Northern Cheyenne boys basketball head coach Terry Curley talks to his team during a time-out at the Class C state tournament at the Rimrock Auto Arena at MetraPark on Thursday. This is the first year the team has made it to state since 1998. (Paul Ruhter/Billings Gazette)

This is a wonderful time for high school athletes on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana.

The boys basketball team at Northern Cheyenne Tribal School has struggled ever since it was disqualified four years ago for using two ineligible students.

This year, though, they’re back, as Rob Rogers of the Billings Gazette writes here. The boys team made it all the way to the Class C tournament. In their first appearance in a state tournament since 1998, they lost to Big Sandy, but get another chance today.

The story gets better:

The girls basketball team will be playing this weekend in the divisional tournament in Miles City for the first time in the history of the school.

“We were ranked to finish dead last,” said Coach August Scalpcane.

Getting into divisionals was almost as exciting as the team’s first win this season.

It was their second game, against Two Eagle River in Pablo, and when the buzzer sounded, the girls cleared the bench, shouting, whooping and celebrating through the gymnasium.

“The ref said, ‘They’re screaming like they won a championship,’” Scalpcane recalled. “I told him it was the first game they’d won in six years.”

Scalpane – who started this year, his first as coach, with just four players, says the teams’ successes are building pride in a school beset by troubles this year at the school, which saw its principal fired and school board disbanded.

Boys basketball coach Terry Curley tells Rogers that sports has “pulled the school out of the dark. We’re back on the map.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Gwen Florio, High school basketball, Montana Class C basketball tournament, Native American news, Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Northern Cheyenne Tribal School, Two Eagle River School