Less than two miles from the University of Kansas, home of one of the most storied programs in college basketball, Adam Strom, the 48-year-old coach at Haskell Indian Nations University — tiny with 978 students, beleaguered and long overshadowed — blew his whistle twice on Feb. 24 to gather his team’s attention.
“OK, it’s about that time,” he said, beginning practice. “Let’s stretch. Let’s warm-up. We’ll meet at half (court). Let’s go ladies.”
Every one of his players, 17 young women from as many tribal nations — Blackfoot, Apache, Navajo, Nez Perce and more — knew the situation, one that began as wrenching, but has since turned inspiring.
ON FEB. 15, they were brought to tears following their Senior Night victory, an 87-18 walloping of Kansas Christian College, when Strom informed them that, in keeping with one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders to reduce the federal workforce, he had been fired one day prior, on Valentine’s Day. His dismissal was “effective immediately.”
A winning coach in his fourth year, he was still technically a probationary employee at a federally funded institution. It wasn’t just him that was out, but also close to 40 colleagues — 25% of the school’s entire workforce.
It is a number so great that on Feb. 17, Dalton Henry, the interim president of the National Haskell Board of Regents, wrote a letter to Doug Burgum, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, asking for a waiver, a reprieve from Trump’s order, arguing that a cut so deep to Haskell could be existential.
It “would have disastrous consequences for fulfilling its educational mission,” he wrote.
“Haskell is already underfunded and struggles to fulfill its educational mission,” the letter said. “Further reductions in its workforce could threaten its ability to maintain operations.”
No reprieve has come, except from Coach Strom. He told his team he’s not going anywhere.
FIRED, UNPAID, no office that is his, as soon as he was summarily let go, he made the decision to volunteer as coach, rather than abandon a team that on Saturday will play for a chance to win the CAC, or Continental Athletic Conference championship. In so doing, Haskell for the third time in four years could enter the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) tournament.
“I got lost in emotion, probably uncharacteristically,” said Strom, part of the Yakama Nation and raised in Wapato, Washington. “I questioned the equitability of the situation. But I gathered myself and said, ‘This is an example of adversity in life.’ I did tell them, ‘They can remove the coaching title, but they can’t remove me from my coaching duties.’”
A 25-year veteran of the game, Strom said he plans to be there until the final game, at least for this season.
The historical irony of an order, essentially a government edict, striking so hard at one of the nation’s 35 accredited TCUs, or Tribal Colleges & Universities, does not escape him.
FOUNDED BY THE U.S. Army in 1884, Haskell was birthed from tragedy. It was created as an Indian boarding school, where children were removed from their parents and tribal nations to be stripped of their culture and heritage and assimilated into white America. Children died there. A graveyard for 103 children at the southern edge of the campus speaks to that legacy.
In 1967, Haskell became a junior college. In 1993, it became a university offering Native Americans free education.
