TAYLORSVILLE, Utah (April 6, 2020) – Winning breeds memories, usually fond ones.
 
With that ideal holding true, no team in Utah college basketball in the last decade would have memories that rival those of the 2015-16 Salt Lake Community College men's basketball team. The Bruins, who won their second NJCAA national championship that year, had a roster filled with NCAA talent; composed of student-athletes from around the country who went on to lead SLCC to a national title and then further individual success after their time in Salt Lake.
 
While the memories of such a team are always sweet, the road to the championship is very rarely a flowery, straight-line road; instead, even the best of championship teams have unexpected turns and bumps. For the 2015-16 Bruins, the journey, however it went, will always be historic.  
Salt Lake entered the 2015-16 season full of momentum. After going 25-6 the previous year, including a 13-2 finish in the Scenic West Athletic Conference, the Bruins entered fall camp with high expectations. Part of the energy around the program came from fifth-year head coach Todd Phillips, a noted junior college leader who had been an understudy under longtime SLCC coach Norm Parrish. Alongside veteran SLCC assistant Paul Marble, former Bruin great Silas Mills and first-year assistant Brian Swindlehurst, Salt Lake had assembled talent at the top to take off entering the season.
 
Phillips: "We were excited about the season. We thought we had a good nucleus of guys but didn't really know exactly what we had at the time.  Guys developed over the year and embraced their roles on the team."
 
Swindlehurst: "We really liked our team and we knew we had some solid talent, but we weren't thinking we would win it all (at least I wasn't)."
 
While coaches certainly set the tone, athletic success will always revolve around the ability of players to make plays. Tyler Rawson is one of the best players to walk the Taylorsville campus in the last decade, a player who eventually rose to being an NJCAA All-American. The American Fork product entered the year with optimism about the abilities of himself and his teammates.
 
Rawson: "The general feeling was good. For me, coming out of Southern Utah, a new change in program culture and adapting to a new level of play was fun. Seeing some familiar faces that I played with or against in high school was comforting and helped with team chemistry." SLCC opened the 2015-16 season on October 30 with a 94-77 win over South Mountain Community College, opening the season on an eight-game winning streak. The team wouldn't experience its first loss until November 27, coming in a 92-86 decision with Glendale Community College. All of what happened throughout the year was akin to a slow-burning rise for the Bruins.
 
Gibson Johnson, another local Utah product, was entering his second year as a leader with the Salt Lake program. The Viewmont High School product had developed throughout his time with the Bruins, giving him a unique feel for what made the team successful.
 
Johnson: "Our team chemistry was great from the start; we all got along but also competed against each other on the floor. I was extremely excited to see what we could accomplish."
 
While the Bruins started the preseason hot, Salt Lake would end up falling to third at the end of the Scenic West Athletic Conference regular season, eventually finishing with a mark of 9-5 in league play. SLCC lost its last three games in the regular season, falling behind Southern Idaho and then-Scenic West member North Idaho.
 
Johnson: "Honestly, (our team chemistry) was almost too good. It was so good that guys stopped holding each other accountable on the court because we were all such good friends. We got lazy at times. We should've never lost a game. We never played a team that had more talent than us, and yet we didn't even win our conference season title, didn't even take second. It is something that I'm embarrassed by."

---

 
The way the regular season ended for the Bruins, there remained questions of what direction the team would go when it came time for the Region 18 tournament. The Scenic West's annual postseason tourney to place teams in the NJCAA postseason featured several nationally ranked teams, with Salt Lake needing to win the tournament to have hopes of competing in Hutchinson, Kansas, for the NJCAA title.
 
Rawson: "Our region was really hard. Every night, it was a fight and felt like a rivalry game. It didn't help that we weren't playing our best basketball. Before the region tourney, we all came together after a few practices and film sessions and told ourselves 'we can beat any team in the country if we play to the best of our abilities'.
 
