The Craig Hall Chronicles :: Josie Windauer

When Lyle Frahm awoke the morning of Monday, January 14, 1957, the junior on the Iowa State men's basketball team wouldn't have had to open that day's edition of the Ames Daily Tribune to feel every degree -- or lack thereof -- of the headline.

Ames Has State Low -30

Hours later, after the Cyclones had defeated No. 1 Kansas and sophomore Wilt Chamberlain in front of a sellout crowd of 8,100 at ISU's old Armory building, the day took on a decidedly warmer glow.

Frahm, who followed his older brother Stan from Manning, Iowa, to coach Bill Strannigan's Cyclone program 90 miles away, was just 6-foot-2 and 171 pounds those days, but he was a defensive stopper. And this would be a signature defensive performance.

Against a team that averaged more than 73 points in its other 26 games that season (and would go on to finish 24-3 and come up one basket short of winning a national championship -- the Jayhawks lost 54-53 in triple overtime to North Carolina in the NCAA title game), Iowa State won 39-37.

Chamberlain, who averaged 29.6 points that season, was limited to 17 points on just 12 shots.

But Frahm was more than a one-dimensional player. With the game tied at 37 in the closing seconds and with the ball in Frahm's hands, everyone expected him to go to Gary "The Roland Rocket" Thompson, who had already scored 18 points. With Thompson covered, Frahm found Don Medsker.

The 6-foot-8 center's only basket of the game came at the buzzer and set off a wild scene. Fans rushed the court and carried the players off the floor in celebration, not knowing -- or perhaps sensing -- it would be nearly 60 years before Iowa State would defeat another top-ranked opponent.

There is any number of ways to tie that story into that of Josie Windauer, Frahm's granddaughter and freshman on the Montana soccer team.

There is the whimsical approach, a non sequitur of sorts, the story Windauer, back then a reluctant soccer player, tells of how her mom had to hold her down as a second grader just to get her shin guards into her socks and her shoes tied before practice.

"One year she flat-out didn't play," says Beth Windauer, Frahm's daughter. "She is a very confident person, but she has to feel confident before she'll try something. Looking back, that's probably what was stopping her."

Years later, Windauer would score 83 times during her career at Columbia Falls High.

"She wanted to feel confident before she really got out there and had people watching her," her mom continues. "It's shocking to people who know Josie now that that's how she was."

Frahm likely had something to prove in those days, in the mid-50s, on a Cyclone roster that had players from as far away as New York and Colorado.

He had arrived from a successful high school program at Manning High -- his teams went 70-5 over four years -- but it was a town of 1,500. Wouldn't anybody 6-foot-2 stand out at that level of competition?

You can forgive Montana coach Chris Citowicki for having similar doubts when he arrived in the summer of 2018 and started reviewing film of Griz wannabes, Windauer included.

All he watched were highlight after highlight, short segments of matches clipped out to make each of the players look her best, and against opponents of unknown ability.

He'll always take the eye test over anything he sees on the screen.

It wasn't until October of Windauer's junior year, at an ID camp in Missoula, that Citowicki saw her in person for the first time. Let's just say he was, perhaps, caught off guard.

"I'd gotten a bunch of videos of this Josie Windauer girl. You just don't know if what you're watching is going to work at the college level. You start questioning her ability because of the ability of the opponent," he says. "Can she do what she was doing against a Division I defender?"

She could, and she was doing it right in front of him, again and again.

"We started playing 11-v-11 and the ball gets played over the top and this racehorse gets on the end of it and scores. And then it happens again," he recalls.

He asked assistant coach Katie Benz who it was that was running past everyone else on the field, making it look like the videos all over again, the screen come to life.

"That's that Josie Windauer girl," Benz told him. "Okay, we have to have her," Citowicki said.

"All it took was a few minutes of playing 11's. In small-sided stuff, she didn't stick out as much. You can see she's athletic, but full field? Good luck keeping up with her. She's going to be the most athletic kid in the (Big Sky) conference."

Of course some things were just bound to happen, given the Frahm blood in her. One cousin on that side of the family played football at Air Force. Another lacrosse at USC.

