Mick Durham - Billings Gazette

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Mick Durham understood, for many reasons, there was only one choice.

Asked the previous night about biggest victories during his basketball career, the current head coach at Alaska Fairbanks let his mind wander down memory lane for a day.

There was the win to stop Manhattan’s 45-game win streak when he was a young player at Three Forks High School. And still at Three Forks, there was the state championship victory over Terry in 1974.

As Durham traveled further down the road, there were satisfying wins against the University of Montana when was a point guard for Montana State.

But in the end, there is one that will always stand above all others.

“Against Weber State in 1996, that would have to be the one,’’ Durham said. “I would have to stay that night in the field house … that was special.”

On March 9, 1996, Durham guided the Bobcats to a raucous 81-70 win over Weber State for the Big Sky Conference championship and a berth in the NCAA Tournament.

And Durham had more immediate reason for picking one of the loudest games in MSU history.

“Especially since Scott Hatler, Adam Leachman and Danny Sullivan still live Billings,’’ he said, starting to laugh of his former MSU players. “They would never let me live that down.”

Durham’s Fairbanks team plays at Montana State Billings on Thursday night.

Now Durham has added another historic victory on his coaching resume.

Last Thursday night, witnessed by an intimate gathering of 430 or so fans in the far outpost of Fairbanks, Alaska, the UAF men’s basketball team defeated defending NCAA Division II national champion Western Washington, 77-73.

The win ended the Vikings 30-game win streak. Their last loss was almost a full year ago, March 2, 2012, to Montana State Billings in the semifinals of the Great Northwest Athletic Conference tournament.

“I wasn’t expecting it,’’ said Durham, who is in his second season as head coach at UAF. “I thought we could compete. We hung around, made some plays and made some free throws at the end.

“And you start thinking about it, you don’t get too many opportunities to play teams with 30-game winning streaks … the defending national champion. You don’t have many chances like that.”

Western Washington had won 11 straight against UAF going into the game.

“Our guys believed they could do it,’’ Durham said. “After a while, we embraced it. We didn’t want them to lose until they played us. We said, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose. Why not us?’ ”

The victory against the No. 2 team in the country -- “It can’t hurt us,’’ said the coach -- is a big step in Durham’s rebuilding of a program that has not experienced sustained success for almost a decade.

“We’re trying to get respect back, get the fans back,’’ Durham said. “It’s a step up when you beat the No. 1 team in the league. You know you’re close.”

The Nanooks finished 5-23 in Durham’s first season, 2-16 in the GNAC. He kept three players for this year’s team.

This year, UAF has tripled its win total. The Nanooks are 15-9 overall, 10-6 in the league with two regular season games remaining.

“We want anybody who wants to play in Fairbanks,’’ Durham said with another laugh.

Then he got serious again.

“I’m at the stage where I don’t want to coach knuckleheads,’’ he continued. “I’m looking for character guys. I want guys who want to get better, take care of the classes … those types of guys.”

Like his successful MSU teams, Durham’s construction of UAF began with the point guard position. He picked up Pat Voeut from Whatcom Community College, ironically located in Bellingham, Wash., the home of Western Washington.

“He’s my type of guard,’’ said Durham. “He runs the offense and can shoot it. We’re not as good a shooting team as I’ve had in the past. But this group is athletic enough to stay around games.

“We’ve made a really big step this season. And we only have two seniors. The key is if we can recruit to be consistent. We recruit predominantly in the northwest, so this (the WWU win) should help us. But can we keep getting good recruiting classes? We need to get a couple in a row.”

And typical of any coach, Durham cautioned his Nanooks of their situation soon after the win.

“I told them, there is one team in the league with one loss,’’ he said. “That is Western Washington, who lost to us. And there is one team in the league with one win, Simon Fraser. Which came against us.”

UAF beat Simon Fraser, 63-61, last Saturday afternoon.

[WeedKillinCat]

Good for Mick, glad he has things turned around up there. Fairbanks can't be an easy place to recruit players to play at.....