Flathead senior Brian Wells packed a bunch of highlights into 6 weeks in 2018

Basketball season didn’t go well, football season ended in week three and the tennis campaign was over before it started.

That was 2019-20, but Flathead’s Brian Wells still has his highlights. His junior football season he came out of nowhere – OK, junior varsity – to start at strong safety for a Braves’ football team that came a goal-line stand from the 2018 State AA title.

“All of 5-foot-8 and 135 pounds,” asserts Matt Upham, Flathead’s head coach. Upham was an assistant to Kyle Samson in 2018 when Flathead got, in a word, hot. “Brian had a pretty spectacular run there, for a few games,” he said.

“I was kind of shocked,” said Wells, a quiet senior who plans to study pharmacy this fall at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. “That was my first year ever playing defense. I was just figuring out corner, and then they told me I was playing safety.”

That’s how dream seasons seem to work: You have your studs like running back Blake Counts and quarterback Jaden MacNeil – and then you add in your upstarts like Tanner Russell as an undersized defensive end and Wells as an even more undersized safety.

Upham had noticed Wells playing well on the JV and started thinking about giving him some playing time. MacNeil manned one of the safety spots, and other kids were banged up.

“The plan was to give him maybe 25 percent of the game,” Upham said. “Maybe 20, 25 snaps. The first game he played he lit it up – he led the team in production. He had a few tackles, an interception and a couple pass breakups. An impact player right away.”

And so it went.

“We’re playing (Great Falls) CMMR and that was the first time we really let him take a lot of time. He had three pass breakups that day and led us in tackles. And he didn’t take half the snaps.”

The progression continued: 75 percent of the defensive snaps against Missoula Big Sky, 90 percent against Helena High.

“And then the playoffs he played every snap,” Upham said. “He was a kid we could trust. He was small – not a very big guy. I was concerned a little bit, but he tackled low and didn’t take on bigger players up high.”

Flathead went into the playoffs as the fourth seed, won a home game against Billings Senior and then sprung a 21-17 semifinal upset on unbeaten Bozeman, in Bozeman.

One key: A late-game interception by Wells on a crossing route that had showed up on film.

“They’d run a bootleg,” said Upham. “He jumped the route and he high-pointed the ball and it was one of the best interceptions I’d ever seen.”

The next week in the state championship he made another pick – his fourth in six varsity games – late as Billings West tried to pad out a 20-14 lead. The Braves then drove the length of the field only to give up the ball on downs at the West 8-yard line. The Bears then ran out the clock.

“We came up a little bit short,” Upham said. “But we’re not in a position to win that game without this interception.

“Then his senior year he got hurt – I knew he was going to have a great year. It really hurt us when we lost him.”

“That run was probably the highlight of my high school athletics,” Wells said.

There aren’t many perfect endings. Samson left for a job at Montana Tech after the season, Upham was elevated and he lost two key players – Wells and Garett Reike – to broken legs suffered in collisions with teammates. The wins were harder to come by in 2019.

The same rang true in basketball, where Wells played less minutes as a senior than he did as a junior swinging up from JV.

“I feel bad – he didn’t have the greatest senior year,” said Flathead’s Ross Gustafson, who recently stepped down as boys’ basketball coach. “But it was really because of that injury he suffered in football. I just don’t think he ever got back to 100 percent.”

But, Gustafson added: “Ultimate teammate and team player. He did the best he could, did everything we asked. He still kept working and kept a great attitude. Some 18-year-olds have something like that happen you get a little, ‘Woe is me.’ And I just never got that from him.”

The what-ifs don’t end there. He planned to team with his brother Tommy for a hard-to-beat doubles tennis team; the COVID-19 pandemic took care of that.

Yet he is not, as Gustafson noted, outwardly frustrated. In the absence of high school tennis he took a job washing out golf carts at Village Greens.

“I’ve played most of my teammates almost my whole life, and I loved being around them and playing ball with them,” he said of basketball season. “It wasn’t too bad.”

Wells owns a 3.87 grade-point average that translates to three Bs in his high school career (“Math,” he said).

A couple of his Flathead classmates are also going to head to Grand Canyon, where another alumnus, Olivia Mohatt, already attends classes.

“First of all, the warm weather,” Wells said of the choice. “But I went there and toured it and really liked it. They have a good school for what I’m trying to do.”

He has warm memories of the help MacNeil gave him as he moved into the safety position in football – of seniors like MacNeil and Logan Siblerud that readily accepted the new guy up from JV.

Quickly 18 months have gone, but the experience is not forgotten.

“It was,” Gustafson said, “a pretty cool thing to watch.”