Eastern Washington University Athletics

The head coach of Eastern’s first-ever Big Sky Conference men’s basketball champions, Steve Aggers finished his five-year tenure at Eastern Washington with a school-record 51 victories, with 41 of them coming in his last three seasons at the helm. He also finished with the most Big Sky wins (32), including 29 in the final three seasons and the school’s first-ever Big Sky men’s basketball regular season championship in the 1999-2000 season.
 
Aggers earned Big Sky Conference Coach of the Year in both the 1999-2000 and 1997-98 seasons, becoming the first coach in school history to receive that that accolade since EWU joined the league in 1987-88. He was the only Eastern men’s basketball coach to win multiple COTY honors until David Riley was honored nearly 25 years later in both 2023 and 2024. In addition, in 2000 Aggers earned prestigious National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) District Coach of the Year accolades encompassing several states in the Western U.S.
 
In all, Aggers, was 51-82 overall and 32-46 in the Big Sky in his five seasons at the helm, but in the final three seasons Eastern won over 50 percent of its games overall (41-40) and over 60 percent in the league (29-19).
 
An astounding number of milestones and records were attained in the 1999-2000 men’s basketball season at Eastern Washington University. And the one accomplishment that can never be taken away is the premier achievement of being the school’s first-ever Big Sky Conference champion in men’s basketball. The Eagles capped a five-year revival of EWU’s basketball fortunes by setting a school record with 12 Big Sky victories to share the regular season title with Montana. In the 24 years since then the Eagles have secured five more regular season titles (2004, 2015, 2020, 2023, 2024), plus a trio of coveted tourney titles and berths to the NCAA Tournament (2004, 2015, 2021).
 
Perhaps the most satisfying milestone started by the Eagles under Aggers was a string of nine-straight appearances in the Big Sky Tournament after having made just one trip in their first 10 seasons in the league. At the time, Eastern was just the fifth school in league history to make that many consecutive appearances. Aggers was the coach for the first three of those eight-straight appearances. Eastern’s streak started in 1998, then continued in 1999 with an end-of-year 81-75 victory at Montana. That “winner advance, loser eliminated” game ended Montana’s 21-year streak.
 
The year before Aggers came to Eastern, the Eagles ranked 298 out of 306 schools in the USA Today Sagarin ratings of NCAA Division I programs. The Eagles were up to 134th – then an all-time best for EWU – in the 1999-2000 season. Aggers and his coaching staff arrived in Cheney before the 1995-96 season and inherited an Eastern team which had barely won 25 percent of its games (36-96) in the previous five years. Included was an even worse 13-61 record in the Big Sky (18 percent), including marks of 0-14 and 2-12 the last two years in that stretch.
 
Eastern was 3-23 overall and lost all 14 of their Big Sky Conference games in his initial season, then suffered mid-season heartbreak in his second year when point guard Rodrick McClure was killed by a drunk driver in his hometown of Las Vegas, Nev., during the holiday break. He was on his way back to the airport to fly back to resume his season at EWU. Eastern finished 7-19 overall and 3-13 in the league that season, winning just three of 17 games following McClure’s tragic death. Said Aggers a decade later: “You never want to make excuses. You fight through injuries and fight through some setbacks; that’s just what good programs do. But it’s hard to overcome that kind of setback when you’re trying to rebuild.”
 
The next year the Eagles finished with a third-place Big Sky finish, and the renaissance continued. Eastern finished with 41 total victories in three seasons before Aggers left to become head coach at Loyola Marymount. Late in his EWU tenure, his staff successfully recruited Alvin Snow, who would become a Big Sky Conference Player of the Year and help lead Eastern to the NCAA Tournament in 2004. Snow was inducted into the Eastern Athletics Hall of Fame in 2018.
“Any time you take a job that was as difficult as the one at Eastern Washington and try to rebuild it, it beats you down and wears you out,” Aggers recalled later. “And there are certainly days when you do feel underappreciated, because the job of turning around something like that is so difficult and so trying emotionally. But we were proud of how we left the program-set up with good players.”
 
Aggers was hired as head coach at Eastern after assistant coaching stints at Pepperdine and Kansas State under Tom Asbury. He had previously been head coach at Wayne State in Nebraska and the University of Great Falls. After leaving EWU and then coaching Loyola Marymount, Aggers was hired in 2006 as head coach of the Great Falls Explorers in the Continental Basketball Association before ending his career as director of athletics at West Los Angeles College.
 
Aggers is a native of Laramie, Wyo., and played college basketball at Mid-Plains Community College and Chadron State. He earned all-conference honors and was co-captain of the Chadron State basketball team his senior year in 1969-70, when he averaged 11.7 points. After graduating in 1971 from Chadron State, Aggers spent 25 years as a college head basketball coach, compiling a 369-360 career record. Besides his two Big Sky Coach of the Year honors, he was the NAIA District 12 Coach of the Year at Great Falls in 1981-82 and the NAIA District 11 Coach of the Year at Wayne State in 1988-89. His teams won nine conference championships and made 13 postseason playoff appearances. Besides serving at Pepperdine and Kansas State, he was also head coach at Mid-Plains (1974-78), and an assistant at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the University of Wyoming. He was inducted into the Chadron State Hall of Fame in 2005 and the University of Great Falls Hall of Fame in 2014.
 
Aggers and his wife, Frankie, have been married for 55 years, and now reside in Fort Collins, Colo., and spend winters in Tucson, Ariz. Both of their children are graduates of Colorado State University. Their son, Erin, now lives in Costa Rica with his wife, and the couple previously served in the Peach Corp in Botswana. Their daughter, Keely, graduated from Cheney High School and now lives in Fort Collins with her husband, two sons (ages 8 and 12) and a daughter (5).