Origin Stories :: Kendall Curtis

They were the longest two days of Kendall Curtis's life she says, that interminable period between taking the phone call from Montana softball coach Melanie Meuchel, the one she'd been waiting for, dreaming about, the one with the offer to join the Grizzlies, and Curtis's return call excitedly accepting that offer.

Every ounce of her wanted to jump on it immediately, before Meuchel could even get all the words out of her mouth. At this time, we're able to offer you a scholarship of ... YES! I ACCEPT!

She had been traveling from her home in Snohomish, Wash., to Montana's camps since she was a freshman in high school, the first visit a revelation, with each subsequent clinic or camp she attended only confirming that feeling, and now she had to wait before she could give her full verbal commitment?

"We wanted her to start to experience that you take big life decisions seriously," says her dad, Dave, who knows what he's talking about, having left his own hometown of Westlock, Alberta, years before to attend UTEP on a golf scholarship, a journey of nearly 2,000 miles.

"Even though she wanted to say yes immediately, you give them some thought and you include your family in the conversation. You're going to go there for four years, and what you decide is going to start to direct your path for the rest of your life, so you should think about that for a little bit."

So she gave it two days. Then she said yes. Yes to Montana. Yes to joining the Grizzlies and becoming a part of a program she seemed wired and destined to unite with, like it had always only been a matter of time. She was that sure.

The body of Montana softball continues to grow, as new players come in and seniors depart, the latter growing in number each May, but one thing has remained a constant: its makeup, its very DNA, the strands of which were laid down by Jamie Pinkerton and Meuchel more than six years ago.

Pinkerton left after three seasons, but the continuity that Meuchel provided when she was elevated to head coach ensured that foundation, built as it was on rock, not on shifting sand, wouldn't be affected.

The word Meuchel uses constantly as the ideal for her program is grit. Gritty players. A gritty team. A gritty effort. Curtis was born well before the birth of the Montana softball program, but together they create a perfect union with a shared genetic code. Like it was meant to be.

"She puts her nose down, and she'll grind it out. She plays with a lot of passion and gives it everything she's got. And she's very skilled," Meuchel says of Curtis, though if she could package that description and apply it to every future Grizzly, you get the feeling she would willingly.

Meuchel first saw Curtis when the freshman made her way to Missoula for a camp years ago. Neither knew much about the other at the time, the coach about the player nor the player about the city, the school or the program. The connection was immediate, on both sides.

When Meuchel would spot Curtis when the coach was out recruiting, she might see her one game playing second base, another at short, then at third, then at first. It's another trait Meuchel values: versatility. And beyond that: the willingness to use that versatility to best help the team.

She wants her program to be a John Fogerty song brought to life. Put me in coach, I'm ready to play today. "And she pitched for her high school," says Meuchel. "You ask her to go play this position and it's, heck yeah!

"Her career here is wide open with her versatility. She'll make our team stronger because she can play at a high level at any position our team needs, when we need it."

Montana played its eight exhibition games in the fall without standout second baseman Lexi Knauss, who was out with an injury. So there was Curtis, starting at second base when the Grizzlies hosted Carroll for a doubleheader on a Sunday afternoon in mid-September.

"I definitely had to step up. I didn't know she was hurt before I got here. When I found out, it was like, this is my time to prove myself," Curtis says. "That first game was a dream come true. I'd worked so hard for this, and it was finally here."

She was so overwhelmed by the experience, so out of her league, so in over her head, that all she did that day was go 3 for 6 with a pair of walks and score a team-high six runs, with a double and three RBIs. And she never stopped as September turned to October. Eight games, eight strong outings.

"She showed this fall that she has the capability to play at this level," said Meuchel. "She had a great fall, but that's just a daily approach for her.

"It's not just a high for a game or a week. She's very consistent, very stable. That's her personality. That's the way she goes about her life. She'll have a big impact all four years she's here."

Meuchel calls Curtis a "softball junkie," and that is without her knowing Curtis was a soccer and basketball devotee too, playing on select teams for all three in middle school before it became too much. That's when her true love was given her full attention.

Three apples have fallen from the family tree of Dave and Kristen Curtis: first came Allie, then Kendall, finally Emery. The second landed closest.

It was Dave whose life revolved around sports in Westlock, which sits an hour north of Edmonton. In reality it was just two sports, both of which fit his hometown in north-central Alberta, where the summer days are long and the winters are best spent indoors, out of the cold and snow but still on ice.

"I was a sport-of-the-season type of athlete," he says. "The days are really long in the summer, so I spent my childhood out at the town golf course. I fell in love with it. My parents would drop me off before they went to work, then pick me up after work. I spent a ton of time out there.

"Then once the snow started to fly, it was on to hockey. We'd put the golf clubs up and play hockey all winter, then get the clubs out in the spring."

He became good enough that U.S. colleges took notice. That's how he ended up 2,000 miles south, from a farming town of 5,000 to the 22nd-largest city in America, hard against the border with Mexico.

If this is a love story, of Kendall Curtis and the game she adores, it can't get there without a blind date. Without it, Kendall never arrives.

You know Jeff Grimes these days as the offensive coordinator at BYU, after previous stops in various roles at LSU, Virginia Tech, Auburn, Colorado, Arizona State and Texas A&M to name a few. He'll be a Power 5 head coach one day.

But back then the former UTEP football player and his wife, Sheri, who had played volleyball at Texas A&M, just wanted to get their friends together.

