Thirty-two years and 614 wins later, CCS honors longtime women’s basketball coach Bruce Johnson

Bruce Johnson already has a spot in the Community Colleges of Spokane Hall of Fame. A couple of them, in fact. He is enshrined with teammates from successful 1974-75 and 1975-76 Spokane Community College men’s basketball teams from when he was a student-athlete.

On Saturday, the retired CCS women’s basketball coach will get his own seat.

Johnson, who retired in June 2021 after 36 years of service to the school, 32 of them as the longest-tenured women’s basketball coach in school history, will be inducted during ceremonies starting at 5 p.m. Saturday in the Wandermere Golf Course banquet room.

A 1974 graduate of Rogers High School, where he was a football-basketball standout (he was inducted into the school’s Walk of Fame in 2015), Johnson was recruited to SCC by then-men’s basketball coach Craig Johnson. The Sasquatch put together the school’s first 20-win seasons during Bruce’s two years as a player and earned runner-up finishes at NWAC tournaments.

He left Spokane to play at the now-defunct Yankton College (South Dakota), where he was two-time all-conference and selected to the NAIA District 12 All-Star team his senior year. He followed that with three years playing professional basketball in Australia, helping the North Adelaide Rockets to the South Australian League championship in 1983.

Johnson returned to SCC in 1985 to teach and coach and was elevated from the assistant’s position to be the women’s head basketball coach in 1988 by then-athletic director Maury Ray.

In his decades as head coach, which ended with the 2019-20 season, the Sasquatch won 614 games and six region championships, earning him East Region Coach of the Year each of those seasons. In 2017, Spokane won the conference championship and Johnson was named NWAC Women’s Basketball Coach of the Year.

He was a tenured physical education instructor for more than 30 years and served from 2009 until 2020 as the department chair.

“He was a great hire,” acknowledged Ray.

“He had a great career at Spokane, both as a student-athlete basketball player and as an instructor and coach,” Ray added. “He was a solid coach and he’s a great individual. The longevity speaks for itself and the wins speak for themselves.

“In his time in the department, he had a positive impact on thousands of Community Colleges of Spokane students.”