“Indian ball,” as it became known, was characterized by full-court-press defense and high-scoring, improvisational fast breaks. The game is predicated on speed and cooperation. “It’s not very individualized,” says Don Wetzel Jr., a Blackfeet Nation descendant who manages the Montana Indian Athletic Hall of Fame. “You’re not taught to be like that. To make your people happy is one of the greatest things you can ever do.” High school stars from the past remain celebrated today: Names like Jonathan Takes Enemy, Sharon LaForge, Elvis Old Bull, Malia Kipp and Mike Chavez remind people of on-court triumphs and, in many cases, off-court trials.

Montana’s best-known reservation teams have come from the plains east of the Rocky Mountains: from Lodge Grass, on Crow Nation, and from Browning and Heart Butte, on Blackfeet Nation. But for the past decade, the basketball program in Arlee, which is in the foothills of the Mission Range, has touched the hem of this elite. In 2005, a group of parents, including John and Becky Malatare, started a youth basketball clinic. Between 2009 and 2013, Arlee’s boys went 88-34; the girls went 105-39 between 2011 and 2016. During that time, both teams secured divisional titles but fell short at the state level. Zanen Pitts, a 32-year-old rancher and Pend d’Oreille first descendant, took over as the boys’ coach in 2013. He installed a system that combined the freewheeling speed of Indian ball with defensive strategies borrowed from college programs. “There is a structure to our chaos,” Pitts says.

In 2014, Phil Malatare entered high school. He had dedicated most of his young life to two pursuits: horn hunting — searching for the freshly shed antlers of bull elk — and playing basketball at the community center. His arrival turned the Warriors’ defense into something terrifying. During his freshman year, the team lost in the state semifinals; during his sophomore year, they reached the championship; last year, they went 25-1, and Phil played nearly every minute of the championship run. Just before the end of the game, someone in the crowd called him a redskin. Then, in the final seconds, he jumped for a rebound that clinched the victory. In his bedroom, he hung news clippings of his victories and defeats, for motivation, along with the cleaned skull of a buffalo he killed.

After last year, Phil was the only Class C player named to the ALL-USA Montana Boys Basketball team. This fall, when The Great Falls Tribune previewed the state’s best high school players, it listed Phil first. Watching Phil on the court, Wetzel got to thinking about Old Bull and Takes Enemy, each of whom he played against. “He’s more like Elvis,” he says. “Elvis was deceptively quick. Phillip is flat-out quick.” Don Holst, a former head coach for the University of Montana and a principal of Arlee’s elementary school, saw it differently. Old Bull was a shooter; Phil, he says, has “this innate ability to see things.” Pitts earnestly compared him to the N.B.A. star Russell Westbrook. “I like Russell’s pull-up jumper a little better,” he once said. Whenever Phil arrived at basketball camps, kids flocked to him. At one game, his father heard a boy scream: “Phillip Malatare touched me!”

John Malatare, a Salish and Cree wildland firefighter, wanted Phil to cash in his ticket to leave the reservation while it was still good. “A lot of these colleges in Montana,” John says, “will give a Native kid one chance.” On reservations, basketball stars become symbols of hope, but many have struggled to replicate their high school success in college. Wetzel played at Montana State University at Billings, but he left the team after having a child in his sophomore year. He went on to a career in public education. Not everyone has been so fortunate. In 1991, Sports Illustrated’s Gary Smith wrote about the Crow stars Takes Enemy and Old Bull, who both struggled with alcohol. Others have gone to college, only to leave after feeling homesick.

Pitts says that in five years as head coach, he has had three college coaches ask if prospects are Native, openly worrying that they might not last in school. Women from Montana’s reservations have carried a similar weight. In 1992, Malia Kipp, from Blackfeet Nation, entered the University of Montana, starring with the Lady Grizzlies for all four years. “I felt if I didn’t succeed,” she once said, “others wouldn’t get the opportunity.”

According to Pitts and Wetzel, the skepticism Native recruits face is owed to cultural misunderstanding, and the inadequate support systems in place as a result. “Those coaches need to do a better job of sustaining ’em,” Pitts says. “They need to understand what they’re coaching.” That meant recognizing the gravitational pull of home for players from reservations, but also the genuinely distinct sports culture incubated there. Kids who grow up playing Indian ball on the reservation, whether or not they are themselves Native — the Arlee Warriors are Salish, Navajo, Sioux, Pend d’Oreille and Blackfeet, but also white, black and Filipino — can find the college game as alienating as campus life. For Wetzel, the businesslike nature and slower pace of college ball was challenging. “It’s conformity,” he says. Wetzel thinks schools should recruit multiple reservation players at once, the way the Lady Grizzlies did a decade ago, following Kipp’s success. “I rarely see two Natives on the court at the same time at a college level,” Wetzel says. “It does bring some magic.”