Belo Horizonte, Brazil – where Arthur Moreira is from – is a sports town.
In 2014, the city hosted six World Cup soccer matches at the Mineirao stadium, which holds nearly 62,000. Now, the stadium is home to Cruzeiro, boyhood club of the original Ronaldo, O Fenomeno, second only to Pele in the rankings of the greatest Brazilian players of all time.
Their rival, Atletico Mineiro, also plays in Brazil’s top division, in the 46,000-seat Arena MRV.
At the 25,000-seat Mineirinho – the largest indoor sports arena in the country – volleyball crowds are so fervent that the men’s national team, three-time Olympic gold medalists, often comes to Belo Horizonte to play.
Elsewhere in the city, there are MMA gyms and racing tracks. Moreira’s father was a tennis player, his mother a gymnast.
Moreira laughs to recall it now. How did a kid from southeastern Brazil, with all those other options, even hear about basketball, let alone become obsessed with the game? None of his friends played. NBA games didn’t exist on TV, and the Final Four? Forget about it.
The only hoops around came on ESPN, in the form of occasional re-runs of the network’s early-2000s staple, the And1 mixtape tour. To a 10-year-old Moreira, every episode was a revelation, a half-hour window into a whole new world.
“That’s what drew me to the sport,” Moreira admitted. “I was a huge The Professor fan.”
That fascination was the spark that started Moreira on a decades-long, multi-continent journey – from soccer to basketball, from playing to coaching, from Brazil to California and now to Moscow, Idaho, as a history-making trailblazer, the first-ever Brazilian head coach in all of Division I women’s basketball.
Six-and-a-half-thousand miles away from Belo Horizonte, Moreira has taken an almost completely new roster to unlikely heights in his first year as head coach at Idaho, putting together a starting five of all transfers and guiding them to third place in the Big Sky Conference. Less than a year after Carrie Eighmey shockingly left the Vandals in the lurch by unexpectedly taking the job at South Dakota, Moreira was a candidate for Big Sky Coach of the Year, and his team might be the biggest threat to assumed title-game opponents Montana State and Northern Arizona.
It’s a season that not many saw coming.
Of course, compared to the rest of Moreira’s story, it’s hardly surprising at all.
“All my friends were like, ‘What are you doing? Man, you’re pretty good at soccer.’ But I just didn’t love it as much as I love basketball, you know? The contact, the team game, the competitiveness of basketball – I’ve just always been drawn to that.”
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There is, of course, quite a lot of distance between a childhood fascination with basketball and chasing the game a quarter of the way around the world. But Moreira’s obsession never wavered.
As a teenager, he begged his parents for an NBA League Pass subscription, fell in love with Rockets-era Tracy McGrady and played alongside future NBA Draft picks Raul Neto and Cristiano Felicio at one of the only clubs in Belo Horizonte that even had a basketball team.
When he saw Gordon Hayward’s halfcourt shot miss by a whisker against Duke in the 2010 national title game – the first college basketball game he’d ever seen – he resolved to play college basketball in the States himself.
And when that dream died when he was cut early in his career at Division-II Sonoma State, he did whatever it took to stay around the game.
“The first year I was at Sonoma State, my coach brought me into the office and says, ‘Listen, Art, I don’t think it’s going to work out,’” Moreira said. “But, you know, I was the guy that was always in the office, always asking questions, so when they cut me, they offered me the chance to stay on staff and help as a student assistant. … So through my last three years of college, I was stepping out of class to make calls, help book hotels and travel, and then go on recruiting trips.”
Moreira spent five years at Sonoma, then seven more with Molly Goodenbour at San Francisco, acquiring a reputation as a top recruiter, particularly of international talent.
Even now, two years after Moreira left the Dons, 12 of the 15 players on San Francisco’s roster are from overseas, including three Brazilians.
“I’ve met him a few times just from scheduling, game scheduling, when he was at San Francisco,” Idaho State head coach Seton Sobolewski said. “And then we all knew his Brazilian connection. He was getting some really good players from Brazil to go to San Francisco.”
He spent one year as an assistant on Eighmey’s first staff at Idaho before taking over when Eighmey left for South Dakota after the 2023-24 season.
And even as Moreira made history as the first Brazilian head coach in D-I women’s basketball, he was facing an incredible challenge for his first head coaching job.
The departure of Eighmey, who never actually signed her contract with the Vandals, after just one season was unexpected, and most of the returning roster went into the transfer portal after the news was announced.