The Windauer genes were added and they combined to create an explosive athlete. Or three. But it was more than that. Athletes who are only athletes, who don't have the other important components of the total package, typically fizzle out well before they should.

"She is an incredible athlete, but that would all go to waste if she didn't have the mental fortitude that she does," says O'Brien Byrd, who's been coaching and working with Windauer since she was a sixth grader playing up an age group for the Flathead Rapids.

"It comes down to the Windauer family. It's just an extremely humble, hard-working family. There is never an excuse put on the table. They are in control of their destiny. She was raised in an incredible family environment."

Frahm, after serving in the Army for two years and returning to Iowa State as an assistant basketball and head tennis coach, would eventually land a job in sales and promotions with Converse and relocate to Portland, where he and his wife raised their family.

Beth played every sport she could but says she spent more time rehabbing ACL injuries than she did practicing and competing. But if she had been fully healthy and reached her potential, who would have been the better athlete, her or her daughter?

"Oh gosh, Josie. She is far better. I was a good athlete but nothing like any of my kids. They have a level of commitment I don't remember having myself," says Beth, whose oldest son, Ben, was a state-champion wrestler for Columbia Falls as a senior and now plays football at Montana Tech.

While that was happening in Portland, Dave Windauer was coming of age in Columbia Falls. He was a standout wrestler but he also developed a passion for bow-hunting and later bow-building, which he learned under the tutelage of local legend Paul Schafer.

Windauer paid off his first Schafer Silvertip Recurve by helping out in Schafer's shop, something he would continue to do each summer, craftsman training protégé. The former also became a second father to the latter.

"He did an incredible amount of fathering for my two sons," wrote Robert Windauer in 1993. "When I could not get through to my boys, I would talk to Paul and he would find a way to deliver what they needed to know. Paul passed on solid values forged from the 'good but hard' life he lived."

Windauer, who had two neck injuries in high school and had his college career cut short because of another, was recruited to wrestle at Oregon, where he met his future wife. She fell for him despite his sport of choice.

"I grew up in a basketball family, and you know the rivalry between basketball and wrestlers, so it was sort of ironic how that worked out," she says.

Soon, they had everything planned out. He was going to become a dentist. After graduating from Oregon, he would go to dental school in Portland, then who knows where that would take them.

But life has a way of changing, often drastically, our best-laid plans. Dave Windauer would never look at a patient's teeth. He'd never fix a cavity. He wouldn't even finish at Oregon.

The afternoon of January 18, 1993, changed everything.

Schafer spent that day skiing on Big Mountain in Whitefish with two friends, one of whom was Doug Betters, the former Montana Grizzly football player and Miami Dolphin.

To avoid some icy sections that had developed late in the day, the skiers chose an out-of-bounds path on their way down. On one steep slope, Schafer lost his balance, landed on his head and slid downhill, out of control. He collided with a tree. He broke his neck in two places and ruptured his aorta.

A man who gotten more out of life than nearly any other, the man whose former football coach at Montana State, Jim Sweeney, said was the toughest human he had ever known, lost his life instantly.

The news hit hard and spread wide.

Windauer attended the funeral and returned to Eugene a changed man, at least one with a changed plan. At some point during the emotional trip, he decided he wanted to move back to Montana and continue the business that Schafer had built, to carry on his legacy.

"He dropped it on me that he was moving back to Montana. I was a little surprised," says Beth, who would remain at Oregon until she had completed her degree.

"I figured he had two more years of undergrad and four years in Portland, so it was kind of a shock. It was hard to navigate those first couple years. But looking back, I'm grateful I ended up here."

The family got its start in Evergreen, just northeast of Kalispell, before setting up permanent residence on Roberts Road, a few miles south of Columbia Falls, which Josie calls a "dead-end neighborhood," but in a good, literal way. The road ends just past their place. "It was a great environment."

The family business -- Schafer Silvertip Custom Bows -- employs both Windauer parents and no one else. He builds the bows, she handles the numbers. His shop is in the garage. It houses Schafer's old tools, his forms and his hand-built machines, all serving as memory.

