a certain inherent pressure with the job. The monster has to be fed. That kind of thing. "Oh, it's still always a lot of fun," said the coach, pausing for effect, "when the season's over."
At home in Twin Falls, the Eagles haven't lost in more than four years. They're 100-0 in their last 100 games, and that includes wins over the Yugoslavian National Team and an Australian professional team that came to America this year and lost in Twin Falls - and then won at Washington State and Boise State."
(The Aussies are back home now, wondering why CSI hasn't qualified for the NCAAs. They're telling horror stories about this 3,800-seat gym in Idaho where the home team NEVER LOSES).
Part of CSI's success, of course, is a rather involved recruiting system, one that reputedly has great lines (i.e. connections) with top major college programs that date back to Sutton's initial building of the pyramid. But that may be oversimplifying it, since the Eagles don't have a track record of fueling any particular four-year school.
One of this year's best players, 6-foot-1, 215-pound David Anderson, is from Marian, Ind. In high school Anderson developed major college talent but not major college grades. Dick Hunsaker, the former Weber State assistant coach now at Ball State in Indiana, tipped off Trenkle about Anderson.
Anderson hadn't heard of the College of Southern Idaho. "I hadn't heard of Idaho," he said last night after scoring 20. "But Coach Trenkle came to visit and started talking, and I liked what I was hearing."
He's joined players on this year's squad from California, Washington, Idaho and, of all places, Brazil. Good news travels far.
Their collective goal is to make it to Kansas. If tradition means anything, they will. The team from Twin Falls has a habit of winding up in Hutchinson. And they've heard of Idaho there.