The Cami Sellers experience

Balance. It's the word that immediately comes to mind when Maggie Frezzotti looks at a recent photo of Cami Sellers doing what she does best: hit a softball.

It's something that Sellers, Montana's sophomore first baseman, did safely for 18 consecutive games earlier this season to set a new program record. Her .361 batting average leads the team and ranks fifth in the Big Sky.

The picture of Sellers in mid-swing, the one that Frezzotti, the assistant coach who has the Grizzlies batting .274, is examining, shows the moment right before a bat that is whipping through the hitting zone makes contact with the ball.

There is about to be some violence.

The kinetic chain of events happened in the amount of time it took for the ball to leave Valerie Vidal's hand to the moment Sellers decided to attack the Northern Colorado pitcher's thigh-high offering.

Frezzotti preaches the idea of generating power from the ground up, and Sellers is her exemplar.

Her back foot has pivoted but remains in contact with the artificial turf at Grizzly Softball Field. Her front foot, already through its small stride forward, provides the block that powers the rotational forces.

Hips that started parallel to home plate are now perpendicular. Everything above follows. Her left elbow remains tight against her hip, her hands are ahead of the barrel of the bat. But not for long. It's about to catch up and transfer all that energy to the ball, which soon will be going the opposite direction.

"All the power that she's generated, she's able to put to the ball because the barrel of the bat is coming from behind," says Frezzotti.

"We talk about generating power from the bottom up and using the hips to accelerate the barrel. We talk about letting the ball get to your power. In this picture, she has let the ball get to her power."

The photo was taken on Friday, when Sellers ended Game 1 of Montana's home series against Northern Colorado with a walk-off, two-run home run in the bottom of the seventh, but it could have come from any game this season.

It's a swing that is repeatable, dialed in years ago through hours and hours of private lessons in the Corona, California, backyard of Marty Tyson, refined in the heat of competition on countless ball fields. And the results have been just as consistent.

Sellers leads the Big Sky Conference with 29 extra-base hits. She has 11 more doubles, triples and home runs this season than she has strikeouts. Her current .627 slugging percentage would be the third-best in program history, in a program that has had some notable sluggers.

The picture would probably mirror any taken last May, when Boston College was playing its final game of the 2018 season in Atlanta, against Notre Dame in the second round of the ACC tournament.

Sellers' final at-bat as an Eagle came in the bottom of the sixth, with her team trailing 6-1. With nobody on base, she hit a 0-1 pitch to center field for the second out of the inning.

Sellers walked off Mewborn Field that afternoon believing she had just played her final game as a collegiate softball player.

Sellers' swing that day was as balanced as ever, but there were other elements of her experience at the Power 5 school that were missing: harmony, solidarity, esprit de corps. Take your pick of any number of others.

If had felt like the perfect scenario when she committed to Boston College.

Her older sister by three years, Rachel, was going into her senior season at Pacific. She had been the trailblazer in the sport, and Cami and then Jamie had followed.

"I had looked up to her my whole life. My younger sister and I have certain standards based on what my older sister did," says Sellers, who was recruited by Pacific as well.

"I love my sister, but I didn't want to follow behind her my whole life. I don't say this in a bad way, but I didn't want to be in her shadow."

Arizona State was interested, and she took a visit. She had attended camps at Long Beach State, a campus not even two miles away from her hometown of Los Alamitos in Southern California.

Boston College? That offered any entirely new experience, one far, far away.

"Boston College was over there, on the other side of the country. I decided I was going to do something completely different," she says.

Two Sellers girls to reach that age and both were Division I softball players.

Bob and Bonnie didn't push their girls toward softball, but Bonnie, who works as a controller for Honda, had played it in high school. Bob, who works for the Los Angeles Unified School District, has played some slow pitch.

And the girls were being raised in the youth sports incubator of Southern California, where the only limits on a dream are resources and the number of hours in a day.

Sellers started with t-ball and was playing travel ball by the age of 10. Soon she would connect with Tyson, who provided weekly private lessons. It was the way of Rachel.

