Origin Stories :: Kylie Becker

Imagine:

The sun rises over the Schell Creek Range in east-central Nevada. It's October and the weather's making a turn from autumn to pre-winter. It's hunting season, and camp slowly comes to life. It's quiet but busy as everyone begins preparations for the day ahead. There is a certain energy in the air, an anticipation.

The deer are out there. And there are tags to be filled. The hunt comes with an unknown, as the best of them do: What will the day bring? What will they find? What stories will be told that night, when everyone returns to camp?

Most of the Beckers are here, plus some in-laws. They are back again, as they are every year at this time, at the same camp, at an undisclosed location between Elko and Ely, more than half a day's drive from their home in Henderson.

It's become familiar enough that the group has come up with its own place-name geography for the places they hunt: Let's head toward Kylie's Canyon this morning and see what we find.

There is one female in the group, one who will be hunting anyway, and to Kylie Becker, there is nothing like it. It's family time at its best, and it's been that way for years. There is no place she'd rather be.

Now imagine:

The sun rises over the Sierra Nevada, well east of Sacramento. It's early May, and days are starting to come with a warmth that suggests spring is turning toward summer in central California.

It's the Big Sky Conference softball tournament. It's opening day: four games and all six teams that qualified will be in action as the weeding-out process begins.

Busses begin rolling up to Shea Stadium. There is an excitement in the air but also an underlying tension. For months these teams have been practicing and playing and preparing, all for this. In the end only one team will be left standing, only one will have the opportunity to hoist the championship trophy.

It's where Becker, a freshman on the Montana softball team, hopes to be, together with her teammates. She couldn't think of anything better, of any place she'd rather be.

"I love hunting, but given the choice I'd have to say waking up for the start of the tournament," says Becker, in reply to a would-you-rather question. "Playing softball at Montana is way better than hunting right now.

"I can hunt for the rest of my life, but I won't get the chance to do this ever again."

Jason Becker, Kylie's dad, understands as well as anyone the fleeting nature of college athletics and how the opportunity can be here today and gone tomorrow.

More than three decades ago every college recruiter west of the Mississippi knew his name and the directions to Cañon City, Colorado, where Becker could make the air hiss with a fastball that routinely clocked in the upper 90s, straight up 100 when the baseball came off his fingers just right.

He accepted a full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State, and who wouldn't have at the time? Under coach Gary Ward, the Cowboys were in the early stages of winning the Big Eight Conference 16 consecutive years, most of those seasons highlighted by a trip to the College World Series.

When his family moved to Las Vegas following Becker's senior year at Cañon City High, Ward set his incoming pitcher up with the local minor-league team to keep him conditioned and in game shape.

A trip to Anaheim, California, changed everything. "I blew my rotator cuff. That pretty much ended everything I wanted to do," he says. "That pretty much ended my full ride to Oklahoma State."

He met Tamara and soon his future father-in-law, whose passion for the sport of hunting soon rubbed off on Becker. And the stage was set: All three Becker kids would get the bat-and-ball gene and see every autumn how hunting trips would bring the family together.

Though not necessarily firsthand, at least not at right away.

"I played volleyball and softball and basketball all throughout middle school and younger, and I was always with my mom," says Kylie, whose dad works in the titanium business and started taking Kylie's older brother, Kevin, on hunting trips.

"I would get mad at them for leaving. I was like, What are you doing without me? I finally went on a couple of antelope hunts when I was nine or 10, and I loved it."

"She took right to it," says Jason. "When she had the chance to take the hunter's safety class (when she was 12), she jumped right on it."

And that fall it went from tagging along with the adults to being a part of the hunt. And it came down to the final day. Then the final hour.

"We about ran out of time. We came around a corner and saw the animal. Before I could finish my sentence she dropped the deer in its tracks," says Jason.

"She always wanted to make sure she made a great, ethical shot and dropped the animal without any suffering. She hit it right where it needed to be."