Dave was there for golf. Kristen, who is from Texas, was there to get her master's degree in physical therapy. Once one of his fall seasons at UTEP was complete, he agreed to meet. He proposed on the day he graduated.

They looked to the Northwest. He started working as a sales rep for golf apparel and equipment, she in physical therapy.

Once Allie arrived, Dave remembered how his dad had introduced him to golf. And then this and that, and not only athletics, just to see what clicked. "We tried to expose all of our kids to different activities, whether it be sports or arts or youth groups or whatever," he says.

Allie tried sports, then went her own direction. She's into arts, horseback riding, but that's when she's not digging into her studies in biology at Pacific Lutheran, where she is a junior, likely destined to max out at the PhD level one day.

But that second piece of fruit, the one that didn't roll far from where it landed, right next to the tree? That is all Dave.

"Kendall and I have a really close relationship. I've shared with her a lot of my own experiences. In her younger years, I don't think she believed a lot of the things I said, but as she's gotten older, she's realized I've experienced some of the things she's going through," he says.

Emery? Well, she's still at that wait-and-see age, only in the seventh grade but already a blend of her older sisters.

"She's pretty gifted athletically, though she may not be as competitive as Kendall, at least not right now. And she's pretty gifted in the classroom, so she's a mix of the two older ones," says Dave.

"We love that they are so different. It makes it fun that they don't have to compete at the same things. They can just enjoy each other without having to compete with each other."

Kendall saved that for softball. Once she had put her soccer cleats and basketball shoes in the closet and gone all in on the diamond, that meant Team Seattle, the only destination that mattered for aspiring players in the greater Emerald City area.

And why not? Who wouldn't want to have Washington head coach Heather Tarr and her assistant, J.T. D'Amico, who led the Huskies to the 2009 NCAA title, coaching them?

Whether a girl wanted to play at Washington or not, Team Seattle was where she wanted to be. Needed to be.

"Every girl I played with is playing in college," says Curtis, who was on Team Seattle in eighth and ninth grades. "That is what Team Seattle was about. It took softball to the next level. If you were serious, you were on that team.

"I knew most girls went on to play in college and that was my dream. I didn't want to play at U-Dub, but I knew I wanted to play in college."

Here she is, the embodiment of a younger Dave once again: She kind of wanted out of Seattle, out of the Pacific Northwest. She didn't want to go clear across the country, but if Westlock-to-El-Paso was doable, that opened things up for her. That's how she landed on Montana. At least as a start.

She came and was sold. "Yep, this is it, so I kept coming," she says.

See her today and you might think she was born to play middle infield, given her quickness and 5-foot-4 frame. But there is more to her than that. She hasn't done it in a while, but she could still toe the pitcher's rubber this afternoon and go all Springsteen on you and throw that speedball by you.

Her dad is a visual learner and was a mostly self-taught golfer. So when his daughter wanted to learn how to pitch, he kind of just figured it out on his own.

"I never guessed I'd be a softball dad," he says. "I got talked into becoming a pitching coach for a travel club in her younger years, so I started studying it. There are a lot of similarities in body movement between the golf swing and the pitching motion, so I understood what it felt like and the timing of it.

"But I didn't know anything about it. I just kind of figured it out. I watched a lot of video, went to some coaching clinics. Once softball really started to get serious for her, then I stepped away and decided she needed to be coached by someone other than her dad."

She's just an infielder now, and happily so. "I have a lot of respect for pitchers. It's like a different sport on top of softball. I'm glad to be an infielder now."

It's what she'll be at Montana, but she's a ball player above all else and would never want to box herself in, not if it could help the team. "If she put me anywhere, I'd be willing to do it. Any position." And there's that grit again, the I'm-ready-to-play mentality that puts her in lockstep with her new program.

"Every time she went to another camp, she just fell in love with it more and more and more," says her dad. "One of the last camps she went to, she said it felt like home to her.

"She had other interest, but she told people, no, I'm going to Montana. And that was even before she had an offer. She felt like it was home, a place where she could make friendships and make a difference."

It's now just two weeks until Montana opens its season against Central Arkansas in Metairie, La., at the Big Easy Classic. Practices continue during a mild January at Grizzly Softball Field and behind closed doors at the team's indoor facility.

It's a new dynamic these days, different than it was in the fall, when Curtis was starting and the spring season seemed ages away. Now it's real. Maygen McGrath is there. She holds the title of Starting Shortstop until we learn differently. Same with Knauss: Starting Second Baseman.

It will put the program's ethos to the test. Seventeen players. All of them are competitive and want to start, and Meuchel wants it that way. But she can only play nine at a time, more if you factor in the DP.

It's a fine line. It's why the coach preaches constantly, on a daily basis if not more so, that the team is 17 deep, not just those who happen to be in the lineup at any given moment. Seventeen go forward or none do, the balance needed to walk that line lost and everyone sent tumbling if even one dissents.

Why is Curtis a perfect addition to the team? This:

"It's really competitive," she says. "Every single player wants to be on the field, but everybody wants the best for everyone else as well. The first week of practice in the fall I was like, dang, this is impressive. It's cool to be surrounded by people who have the same motives and the same goals.

"Everyone has a lot of (wait for it ...) grit, which is neat to be around. It's really motivating to know that I'm playing for my teammates and that they are playing for me."

She knew, even back then, in September of her senior year at Glacier Peak High, when Meuchel called with the offer. It was excruciating to have to wait those two days, but what is 48 hours when four years lay ahead, full of promise?

University of Montana Athletics

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Kendall Curtis

Lexi Knauss

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