When the dust settled, just two players remained who had any experience at Idaho – Sarah Brans and Ashlyn Wallace. And with Wallace missing the season with a long-term injury, Moreira had the barest possible foundation for building his version of the Vandals.
“I mean, when the season ended last year, we had three players on the roster,” Moreira said. “And then we had one freshman committed, and that was it, right? So we had four players coming in, and we figured that the only way to rebuild the team is through the portal, and that’s something I’m pretty comfortable with. The last three or four years at San Francisco, we brought three out of the last five (conference) newcomers of the year.”
Together, Moreira and associate head coach Drew Muscatell scoured rosters across the country, looking for players that fit their blueprint.
“There’s a recruiting process. Character is non-negotiable for me,” Moreira said. “We try to do a lot of research before we bring players into our program. There’s a couple players we have on our roster that we called six different people to background check on them. High school coaches or maybe somebody that coached them, their parents or siblings. With some of the international kids, I went as far as to ask the janitor of the club that they played at, OK, how does she treat you? Does she talk to you? Is she polite to you, you know?”
The transfers that Moreira brought in to form the backbone of the team came from all over. Hope Hassmann (CSU-Fullerton), Rosie Schweizer (Pacific) and Anja Bukvic (Louisiana Tech) came from other Division I schools. Point guard Olivia Nelson had played four years at Division-II Missouri-Kansas City. Center Jennifer Aadland spent five years, including a redshirt, at Division-II Augustana.
Together, those five form Idaho’s all-transfer starting lineup, which is unique even in this era of portal chaos.
The situation was so unsettled that Moreira wasn’t able to do much actual coaching over the summer. Instead, he rolled the ball out and let the players scrimmage as much as possible, hoping that they would build chemistry with each other that way.
“I know a lot of basketball coaches like to put all their concepts in. Teach the whole offense, the whole defense before they allow the girls to play,” Moreira said. “I was talking to our staff like hey, listen guys. We have 12 new players. We don’t have that much time. We need to develop chemistry quick. We started playing scrimmages five on five on Day 1 of summer workouts. I just wanted them to get as much experience playing together as we could. So when the season started, we didn’t look like a new team.”
The approach worked. The Vandals opened the season with a five-point loss to BYU, and put together a seven-game winning streak later in the non-conference schedule.
They lost their conference opener by three to eventual champion Montana State in Bozeman, but followed that up with six straight Big Sky wins, establishing themselves as an unlikely contender.
And despite some ups and downs through the rest of the conference slate, they finished 10-8 in the league, good for third place in a year that didn’t have many strong teams behind the top two of MSU and Northern Arizona.
“I was a little unsure of just how we were gonna glue together in our team chemistry, with having so many transfers, but I think it’s been this ideal season for me to end on,” said Aadland, who averaged 9.7 points and 9.6 rebounds. “We have a great coaching staff, and I love how our team has been able to come together and battle through adversity when we dropped a few games.”
The results validated Moreira’s recruiting blitz from the offseason.
Nelson was named the Big Sky’s Newcomer of the Year after averaging 14.3 points and 3.1 assists.
“She started on a team that made a run to the (Division II) Final Four as a freshman, she knows what it takes to win,” Moreira said. “She’s one of the most competitive players I’ve ever coached, and I’ve never met somebody that enjoys life as much as Olivia. She’s always laughing. She’s the loudest one. She’s one of those kids that, if you end practice, she’s gonna ask if we can play another game and scrimmage a little more. So she really set the tone early, and it’s contagious. If you have one kid that competes hard, now everybody wants to do the same.”
Hassmann averaged 12.1 points and led the team in assists, while Aadland and Schweizer provided post physicality. All four of those players, plus Bukvic, were healthy for all 29 games, a stroke of luck for a group of players that needed to play together as much as possible.
The result was a season that not many people saw coming, and some deserved respect for Moreira.
“He’s just done a great job there,” Sobolewski said. “They’re a very prepared team. They have great toughness. … Art and his staff do a great job of getting them ready. They put a lot of thought into every game from the mental side. And he’s just doing a great job of being competitive.”
Now, more than 6,000 miles away from the hometown that sent him on his unlikely journey, Moreira will lead a team into postseason play for the first time.
And although Idaho is a distant third behind Montana State and Northern Arizona at this year’s Big Sky Tournament, if Moreira and the Vandals can pull off an upset, he might not be done making history this season.