And Kylie Becker started crying.

"My father-in-law and I were like, Oh god, what do we do here?" recalls Jason. "We thought it went the wrong way. But it actually turned her on to it. She got that I did it! I did it! look on her face."

"I was overjoyed," says Kylie, who also inherited the family's traditional values and hardiness of everything else associated with the hunt. The family has a fifth-wheel trailer, but don't mention bringing it if Kylie's on the trip.

"I tell them that staying in a trailer is cheating the sport. I don't like it. I like to tent. It's real."

"We showed her the rough way of doing it. I'm glad she loves doing it with the tent," says Jason. "I think it's more rewarding that way. It's more the style they did it in the old days. You appreciate it a lot more."

And with that as background, it should come as no surprise that Becker was raised playing baseball, not softball. It was the only bat-and-ball sport that was available to kids at the age of three. Three? Yes, three.

Plus it was the sport of choice of Kevin, who is five years older than Kylie. Leah would arrive later. She fell in line and plays softball as well.

"My brother was a stud and the person I followed. He drove me to be the person I am," says Kylie, who followed her father's path and became a pitcher on her baseball teams.

It's not an unusual route for Griz softball players to take, to start out playing baseball before ever playing softball.

Count Montana coach Melanie Meuchel as a proponent. There is just something about playing baseball first seems to work in a player's favor.

"It's a great way to hone some fundamentals. A lot of times you can tell someone has played baseball, with some of the tools and finesse things about their game," she says, before attaching a not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that addendum. "Not that the same thing can't happen in softball."

It's the sport Becker went all in on, after she made the varsity team as a freshman and had a coach tell her, Choose the sport you think is going to get you somewhere.

She knew it could happen in softball because she saw it happen with Michaela Hood, a pitcher who became a teammate when Becker joined the Lil Rebels club team as a sophomore. Hood was a senior and had committed to Montana.

"She told me about Montana and how excited she was, so I got interested. Then I saw how well the team was doing. Wow, they've been a program for two or three years, and they're already that good?" says Becker.

Then one day: an opportunity. A Montana coach was scheduled to watch Hood pitch. "She said, You'd better be on your game," says Becker. There was no reason to put on an act. She just had to be who she was.

"The way she plays the game is the style in which we've kind of built Griz softball around," says Meuchel. "She is intense and gritty but very talented and out to prove to people who she is and what she can do. She's a baller."

She came. She visited campus. She was smitten.

"With the softball facilities and the things they offer? I fell in love as soon as I came here," Becker says. "I didn't need to visit any other school. I was done. I was 100 percent here."

She batted .385 in six exhibition games in the fall and defensively played the left side of the infield. She's used to it ... at shortstop, the position she has the most experience. But third base, where you might find her starting this spring? Not so much.

"It's very interesting. The ball plays differently," she says. "At shortstop you have time to think about what you're going to do with the ball. At third you just have to go and do it.

"But I'm competitive, and I'll do what's best for the team. If we need somebody at a certain position, I'm totally 100 percent for it. I'll compete wherever the coaches put me."

"She's probably the most utility kid on our team," says Meuchel. "She has a knack defensively of finding a way to get it done, wherever she happens to be playing. She has a fearlessness about her.

"If we had to put her in center field, she'd play center field. She may not have the most experience in some areas, but she is an individual who is driven to succeed."

Of course it hasn't been all easy, the move to Montana. Life went on without her back in Nevada, like last fall when her dad and brother both drew elk tags in the same year for the first time. Both were successful.

It wasn't the hunt itself that had her feeling like she was missing out. It was the family moment, the bonding. But soon enough it will be May and that sun will be rising over the Sierra Nevada. And Becker and her teammates will have their own trophy to pursue. The wildlife will just have to wait.

University of Montana Athletics

Related News

Players Mentioned

Kylie Becker

Michaela Hood

Related Videos