Josie Windauer's hunting memories predate any of those having to do with sports, of traveling to the east side of the state with her family and older cousins to set up tree-stands and wait on whitetail deer by the Milk River near Glasgow.

In most of her memories, she is still too young to hunt. Still, she became a product of the way of life. Bow-hunting takes practice and patience. It's a process that can't be rushed, and that makes the rewards so much more meaningful.

When she talks about it, you can take what she says and apply most of it just as easily to sports, or at least how the three Windauer children approached them. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not, but the results speak for themselves.

"You have to work really, really hard," she says. "You have to practice, just like you do in sports. You can appreciate it a lot more than hunting with a rifle or compound bow. You appreciate it more because you worked harder for it."

In time -- and it was probably always going to be just a matter of time -- sports won her over. "Once I did start, I loved it," she says.

There were wrestling mats in the basement that Dave used to teach his sons about the finer points of that sport. Their sister discovered her passion was in soccer, right about the time Byrd asked her to play up an age group with the Flathead Rapids.

No longer would she be able to get by with athleticism. Now she was going to have to apply herself. When she did, the sport became more than a game.

"That was really when I fell in love with soccer. I was really pushed and really fell in love with it," she says.

Had her dad gone to dental school and ended up in Portland or Seattle, the club coaches in those areas would have pounced on a player with her early hints of athleticism blending with talent. Even at that age she would have felt pressure to narrow her focus down to a single sport.

Would she be even better now had she gone all in on soccer the last six-plus years? Would she have burned out? All she knows is she wouldn't have changed a thing.

She had the typical small-town-Montana experience (substitute seasonal sports as necessary): soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, track and field in the spring.

Instead of going all in on one, you give each sport everything you have while it's in season, then go on to the next. It was the expectation in the Windauer home: "Commitment is huge," Beth says.

That non-specialized process leads to two things: an overall athleticism that might be missing on kids who commit to a single sport too early and a ceiling at the college level that is much higher than someone who has been all in on soccer since before middle school and is closer to her potential.

It's something Montana -- across all its intercollegiate sports -- has come to rely upon in its pursuit of championships.

That's why Citowicki becomes so fired up when discussing Windauer, why we should all be counting down the days to her first match (which is ... when?) in anticipation.

But first, a touch of the brakes. She isn't going to open with a hat trick. She might not even score as a freshman, but don't bet against it. The joy will come in watching the distance traveled from point A to whatever level she reaches three years from now.

"She's still a work in progress. When that comes along, she'll be unstoppable in this conference," Citowicki says. "When we address some of the technical components, she's going to be a beast."

You might recall what Byrd said earlier, about having that athleticism and the drive to get better. It's when those work in combination that a truly special athlete can emerge.

"She has the mindset for it," says Citowicki. "If you say, 'Josie, I want to work on these things with you.' She'll go, 'Sure. Right now? Tomorrow morning? Does 6 a.m. work? Five a.m.?'

"She has that Alexa Coyle, Taylor Hansen mindset. Let's work nonstop, all the time, until I'm better than everybody. She's the complete package, and you only come across somebody like that every once in a while. So we love having her here."

One of Windauer's fellow freshmen, Meredith Udovich, is from south of Seattle, Puyallup to be exact. She played 10 years with Washington Premier, and that name is no misnomer.

The club attracts the top talent from an area, the Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma triangle, that has a population of more than four million, or nearly four times the number of people in Montana, which is 147,000 square miles.

The Seattle area only feels that large when you're surrounded by traffic and inching your way to your destination at 12 miles per hour.

Udovich had by a factor of at least 10 as many high-level soccer experiences as Windauer. So the assumption was that when she learned on signing day last November that one of her teammates was from a place in Montana she'd never heard of, she must have had some preconceived ideas.

Turns out that wasn't the case.

"Honestly, no, I really didn't think about that, the small-town thing," she said. "People come from everywhere. It really doesn't matter.

"Alexa (Coyle), she's from Montana, and she's a star. Josie is so athletic and so fast, she can do anything. She might not have some of the experience with club, but that doesn't matter. She'll learn and get better every day."

