Sellouts of over 15,000 fans. Students camping in sub-zero temperatures to get through the doors as soon as they opened. A raucous home environment unmatched by any team in the country.
That’s what the atmosphere at the Arena-Auditorium used to be like. Those days, however, have long since passed. Over the past two decades, Wyoming basketball has struggled to maintain even a small fraction of the capacity crowds it drew from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Memories of those surreal years remain firmly implanted in assistant coach Chris McMillian’s mind. McMillian was a standout point guard for then head coach Steve McClain when the Cowboys captured back-to-back Mountain West Conference Championships in 2001 and 2002. McMillian–who was only just hired a few months ago in May–brings a unique perspective to the program and coaching staff as someone who not only lived through some of the greatest eras of Wyoming basketball, but played a crucial part in them.
“I said it when I first got hired, it kind of feels like Christmas morning. That high for me or rush, if you will, hasn’t gone away, quite frankly.
“Getting to wake up every single day and plant my feet firmly in the place that helped me become who I am today has been pretty special for me,” McMillian said.
McMillian, alongside his teammates from those days, still remain as some of the most legendary names to ever grace the hardwood at the Arena-Auditorium. Outside of a title run in 2015, no other team has been able to reach the heights McMillian and those early 2000s teams were able to reach–and the crowds have never been quite the same either.
One of the biggest highlight games of that era came in the most attended game in Arena-Auditorium’s 43 year history. The Cowboys played host to Utah in a battle for the Mountain West regular season title and just slipped past the Utes 57-56 in front of a crowd of 16,089 people.
“That was my redshirt year, that 2002 game,” McMillian said, as he garnered a medical redshirt for an injury he had suffered earlier in that season.
“I’ll never forget it, watching Marcus Bailey hit those free throws to put us up four. We only won by one because Nick Jacobson came down and banked in a three. Thank God Marcus Bailey made both. It was crazy, man, it was a wild time to see the fans storm the court and watch Josh [Davis] up on the rim. It was pretty remarkable.”
Josh Davis, an Associated Press Honorable Mention All-American in 2002, and Marcus Bailey, an All-Mountain West Tournament team selection in 2002 as well, have since become amongst some of the most well recognized names in Wyoming men’s basketball history. Alongside McMillian, those three were some of the brightest stars from some of the most prosperous years of the Arena-Auditorium.
“I just think, for us, man, once we started winning and we had it rolling and Josh Davis is first team all-conference, then Marcus Bailey, the prodigal son, if you will, he’s rolling at that point in time,” McMillian reminisced.
“So, I just think it was the perfect storm.”
A perfect storm like those seasons doesn’t blow through often, either. Since 2002, the Cowboys have had just 12 winning seasons. While that number doesn’t seem too daunting on paper, only seven of those seasons have featured over 20 wins. In that time, the Cowboys have only reached the NCAA tournament twice, once through a Mountain West Tournament championship win in 2015 and once just squeezing into the field via an at-large bid in 2022. The Cowboys have been void of an actual win in the NCAA tournament, however, since that wild 2002 season, where the Cowboys ended up upsetting 6-seeded Gonzaga in the opening round of the tournament.
Head coach Sundance Wicks is hoping to change that in just his second season.
Wicks, who served as an assistant under Jeff Linder when the Cowboys earned their at-large bid to the tournament in 2022, never quite got to experience the highs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Wicks graduated from Campbell County High School in Gillette in 1999 and despite growing up just four hours away from Laramie, it was never in the cards for Wicks to make the trip down south, especially after choosing to compete in both track and basketball at Northern State in Aberdeen, South Dakota after his prep career.
Wicks, however, vividly remembers a crowd of around 7,500 that watched the 2022 Cowboy basketball team topple Border War rival Colorado State in an exciting overtime finish.
“We closed it out with a dagger Drake Jeffries three, and then a Jeremiah Oden touchdown dunk–I get goosebumps thinking about it. It’s one of those environments where, as a player, you’d love to play in those games,” Wicks remembered of that game.
ICE IN HIS VIENS ❄️❄️❄️❄️ @drakejeffries pic.twitter.com/lClyRRlVm0
— Wyoming Cowboy Basketball (@wyo_mbb) February 1, 2022
That’s what Wicks and his staff is trying to build the program back up to, and there is only one way to accomplish that–by winning.
Easier said than done in a league like the Mountain West, right?
Wicks’ first year at the helm wasn’t one without its fair share of challenges. After having less than a month to recruit nearly an entire scholarship roster, his team sputtered to a 12-20 finish. That squad–which only returns three players this season–drew only an average of 3,764 fans to the Arena-Auditorium, a far cry from the 10,026 average fans that poured into the arena during the 2001-2002 season. The main factor in that? A little too much losing, and not enough winning–it’s as simple as that.
“You win, people show up,” Wicks bluntly stated. “You get a couple of early, big wins against your conference foes, and then the magic starts to happen.”
There’s one population in particular that Wicks thinks can bring that magic back to the Arena-Auditorium, and that’s the students. It was them who camped out in freezing winter temperatures to rush through the doors back in the day. Now, the student section at the base of the south end of the court is lucky to be half-filled by tip-off.
“Honestly, the feedback I get from the fans, just the general fans, they love it when the students are here,” Wicks said. “They’re more apt to come when the students come, right? So, I don’t think the students at the University of Wyoming quite understand the amount of influence they have on the overall wellbeing of our general fans.”
Winning early–and often–is the clear plan to get both students and the rest of the fanbase into the mustard colored seats wrapped around Maury-Brown court. The opportunity to do that is evident in the Cowboys’ non-conference schedule this season. The Cowboys will have eight chances to impress within the confines of the Arena-Auditorium on their non-conference slate. After rolling past the NAIA national champions–the College of Idaho–by a final score of 111-63 in an exhibition match, there should be no shortage of high-flying excitement on the offensive side of the ball to invigorate fans, similar to the McClain era back in the day.
That’s a good of an opportunity as any to get the ball rolling before Mountain West play commences.
“We’ve got to show up and play no matter if there’s one person in the stands or 10,000,” Wicks said.
Wyoming basketball may never again reach the heights it did in 2002, and fans may never get to witness stars like McMillian, Davis and Bailey rise from the ashes for a full four years ever again.
However, there’s still a lot of history that can still yet to be written within the walls of the Arena-Auditorium–and Wicks, McMillian and the rest of this staff certainly seem like the best equipped to restore the former glory of the Dome of Doom.
