Brent Bargen
Chadron State College
Head Men's Basketball Coach

2007 -- Brent Bargen is in his second year as the men’s basketball coach at Chadron State. He is a Nebraska native who was a Division I assistant coach for 11 years prior to being selected Chadron State’s new head coach early in the summer of 2006 from among more than 100 applicants.
Athletic Director Brad Smith said he is pleased that Chadron State was able to hire an enthusiatic young coach with the potential to build an outstanding program.
Bargen, 37, was an assistant at Long Beach State in California for six years prior to coming to CSC. Before that he was on the staff at Kansas State University five years. Those experiences helped prepare him to become a head coach. The Bargen family was glad to return to Nebraska, where both Brent and his wife Leslie were born and raised.
The coach was born in Superior, Neb., and lived in Milford from kindergarten through his junior year of high school. As a senior, he moved to Crete, where his father, Bob Bargen, was an assistant basketball coach at Doane College.
The new Chadron State coach was an all-conference football and basketball player in high school. He attended Doane, where he was on the basketball team four years and a starter two years when the Tigers were coached by the legendary Bob Erickson. During Bargen’s senior year, Doane won the Nebraska-Iowa Athletic Conference championship. He graduated in 1993 with a degree in sports management.
After serving as an assistant coach at Dorchester High School and Nebraska Wesleyan each for a year, Bargen was an assistant coach under Tom Asbury at Kansas State University for five years. During this period, the Wildcats reached the NCAA Tournament in 1996 and played in the National Invitational Tournament in 1998 and ’99.
In 2000, Bargen went to Long Beach State, where he was an assistant two years under Wayne Morgan, later the head coach at Iowa State. The next four years Bargen worked under Larry Reynolds.
In 2005-06, Bargen’s last year at Long Beach State, the 49ers were 18-12 and reached the finals of the conference tournament. They led NCAA Division I in scoring that season with an 83.7-point average. Bargen wants his Chadron State teams to also play up-tempo and pour in lots of points.
Bargen’s wife, the former Leslie Grote of Harvard, Neb., was a volleyball and track athlete at Doane. She is employed as the events coordinator for the Chadron State Foundation and Alumni Association.
The couple has three children. They are Ashley, who is a junior at Chadron High, where she has been a starter on the volleyball team the past two season and plays basketball; Zac, who is a high school sophomore and is a regular on the football and basketball teams; and Jake, a sixth-grader and another budding athlete.
Bargen comes from a coaching family. His father was a basketball coach for approximately 35 years. Before serving as Erickson’s assistant at Doane for about 10 years, he coached high school basketball at Milford. He later was an assistant coach at Nebraska Wesleyan eight years, was the head coach at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, two years and an assistant at Barton County Community College in Kansas for a year. He now lives near Milford.
Bargen’s uncle, Gary Bargen, also is a veteran coach and athletic administrator. He was the head basketball coach at Southeast Community College at Fairbury and Hutchinson Community College in Kansas before serving about 10 years as an assistant to Danny Nee at the University of Nebraska. He is now an assistant athletic director in charge of compliance at UNL.
The CSC coach said he practically grew up in gymnasiums and has observed dozens of coaches during his lifetime.
“Because of my family’s involvement in basketball, I’ve been around great coaches all of my life; as a youth attending countless camps, as a player and then as an assistant coach for 13 years. I’ve learned from all of them.
“I’m excited to be coaching in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. I know it is one of the elite conferences in the nation. My goal is to take the Eagles to the elite eight in the conference and compete for the championship as soon as possible.”