Scobey Graduate Helps Yotes Win NAIA Basketball National Title

Handran Averages 5.5 Points, 5.2 Rebounds

National champion!

Yes, it does have a nice ring to it, and Caden Handran (SHS ‘21) of the College of Idaho Coyotes men’s basketball team gets to have the honor of it tagging along with him for the rest of his life.

Handran, a 6-foot-6 sophomore with the Caldwell, Idaho-based school, helped his team win it all during last week’s 85th annual National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) Men’s Basketball National Championship Tournament in Kansas City, Missouri. The Coyotes—they prefer Yotes—defeated the Indiana Tech Warriors 73-71 in the Saturday, March 18, championship game.

“It’s pretty crazy, very surreal,” said Handran in the early afternoon hours of Monday, March 20, via telephone conversation. “Getting all these congrats around the campus. It will sink in even more when the celebration happens on Wednesday (March 22).”

It was the College of Idaho’s second national title for men’s basketball, as it captured the NAIA Division II championship in 1996 when the school was known as Albertson prior to a name change.

It was the team’s second consecutive berth in the national tourney. During the 2021-22 season the Yotes defeated the Grace Lancers of Indiana in a Sweet 16 matchup but lost to the topranked Loyola Wolf Pack of New Orleans 60-53 in Elite 8 action.

The Yotes began the 2022-23 season the way they ended the prior one, and that is with a loss.

On November 4, 2022 the College of Idaho was on the road playing the Arizona Christian University Firestorm and was burned by the slim margin of 82-78.

The Yotes (36-1, 31922357, 86.2-63.7) have not lost since!

The closest any team came to defeating them during the regular season was at the Southern Oregon Raiders, a 60-54 final.

During the Cascade Conference Championships they defeated the Bushnell Beacons 87-70, the Corban Warrio...