Phillips: "We knew we had a good team but guys individually were not playing well. We were really frustrated and disheartened. Our staff came together and brainstormed all week on how to best motivate our team. We decided to go all in on the conference tournament. We put together team building and motivational activities for the guys."
 
Paul Marble, who now serves Salt Lake Community College in athletics administration, was a notable figure on the Bruin bench for many years. As a motivational force within the team's coaching staff, the longtime assistant made a significant contribution to the overall feeling of the team.
 
Marble: "I went to the store and bought white shirts and markers for the players and coaches. We had our pregame chalk talk and after I had everyone put away the chairs and I put the t-shirts around the floor in a circle so that everyone faced each other. I asked them to write down what they were willing to do to achieve our goal of winning the Region 18 title in a circle on the shirt.  Everyone wrote something in the middle of their circle, then I handed out scissors and asked the team to cut out the circle. They all got up and put on their t-shirts; then I explained to them that those holes in their shirts represented to them and the world that they had just exposed their hearts."
 
Salt Lake opened the Region 18 tournament with a dominating victory over Colorado Northwestern, setting up a semifinal clash with Southern Idaho. SLCC posted an 82-60 win over the Golden Eagles, claiming the Region 18 title with an 86-73 win over North Idaho the following night.

Phillips: "Coach Marble took us through a visualization activity that ended with players ripping shirts off.  We kept the shreds of shirts as a reminder for us. We carried the shirts to every game. We ended up crushing CSI and beating NIC in the championship. We were clicking on all cylinders."

SLCC swept through Cochise College in the NJCAA District One championship game, earning its first trip to Hutchinson since the 2013-14 season. Salt Lake opened the NJCAA National Tournament on March 14, 2016, with a 77-64 win over Northeast Mississippi. The Bruins had one of the toughest tests of the entire season the next night, an opponent that could either showcase or expose the confidence Salt Lake had built to that point – No. 4 Odessa College. In retrospect, the team remembers the game as a turning point.
 
Phillips: "Odessa was the best team out of the Texas League and quite possibly the best team we played."
 
Swindlehurst: "I thought (Odessa) may have been the best team in the tournament and we were lucky to play well enough to beat them when they hadn't played a game yet."
 
The Bruins earned a tight 92-86 win over Odessa, keyed by a team-high 23 points from Tad Dufelmeier. Rawson also contributed 18 points in the win.
 
Rawson: "The first two games were a little nerve racking and you could tell we had some jitters. After we beat a really good Odessa team, we knew we could beat anyone in the tournament."
 
SLCC then earned blowout victories over Southwestern Tennessee and Gillette College, advancing to the NJCAA national championship game for the first time since 2009.

---

 
Salt Lake's opponent in the NJCAA national title game would be none-other than longtime junior college power Hutchinson Community College, which coincidentally has served as the longtime host of the NJCAA tournament. Facing a proud tradition, and strong community support from a hometown crowd, the Bruins expected to have a battle on their hands entering the championship.
 
Johnson: "Having the stands full of Hutchinson fans was fun for us; we loved to feed off of the despair of opposing crowds as they watched their team lose. (Rawson) would even blow kisses and shush the crowd. We loved that 'us vs. everyone' mentality."
 
Concerns about whether Salt Lake's momentum would continue were quickly silenced in the national title game, with the Bruins hopping out to a 42-27 halftime lead. Indeed, the confidence of Salt Lake Community College wasn't just an imaginary or created emotion; it was real.
 
Phillips: "The atmosphere was unbelievable; it was completely packed and the crowd was against us. It made for an unbelievable national championship game. It was amazing making a crowd that big go that quiet."
 
Rawson: "You really couldn't ask for a better stage in the national championship game. Playing against the hometown team with a completely sold-out gym with all of them cheering against you is intimidating; however, with all of the momentum we had gained the previous eight games, we had nothing to fear." 
 