"What I learned from her is that nothing is handed to you," Sellers says. "You have to work for what you get, and hard work does pay off. That was the biggest thing."

And she had the home-field advantage over thousands of other aspiring softball players.

Those countless road trips taken by Keith and Maygen McGrath, from their home in Salem, Oregon, to recruiting tournaments in Huntington Beach? They likely took a route that passed maybe a mile or two from the Sellers' home in Los Alamitos, itself less than 10 miles from Huntington Beach.

"The competition in Southern California is great. It's great living there, because you don't have to travel. People come to you," Sellers said.

Soon she was the one doing the traveling, to Boston to become an Eagle.

A cursory look at the team's 2018 season would indicate it was a successful one for both Sellers and the team.

Sellers started all but one game and the Eagles won 30 times, including a 13-game winning streak. One of those wins would come at home, 1-0 over Florida State against the team that would go on to claim the national championship.

But not all was right, at least not for Sellers, who was basing the happiness of her experience on more than playing time, more than wins and losses, more than the perks that an ACC school can offer.

"I could sense it pretty early. Every conversation we had when I called her, I could just tell she wasn't comfortable there," says Bonnie.

"When you go off to school like that, you expect to join a family, and Cami never felt it there. It was not home for her. It was not the right fit and the right program."

There is more to the story than it not being the right fit, but Cami Sellers isn't interested in living in the past, not when her present is so fulfilling.

She says things like, "the atmosphere and environment weren't for me," and "you live and you learn," and "it was a good learning experience, but it wasn't for me."

All of which could suggest any number of things, but the damning end result was this: Cami Sellers, who had had a passion for the sport since she first grabbed a bat and put on a glove to play t-ball, had the joy of the game taken from her.

When she walked off the field after Boston College's ACC tournament loss to Notre Dame less than a year ago, she believed she had played her final game of college softball.

"My heart wasn't really in it anymore," she says.

Bonnie Sellers had two reactions when she learned of her daughter's decision to quit playing.

The first was pragmatic. She and Bob have invested so much into softball. Time, energy, finances. If Cami wanted to move back home and attend Long Beach State, that wouldn't be the end of the world, would it?

But there was also the emotional side, the one moms just seem to handle best. She knew her daughter and what softball meant to her. She knew if Cami pulled the plug after one season, it would be an opportunity lost and something she'd likely carry as regret through the rest of her life.

"I was okay with her decision, but in the back of my mind I knew she still wanted to play," says Bonnie. "She didn't have a great experience there, so I said, 'Let's try.' "

Four days before her sister would play the final game of her freshman season at Boston College, Rachel Sellers would wrap up her four-year career at Pacific.

The catcher made 185 career starts and ended her time as a Tiger with a batting average of .295, with 31 doubles, 21 home runs and 89 RBIs. When she was a junior, Pacific advanced to the National Invitational Softball Championship.

When she got her start in the sport back in Los Alamitos, there was another girl her age who also played catcher. Rachel Sellers and Madison Saacke would become best friends.

Because they shared the same position, they would eventually play on different travel teams, but they were both 2014 graduates of Los Alamitos High, and their moms would become close as well, sharing as much bleacher time as they did.

When Sellers went to Pacific in the fall of 2014, Saacke headed to Montana to become one of the founding players of the Grizzly softball team, which played its first season in the spring of 2015.

By 2017 they were champions.

Whatever led to Cami Sellers having the experience she did at Boston College, one that almost drove her from the sport entirely, Madison Saacke went through the opposite at Montana. She found a second family with the Grizzlies, a sisterhood with her teammates she'd never expected or thought possible.

Those dots connected last summer, good emerging from grief.

Katrina Saacke fought and overcame breast cancer in 2007. Last summer it was colon cancer, an unfair 1-2 punch that odds predict will never happen. The odds were wrong in her case.

When Bonnie Sellers was spending time with her ailing and longtime friend, talk turned to Cami, the difficulties and disappointments she'd gone through at Boston College and her decision to quit the sport if she couldn't find just the right place.

