Frezzotti joins staff, exhibition games begin

There is never a good time to be summoned unexpectedly to the athletic director's office and not told the reason you're being asked to report.

But on a Monday evening in the middle of the season? When you've lost 13 in a row and are off to a 4-21 start, and you've just returned home from getting swept on the road at Buffalo in your league openers?

Melissa Gentile, head coach of the Eastern Michigan softball team, was hoping for the best last March when she walked in for her meeting with Scott Wetherbee. A pep talk perhaps.

But she had a bad feeling. The timing of it just felt wrong.

"We thought it was weird," says Magali Frezzotti, who was one of Gentile's two assistant coaches and this fall finds herself in Montana, on Melanie Meuchel's staff as graduate assistant coach.

The meeting wasn't about Gentile's job performance or her team's struggles. It was to let her know the program would be eliminated at season's end in a cost-cutting move by a department that had been operating in the red year in and year out.

The deficit for the 2018 fiscal year was expected to be between $4.5 and $5.5 million, so softball was cut, as were men's swimming and diving, wrestling and women's tennis.

Those programs' student-athletes were informed of the decision the next morning.

"For my personal goals and aspirations, it wasn't a happy thing to hear. I thought I had something semi-stable going on," says Frezzotti, a native of Argentina who moved to the U.S. in 2013 in an attempt to make the sport her livelihood.

The Eagles would lose their next three games by a combined score of 20-2, but there would be moments of joy in the weeks that followed: the back-to-back wins over Miami (Ohio), the two-game home sweep of Central Michigan, both by shutout.

"From a professional standpoint, it didn't change much," says Frezzotti. "We still needed to make the best of our opportunities and had a duty to teach our student-athletes and make them better.

"Those were times of adversity, so it was an opportunity for us to guide them and hopefully make something good out of a sad situation we were all going through."

But after a season-ending 2-0 loss to Western Michigan, Frezzotti and everybody else was on their own, left to scramble for whatever they could find. Frezzotti found the Grizzlies.

"I've been trying to adjust. I spent five years in Michigan. That kind of became home for me, then I came here by myself," she says.

She was convinced to move to Michigan from Argentina by Amanda Chidester, a two-time Big Ten Player of the Year for the Wolverines, who was playing at an international tournament in Puerto Rico in 2013 for a U.S. national team when she struck up a friendship with Frezzotti.

Frezzotti, who has been playing for her national team since 2005 and hopes to be contacted again to play at an international tournament in Aruba next month, grew up playing softball in her home country, but it wasn't a sport of much popularity.

So when Chidester told her of softball in the U.S., of a booming sport, of the opportunities to train at a higher level, of the chances to continue on in the sport through coaching, Frezzotti was intrigued enough to make the move.

She got on as a graduate assistant at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, where she coached for two and a half years and earned a master's degree. That led to her first full-time position, at Eastern Michigan, until the decision by the school last spring to cut the program, in Frezzotti's first year.

She doesn't need another degree for what she aspires to be -- a Division I softball coach -- but she's doing what she has to do to stay in the game.

"It wasn't my Plan A. My Plan A was to continue full-time somewhere, but this was my best option to get more experience," says Frezzotti, who can often be found after practice keeping her own skills sharp in the batting cages.

"I wanted to stay part of a Division I program. I fit well in this environment. I perform better when the demands from the student-athletes and the department are a little higher. This program has been successful in the past, and that's exciting."

This fall, during Montana's exhibition season, she'll be taking on more of a coaching role than she was probably expecting.

Second-year coach Melanie Meuchel was left without an assistant coach when Betsy Westermann unexpectedly stepped away from her position last month.

"There are a lot of things Maggie brings to the table with her experience," said Meuchel. "We're going to be better because of her knowledge and her ability to teach, along with her passion and her ability to push people.

"She is someone who loves to learn about the game. That makes her better as a coach and will make me better as a coach. And it will definitely make our players better, so she's a great addition."

The process of finding Westermann's replacement is ongoing.

Montana opened its fall season just last week and will have had only a handful of practices when the Grizzlies host MSU Billings in a doubleheader on Sunday starting at noon.

In a perfect scenario, Montana wouldn't be playing its first games until the following weekend, but filling the allowable eight-game schedule in the fall is more important than when those competitions arrive.

"We knew these games would arrive early, but it will be an exciting time to put all 17 players in the same dugout and compete together against a different opponent," said Meuchel.

"We've had a scrimmage, and we've gone against each other, hitters and pitchers, doing different things in practice that challenge us. It will be fun to compete out of the same dugout."

The fall will be an especially interesting time as well for fans of the program, who grew accustomed to seeing year after year so many of the players who graduated in the spring, 11 in all.

Meuchel has nine returners, headlined by a deep, experienced pitching staff, and brought in eight newcomers: two transfers and six freshmen.

"It's been an exciting time as we go through this building process," she said. "Personalities are starting to come out. We're doing a good job of carrying on the tradition of what's been Griz softball but also establishing the personality of the 2019 team."

The pitching staff includes seniors Colleen Driscoll, who ranked third in the Big Sky in ERA last spring (2.62) and Maddy Stensby, junior Michaela Hood, who was first-team All-Big Sky as a freshman, and sophomore Tristin Achenbach.

The returning position players don't have nearly the resumes as the pitchers, and some of them might very well end up playing in new positions.

"We'll try to give everybody some opportunities on Sunday and see where we're strongest," said Meuchel. "We're just trying to get everybody some experience this fall and get a good feel for what we have.

"I like how everyone is settling in to who they are. I just ask them to play hard, trust what they know and we'll make adjustments as we need to. They are starting to mesh, but that takes time. That's always a process, and championship teams discover that along the way."

Montana will be off from competition the following weekend before facing Providence and North Idaho on Saturday, Sept. 29.

University of Montana Athletics

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