While the game would go back-and-forth in the second half, with Salt Lake's lead at one point getting trimmed to an uncomfortable margin, the philosophy of winning being players making big plays came true with one critical blow from Rawson.
 
Johnson: "Hutchinson cut our lead to six points and I had just fouled out, so tension was high. (Rawson) drove the lane, jump-stopped, and hit a little floater over their big man and we went up by eight points with about 30 seconds left. That's when I knew it was over and we had won a national championship." The final buzzer sounded and pandemonium took place around the assembled group of Bruin players and coaches, with the Salt Lake faithful cheering loudly from the stands – indeed, SLCC had won its second national championship thanks to a 74-64 decision over Hutchinson. The elation of victory quickly enveloped the Bruins, who began to realize exactly how incredible their accomplishment had been.
 
Phillips: "It was an amazing feeling. The excitement, the energy, the relief all wrap up in one. It is such a long week, playing five games in six days; you win and instantly start prepping for the next game. Everything just comes crashing down on you. I was so happy for our coaches, players and school."
 
Swindlehurst: "I was a new college coach at the time so I didn't fully understand how big of a deal winning the national championship was. I was ecstatic and was so happy for our guys because they had worked so hard and had sacrificed a lot to be where they were.  I was happy for Coach Phillips, too.  I also thought to myself that I was a really spoiled and lucky coach, as most coaches can coach a whole career without experiencing what's it's like to win a national championship."
 
Johnson: "It all hit me at once: the fact we were going to win, the fact that my life was about to change forever and that, no matter what, we were the NJCAA National Champions and no one could take that from us. We had a hell of a team and if we played the tournament again, we would've won it again; we were playing that good of basketball."
 
Rawson: "It was so satisfying to know that we made it all this way; playing five games in six days, feeling exhausted, and completing a near-impossible task. A month before, we knew we could be playing our last game as a Bruin, yet here we were nine games later calling ourselves 'national champions'.
 

---

The journey of a national champion is sweet, but it doesn't make the ending any less abrupt; the season is over, albeit with memories of accomplishment and success. In junior college, players move on to four-year schools with quickness and team bonds are established with new teammates. Still, the unity of shared accomplishment will forever bind the 2015-16 Salt Lake Community College Bruins.
 
For Phillips, who left Salt Lake after the 2018-19 season to become an NCAA Division-I assistant coach at Utah Valley University, the year was a flowing tapestry of highlight moments.
 
Phillips: "The memory that is burned in my mind is the resilience of our team. We had multiple guys step up game-after-game to help carry us through the gauntlet of the tournament. I have lots of pictures of guys jumping up and making big shots when we needed them."
 
Kevin Dustin, SLCC's Athletic Director who was in his second year on the job, had been around college basketball in many capacities, as both an administrator and as an assistant coach at Utah State. The success of the 2015-16 Bruins is still remembered in many ways in the SLCC program, according to the department's leader.
 
Dustin: "It was an incredible last few weeks. I knew for a long time that the team was built for a long run, if they could get in the tournament.  We had great post players, athletes on the wing, shooters, and solid point play. This group had depth in all positions and high character.  Just as importantly, the staff was terrific.  They out-coached the rest of the tournament field with game planning during a quick turnaround.  This team had all the ingredients."
 
Several of the individual players from the 2015-16 team left Salt Lake for other opportunities. Tyler Rawson continued his career playing locally at the University of Utah, with Gibson Johnson transferring to play for Hawai'i, where he is currently a graduate assistant coach. Both players look back on the memories of winning a national championship with the Bruins as a highlight in their lives, personally and basketball-wise.
 
Rawson: "I just grew so much more confident in myself over the course of the season. I trusted that I could be more of a dominant player and take control of the game with my all-around game. Scoring, passing, rebounding, and defending; that versatility became the stamp of my career."
 
Johnson: "It was a year and a team that I will always remember. The most fun I've ever had on the basketball court."