Former MSU Coach Danny Sprinkle takes helm at Power Five Program

Former MSU basketball coach Danny Sprinkle was introduced at a press conference in Seattle as the next head coach of the University of Washington last Wednesday. 

It was a full circle moment for Sprinkle as he took the helm at a school where his dad, Bill, was a star football player in the 1960s. Despite the personal connections and the fact that this new job marks the current peak of his professional career, Sprinkle took time to acknowledge that all of it started 676 miles away in Bozeman, Montana.

“Montana State, the athletic director Leon Costello and the president Waded Cruzado, who are absolutely phenomenal, took a chance on a guy who had never been a head coach before I got the job at Montana State. I will forever be thankful for them and Montana,” Sprinkle said.

Sprinkle took his appreciation for MSU a step further, clarifying the narrative that someone from Washington was coming to guide the program into its first years in the Big 10 Conference.

“I’m from Montana, despite what you may have read in that paper, and I’m very proud of that. I’m not from Pullman. I was born in Pullman, that’s it.” Sprinkle said. “But I take immense pride in being from Montana and representing those people.”

Sprinkle’s rise from mid-major head coach to leading a power five conference school has been nothing short of meteoric, but he is the first to acknowledge that his own story can’t be told without also recognizing his time with MSU.

A two-time all-state player for Helena High School, Sprinkle’s sole Division I offer to continue playing basketball came from MSU. During his time at MSU, he garnered a reputation as a sharpshooter from the three-point line and helped propel his team to the 1996 NCAA Tournament. When he graduated, he was the school’s seventh all-time leading scorer.

Post graduation, Sprinkle spent 19 years as an assistant coach, bouncing between roles at Cal State Northridge, MSU and Cal State Fullerton.

His success in his playing career and his time as an assistant coach played key roles in landing Sprinkle his first head coaching job at MSU in 2019. “I went in the arena and looked up at the rafters and one thing I noticed was that it had been a long time since the Bobcats had been to the NCAA Tournament. I had been at two schools, Northern Iowa and South Dakota State, where they had success in basketball and had gone to the tournament. You could see what that success in basketball and the result of going to the tournament did for the department but also the university,” Director of Athletics Leon Costello said. “It's just a big deal to do that. I think with where our basketball program was, hiring Danny, I don’t want to say it was a no-brainer but it was kind of a no-brainer just because he was an alum, he had been in the coaching business a long time, it was kind of his turn.”

In the four years that followed, Sprinkle and MSU enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship and a historic period of success, including two straight NCAA Tournament appearances. That success placed Sprinkle on the coaching map and eventually helped him land a job at Utah State, but it also cemented MSU as a mid-major basketball destination.

“I’m not going to lie, I watched a lot of Utah State games this year and every time they talked about Danny, every time they talked about Great [Osobor] and Darius [Brown II], they mentioned Montana State. I think for us, it says a lot about where our basketball program has come. We’ve had a lot of great success here recently and we are continuing that under Coach Logie. To be honest, I think having Danny here and accomplishing what he did enabled us to hire somebody of Coach Logie’s expertise, somebody that had been a head coach for that long, had that much success,” Costello said. “It just put us on another level, and I’ll always thank him for that.”

Sprinkle and the Utah State Aggies took the Mountain West conference by storm. Despite being projected in a preseason poll to finish 9th, the Aggies won their conference outright. It was an improbable run that ended in the second round of the NCAA Tournament this year, but the seeds of what made it possible were visible during his time at MSU.

According to Costello, one of the major components of Sprinkle’s success is his ability to connect and build relationships with the people around him. “With the transfer portal and NIL, if you are going to build a roster and retain that roster you have to have a relationship with them and he’s one of the best at it. I think he can coach the way he wants to coach because the student athletes know it’s coming from a place of love,” Costello said. 

“They know what he’s trying to do for them is make them the best basketball player they can be but also, in return, the lessons they’re learning on the basketball court helps them become the best person that they can be. They know that from day one when they come in to play for him and that relationship starts really early and develops throughout the course of the year and years that he has them around. I think every student athlete that has played for him would probably say the same thing.”

Even for people who watched closely as Sprinkle strengthened the culture at MSU, his rise to a power five coach is nothing short of shocking. When asked if he had ever seen a coach ascend this fast in any sport, Costello laughed at the impossibility of what had happened. 

“Not this fast, no, not this fast. I’d like to tell you, oh yeah, we saw this coming, but it's been pretty amazing to watch,” Costello said. “In his four years here, I thought what he did was pretty amazing. It takes a while to build a program, to build a culture, but he did that really, really fast. We hated to lose him anytime, but then to watch how he put his plan in place at Utah State and then to watch it all year long and the success that they had. You just knew that he was bound for something big. Did I think it would happen in a year’s time? Heck no.”

Now, Costello will be watching the progress of Sprinkle as he takes over at Washington. He has no doubts that the process and skills Sprinkle honed at MSU will translate to a higher level.

“He’s just a great person who is very highly competitive, that wants to win and wants to win at the highest level. He’s going to do everything in his power to make sure that he will continue to win. When you have a great person who surrounds himself with great people, the sky is the limit for what you can accomplish and he’s really great at that,” Costello said. “He’s probably the master at that.”