"I was seeing her over the summer, and I told her Cami left Boston. She was like, 'Oh my god, call Montana. They just lost 11 seniors.' The light bulb just went on. That's how we kind of connected," says Bonnie.

The Sellers reached out. Montana coach Melanie Meuchel reached back. A visit was set up, and it would be anything but routine.

Grizzly Softball Field, the Washington-Grizzly Champions Center, the campus, the city, they were all important, but Cami Sellers had lost her love of the game. What about that? How do you sell that to a recruit?

"I was hesitant to visit, because I didn't think I wanted to play anymore," says Sellers, who didn't even need the full 48 hours of her official visit to determine that she could actually love softball again and that Montana was the school and the program that could rekindle that passion.

"When I told my mom I loved it, she said, 'I knew you would after talking to Katrina. Madison loved it.' "

"We just fell in love with it," says Bonnie. "We weren't there very long and Cami says, 'Oh my god, mom, this is like a breath of fresh air.'

"It was so cold at Boston College and so warm and welcoming at Montana with Melanie."

Still, there were nerves when August rolled around and the entire Sellers family moved Cami to Missoula for the start of the fall semester.

She'd hit it off with the coaches on her summer visit, but most of the team had been out of town.

She'd been told a lot of things by Boston College as well, about how things would be when she arrived and joined the program. And those didn't happen.

Now she had taken another leap of faith.

"I was nervous, especially to meet the seniors," says Sellers. "I was super nervous to meet them."

It would be a laughable for anyone who knows Colleen Driscoll and Maddy Stensby to think Montana's two seniors could ever be the source of problems for any of their teammates, but Sellers arrived with baggage, remember?

That's why she almost -- almost -- tears up when asked about her senior teammates. She only doesn't because she cuts her comments short, keeping them to the point. "I love Stens and Coco. I love them," she says.

She's had to deal with things they don't consider in Southern California -- snow made Montana's home field unusable into the second week of March? -- but she and her teammates have come out the other side and are peaking at just the right time.

They've won 10 of their last 13, including series sweeps over both Portland State and last weekend over Northern Colorado, and play a series at Southern Utah this weekend before traveling to Sacramento State for the Big Sky tournament, which opens on Wednesday.

Their leading hitter is becoming one of the most feared bats in the league, which can happen when balance, which was always there, is buttressed by harmony, solidarity and a return of someone's joie de vivre.

"I think we're pretty confident," says Sellers. "People are overlooking us, so we have nothing to lose. Our thing is punch them in the throat first pitch.

"We know what we can do. We just need to stay within ourselves and keep it to ourselves. People are going to overlook us, and that's their problem."

Of course none of this happens unless Sellers fails to discover any sense of family at her first school. Unless Meuchel and former coach Jamie Pinkerton recruit Madison Saacke. Unless Saacke has a life-changing experience. Unless it was shared by Katrina Saacke, who rarely missed a game.

Unless Saacke's colon cancer reunited her with a longtime friend. And unless those friends turned their talk away from the oppressive matter at hand to news of their daughters.

Everyone, from Meuchel to both Bonnie and Cami Sellers, point to Saacke for making it happen. Without her, Sellers never goes through a rebirth at Montana.

And that's a bittersweet sentiment.

In August, on the very week the Sellers family was in Missoula to move their daughter to her new home, Katrina Saacke lost a battle with cancer, one she should never have had to fight, not a second time.

"It breaks my heart to this day, because I feel so grateful for Katrina," says Bonnie. "She'd be so happy that she put us in a good place.

"She loved -- LOVED -- it there. I'm just so sad that I can't share the happiness we all have with her. That's the hardest part."

But there is a sense of peace in that as well, that Katrina Saacke was able to pay forward some of the good that her daughter experienced at Montana to someone new before she passed.

Add that to her legacy, that she pointed Cami Sellers to Montana. The program, the family, that Pinkerton and Meuchel started and that Meuchel shepherds on welcomed her in and did the rest.

University of Montana Athletics

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