And it's clear Windauer wouldn't trade her small-town experience for anything.

"The community of Columbia Falls, those are the people who have hoisted me to where I am," she says. "I've leaned on them throughout the years. We've all supported each other. It's awesome to stay connected to them and be able to remain so close to them."

"They all come to the games," Byrd says. "They love and support you. They share your news on social media as if you were one of their own family. I love small-town Montana."

She is at Montana in large part due to Byrd's coaching, himself a Columbia Falls product who learned firsthand what it's like to go away to college and be exposed to a higher level of soccer.

"The big difference is she's moving two hours away. I moved 20," says Byrd, who was recruited to play at McPherson College in McPherson, Kan., a place midway between Wichita and Salina, in other words a place you've likely never been nor ever will be.

But it searched far and wide to fill its men's soccer roster, and that included northwest Montana.

"I was so intimidated the first day. There were guys from big clubs in Texas and Wichita, a guy who had been in the Uganda national team youth pool," Byrd says. "I was way out of my league."

So he did what Windauer has done, all the way back to playing up an age group in sixth grade.

"Hard work and athleticism go a long way. If you can add that you're coachable, then you're not going to be behind for too long," he says.

After getting a taste of professional soccer, Byrd returned to Montana and has made a name for himself in the coaching world. And not just the local soccer world.

The 1995 graduate of Columbia Falls High took over the Whitefish boys' program at the age of 25 upon his return to the state and led the team to four state titles.

In 2013 he was named the National Soccer Coaches Association of America's Division II National High School Coach of the Year.

In 2015, after a dozen years coaching the team at Whitefish, he took over the boys' program at Columbia Falls. Two years later, the girls team had an opening.

"I said I'd do both but I couldn't do it for long," says Byrd, who coached Windauer as a sophomore and junior and every time she said she wanted to go to the field and work on something.

A former player of Byrd's at Whitefish, Thomas Clark, was his assistant coach for both programs those two years. He took over the girls' team when Windauer was a senior, last fall, when the Wildcats dreamed of doing the improbable.

They wanted to become the first school other than Billings Central or Laurel to win a Class A state title since Belgrade in 2007.

Things looked promising early in the season, when Columbia Falls went to Laurel and won 2-1, with Windauer scoring both goals. The game-winner came in extra time and was essentially a buzzer beater.

"That was probably the most exciting high school game I've ever played in," says Windauer, whose team would later fall to Laurel in the semifinals of the state tournament. Laurel would defeat Billings Central 2-0 for another state title.

"We knew we were just as good as them. It just didn't play out in the end."

When the season ended, Windauer had scored 33 goals, 83 for her career. No one, not Windauer, not her mom, not Byrd, knows exactly how that will translate to the college level.

"I really don't know," Beth Windauer says. "I know the level of play is far greater than anything she has played at in Montana. I realize it doesn't equate to a Washington standout or a California standout or an Ohio standout.

"I just know she is one of the hardest workers you're going to find, so I think she'll create opportunities for herself and for others."

Citowicki will never have a roster plump with players from Montana. But the ones who do become Grizzlies have an added burden.

"I want them to be a role model to all the other kids," says Citowicki. "It's almost unfair in a way, but if you're going to be a Montana kid playing here, you'd better be a starter."

He's got what he wants so far, with Coyle in the senior class, Quinn Peacock in the sophomore class and now Windauer as a freshman. Solid in-state representatives from top to bottom.

"We love our Montana kids. Not only are they really good players, they give hope to all those who are younger who want to do it," says Citowicki.

And so often they bring something unique to the program. Coyle? She one day had to choose between pursuing soccer and downhill skiing as her sport in college.

Windauer? We'll take a wild guess and say she is the first Montana soccer player ever to post a photo of herself on Instagram proudly showing off a fish she shot with one of her dad's recurve creations.

"She's a once-in-a-lifetime player for a coach to have," says Byrd. Indeed. Montana forever.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Alexa Coyle

Taylor Hansen

Quinn Peacock

Meredith Udovich

Josie Windauer

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