FVCC's Mountainettes dominated on hardwood, too

Their male counterparts may have come and gone in a flash, but for Mike Persha and the Flathead Valley Community College women’s basketball team, what was supposed to be a one-year favor for a friend turned into a seven-year run of sustained success that helped spark the sport’s growth in the Treasure State.

In 1971, a year after the men’s program had dissolved, athletic director Neil Eliason lost his women’s basketball coach and approached an IBM business machine salesman who had been helping him with Flathead High School’s track team in his spare time.

Persha, a player on the University of Montana basketball team from 1962-66, thought he was taking an interim job at the helm of the Mountainettes, as the women’s teams were called, and accepted the pro bono part-time work while maintaining his job at IBM.

“When I told Neil I’d help him out, he said, ‘I don’t have any money to pay,’” Persha recalled from his home in Billings last week. “He said, ‘I just need help for one year.’”

Persha never did collect a salary in his seven seasons and even with “zero” knowledge of the team at FVCC, as he recalled, managed to find immediate success. His teams won 85 percent of their games in his first six seasons despite, as Persha said in a Dec. 4, 1977, Daily Inter Lake article, a severe lack of experience in the early years.

“Most of the girls that first season had never played high school basketball,” he was quoted as saying. “But then, neither did the teams we were playing against so it all evened out.”

The Montana High School Association did not sanction a state girls basketball tournament until 1972, and as a result, most of the players Persha picked up in the first few seasons came from Eliason’s budding FVCC track program, which was on its way to its own run of athletic dominance. While inexperienced on the hardwood, the number of track stars who played basketball for Persha did give his teams a distinct athletic advantage.

“That’s really where the basketball came from because a lot of the girls that played basketball came from track,” Persha said. “We really did get the best girls around to play.”

From that first year, the Mountainettes went on to win state and regional tournament titles in the 1974-75 season and advance to three straight Association of International Athletics of Women national tournaments from 1976-78, finishing fifth, fifth and fourth, in that order, in the country among junior college programs.

Those teams, which would be the final three Persha would coach, boasted loads of talented players who later went on to prosper at four-year programs, including Vicki Hileman (Boise State), Sue Erekson (Boise State), Kerry Clawson (Oregon), Jeanne Gragg (Idaho State), Sandy Selvig (Montana) and Marcie Topp (Montana State).

Topp, Selvig and Gragg were freshmen on the 1977-78 team that earned the school its best-ever finish (fourth) at the national tournament, and Persha pegged Topp, a Kalispell native, as the most gifted player he ever coached.

“Had women’s basketball been then what it is now she could have gone to any college,” he said. “She played with us as a freshman and she was a unanimous All-American.”

By 1978, the rest of Montana was starting to catch up with the growing sport and it was that year that both of the state’s universities committed to hiring full-time women’s basketball coaches and fully funding their programs. It was at that point that Persha walked away from the Mountainettes, seeing the writing on the wall as the larger, better-financed four-year schools began luring talent away.

According to Persha, his alma mater called him in 1978 and asked him to give up his full-time job and become the first full-time head coach of the Lady Griz. He turned the job down and the gig instead went to the brother of one of his players, Robin Selvig, who would go on to win 865 games in a legendary 38-year career in Missoula.

“I guess they made a big mistake,” Persha chuckled.

The Mountainettes would linger for two more seasons after Persha left before disappearing along with the rest of the FVCC athletic teams, and Persha would never again coach college basketball.

“It was the best experience of my life, it really was,” Persha recalled. “Probably the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I loved it.”

Entertainment editor Andy Viano can be reached at (406) 758-4439 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.