Sundance Wicks Is First Wyoming-Born UW Men’s Basketball Coach In 50 Years

Gillette native Sundance Wicks is making a splash with University of Wyoming men’s basketball as the first Wyoming native to lead the program as its head coach in nearly 50 years.

The Wicks era officially begins Monday when the Cowboys host Concordia University-St. Paul for a 7:30 p.m. tipoff to begin the 2024-2025 NCAA Division I season.

Wicks told Cowboy State Daily on Friday he considers himself “Wyoming’s Coach Prime,” in reference to attention-grabbing University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders because of the excitement and attention Wicks is similarly trying to generate for his program.

But Wicks is taking a much different approach than Sanders to lead his program. In a day and age where many NCAA Division-I athletes are transferring schools and jumping after Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) opportunities left and right, Wicks is still trying to take the old-school approach of building a culture and identity within his program in order to cultivate success. He believes this will help him achieve a high level of success in Laramie that will get people talking about UW men’s hoops again.

“Gritty not pretty,” is the mantra he said his Pokes will hang their hats on.

“The identity is going to match the state … we’re in the biggest blue collar state in the United States of America,” Wicks said. “We’re going to defend, we’re going to rebound, and we’re going to compete our tails off.”

Who’s Wicks?

Wicks grew up in Gillette and attended Campbell County High School from 1995-1999. He was a three-sport athlete in football, basketball and track.

According to the Gillette News Record, during that time Wicks helped deliver the Camels three straight basketball state championships. In his senior year, he also won state titles in track and field in the 300-meter and 110-meter hurdles, and a state championship in football.

Campbell County High boys’ basketball coach Bubba Hladky coached Wicks in high school, and considers him the best and hardest working player he’s ever coached. Whenever the Camels needed a basket down the stretch, Hladky said Wicks was always there.

“No one every played harder, he brought energy to all his teammates,” Hladky said. “He played harder than anybody I’ve ever coached in 40 years.”

Wicks went on to play college basketball at Northern State University in South Dakota, which is where he first realized he wanted to coach the sport for the rest of his life because of the coaching he received there under Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly (ESPY) Award winner Don Meyer.

“I said if I can pay this forward in the smallest percentage that Coach Meyer did for me, I’ll be pretty blessed,” Wicks said of his mentality. “If you’re blessed in your work and you have a great family, you’re pretty blessed in life.”

Living A Dream

Twenty years after starting his coaching career, Wicks was offered the opportunity of a lifetime to coach the Pokes — his dream job.

“To know I get to live my dream every day, I have been for every day of the last 20 years,” Wicks said.

Although the UW position marks a huge moment, Wicks considers every job he’s had throughout his coaching career as dream jobs. In some ways his whole career started on a wing and a prayer.

Rarely do coaches get a glamorous start when they enter the coaching profession, and Wicks was no different. After graduating from Northern State, he served as a graduate assistant there on a $500 a month stipend, living out of a garage with multiple roommates.

“The first thought in my mind was I don’t know how I’m going to be able to survive this profession,” Wicks said. “I’m living out of a garage with two other grown males and drinking red wine on Wednesday night.”

Wicks also makes it clear he values every opportunity that he’s had along the way, even if they didn’t end on such a positive note. One of his big mantras is “make the big time wherever you are” because of the local impact that can be made.

“Success isn’t guaranteed, and failure isn’t guaranteed, and you have to show up and do the work every day,” Wicks said. “So many times we get caught up thinking about what we want to do instead of thinking what we have to do right now and what we get to do right now.”

After leaving Northern State, Wicks got his first full time coaching gig at the University of Colorado in 2007, helping the Buffs scout big-time opponents like future NBA star Kevin Durant.

The CU head coach and the entire coaching staff, including Wicks, were fired after that first season. This led to Wicks making stops at Northern Illinois, Arizona Power Basketball Academy, San Francisco, another stint at Northern State and Missouri Western.

In 2020, when former UW coach Jeff Linder was hired to be the head coach in Laramie, Wicks got a call from Linder at 11:45 p.m. on a Saturday night. He didn’t anticipate the call or Linder offering him a job, just like every other opportunity he’s had in his career. Wicks said he paid his own $16,000 buyout to come back to Wyoming and coach.

“Every time that I thought was going to get a job, I didn’t get it, and every time I didn’t try to get a job, I got it,” Wicks said. “This is the coaching paradox, you don’t try to find a job, the job finds you.”

After an NCAA Tournament appearance and three seasons as an assistant on Linder’s staff, Wicks got the opportunity to be head coach at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay this past year.

After only winning 3 games in the season before Wicks took over, the Phoenix had a great year under Wicks’ tutelage, posting an 18-14 record. But when Linder announced he was departing UW this spring, the Gillette native got an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“There’s so much history here in this state that I’ve been a part of and also the people who went to school with me have been a part of and now we get a chance to make history together as one of their own,” Wicks said.

Vision For UW

Wicks is taking over a UW team with nine new members, most transfers who previously played at other colleges.

This dynamic isn’t out of place in today’s collegiate sports landscape, where players frequently leave programs after one or two seasons, often spurred by lucrative NIL deals. Those deals aren’t readily available for UW’s athletes, and Wicks has no intention of changing that.

“We build teams, we don’t buy teams around here,” Wicks said. “That will pay dividends for us if we continue to recruit the right person. The makeup of the man is much more important than the money you have.”

Wicks wants his team to embody the hard-working mentality embodied in Wyoming culture.

“We have to fight for our culture everyday,” he said.

His biggest challenge, Wicks said, will be getting a team with so many new faces on the same page to play Cowboy basketball. To help speed up the learning curve, Wicks’ coaching staff plans to treat every practice like the Super Bowl.

“We have to try to connect faster, be harder, be vulnerable sooner because that’s how you build teams,” Wicks said. “That’s the hard part is trying to speed up the process of it.”

But also helping with that effort is the fact that he has legitimate talent to work with. A few of the new transfers posted double-digit scoring averages at their previous schools and gained NCAA Tournament experience. He expects there to be changing and emerging leaders any given night of the season.

Above all else, Wicks wants Wyomingites to know his team is going to work to get their butts in the seats of the Arena-Auditorium.

“We’re going to show up every single day just like the state shows up for us,” he said. “When people show in the AA, we’ve got to meet them halfway.”

Contact Leo Wolfson at leo@cowboystatedaily.com

Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.