Powerful Lyric
There are a handful of reasons Lyric Ersland is having the season he’s had so far for the Flathead basketball team, but the biggest is he decided something had to change.
“I felt I was really lacking during my first three years of high school,” Ersland, a senior forward, said. “I felt like I was cheating myself and cheating my team, because I felt like I was being lazy.
“So I worked it out. I sat down with my dad and a buddy of mine (teammate Dustyn Franchini-White) and just decided if I wanted to make my dreams a reality, something had to happen.”
The statistical results have been impressive: Ersland is averaging 22.5 points and 8.6 rebounds for Flathead through 10 games. This is up from 12.8 points and six rebounds in 2023-24, when the Braves struggled through an 0-19 season under first-year coach Dan Trageser.
Seasons like that can wear on an athlete, but Trageser has seen the opposite with Ersland.
“One of the biggest improvements I’ve seen in him is his leadership,” Trageser said. “He’s kind of matured into that role, and it’s one he’s wanted. Being part of teams that didn’t have success, now his words match his actions and guys see his work and what he’s been able to get done for us.”
The bad news: Flathead started 2-1 but is now in the midst of a seven-game slide. That includes a 54-49 loss in last week’s Crosstown game at Glacier — a game in which Ersland worked inside and out for 35 points and 13 rebounds.
Three of the losses have come by three points or less.
“That’s something we need to learn,” Ersland asserts. “We need to finish games. We’ve had so many close ones, but we’re all sick of hearing, ‘Oh, you guys were so close. If this happened, if that happened, you would have won.’ You can do that for hours.
“I just want to win. If you win, you never talk about, if this happened we would have lost.“
Ashley Ersland was born in Troy but moved to Butte before he was old enough to remember. He’s the fourth boy born to his parents, who after having oldest boy Adam started picking out girls names.
So it was that “Charline” became Charlie and “Danielle” became Dan. When they tried again, they went gender-neutral.
“My mom was a fan of Gone with the Wind,” Lyric Ersland’s dad says. “It was going to be Ashley, either way. It’s a stupid story, man.”
Fans of Johnny Cash can guess what growing up in Butte might be like for a boy named Ashley, and they’d be right.
“I grew up knowing how to handle myself,” Ashley Ersland said. He quit high school having never played organized basketball because his parents, devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, prohibited it. Which isn’t to say he didn’t love the game: He and Adam, he said, squared off with the two middle boys for hours, every day they could.
At 18 he left his home to stay with a brother in Bozeman; later he got his GED, moved to the Flathead Valley and began learning to install floors and carpet. Now he has his own contracting business. And while there are nieces and nephews these days, it is Lyric Ersland who has really taken to the game of basketball, along with two younger sisters.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the type of kid he turned out to be,” Ashley says. “His head is solely focused on basketball and family. As a father, to know come Friday night he and his friends are going to Flathead to work on basketball, as opposed to all the stupid stuff I used to do when I was younger? Couldn’t be prouder. He has a good head on his shoulders.”
Lyric Ersland stands 6-foot-5 in his basketball shoes and was always one of the bigger kids around. At Fair-Mont-Egan, naturally his coaches put him in the post. When he started playing travel hoops with Team Ball, Ashley said, there was more freedom for him to shoot outside the arc.
“When he went to that travel team, he was far from the best player,” his dad remembered. “Instead of getting discouraged, he resolved to work harder.”
The pattern continued at Flathead. Ersland played in 11 games as a freshman, and scored 18 points. As a sophomore he was second on the team in scoring at 7.6 points a game.
This season, partly because Trageser runs a lot of the offense through his senior, Ersland does a bit of everything. He’ll hit the three or the sweet, baseline 8-footer, like he did against Glacier.
“We talked about what he could be, with his size and skill,” Trageser said. “We wanted to make him a really tough ‘guard’ in AA. We asked him to go into the post a little more and open things up for his teammates. He’s stepped up at the defensive end.
“And just because he’s a tough kid to guard, now he’s getting attention from colleges in the last couple of weeks.”
Ersland’s strongest contacts so far came from Pacific University, an NAIA program in Forest Grove, Ore., and Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Ore.
None of this seemed likely a year ago. He’s aware that he’s had a lot of support along the way, from his grandfather Michael Churmage to his mom (Shaleigh) and dad to Franchini-White.
“It was a lot easier to do this with someone else,” he said, meaning the Braves’ point guard.
Trageser sees the obvious benefit of a strong offseason: double workouts in the summer, constant shooting and scrimmaging.
“It’s transformed his game and his body a little bit,” he said. “And he’s playing with a lot of confidence.”
The Braves are at Missoula Sentinel Thursday and at Missoula Hellgate Saturday, the last two of 10 road games they’ll have played in 11 outings. Trageser envisions his team getting comfortable and finding some rhythm and momentum while getting six of its last seven regular-season games at the Flathead gym.
So does Ersland. He sees a program on the rise, playing fun, full-court basketball.
“I know we haven’t produced a lot of wins but I also know we’ve been a lot closer in a lot more games,” he said. “In a few years Flathead could be one of the bigger programs.”
Obviously, he’d like that momentum to start now.
“I want to be a key factor to produce wins,” he said. “As long as we’re winning, I’ll fill whatever role. I don’t view myself as a selfish player, but I also can read the moment, and if I think I have to score 30 tonight to give us a chance, I’ll try to do it. But at the end of the day, I just want to win.”
“They want to go to State so bad,” Trageser said of the Braves. “I know that’s something the seniors deserve, and that Lyric deserves. He’s flown under the radar the last couple years and now I think people are starting to notice.”