Origin Stories :: Riley Stockton

The girl who did the trucking, the one who had six inches and maybe 100 pounds on a young Riley Stockton, the one who saw the undersized catcher in her oversized equipment holding the ball and blocking the plate, probably thought she had broken her for life.

Broken her physically. Broken her will to keep playing the position, especially after she had to be scooped up by her coach and carried to the dugout. Who, at that age, shakes it off and gears right back up and heads back out to catch the next inning?

Who doesn't ask for a mid-game career change, maybe to right field? Who would have blamed her for calling an audible after the game and pursuing piano or dance lessons or volleyball?

It's vivid in Stockton's retelling, the violent collision at the plate that comes to mind first when asked to pull one from her memory bank.

The ball beat the runner to the plate. Stockton stood her ground. Collision, Stockton goes horizontal, parallel with the ground, lands several feet from where she started.

Gasps all around, from players to parents to anyone else looking on. "She just trucked me. She blew me out of the water," says Stockton.

Her coach, a former collegiate player, rushed out, gave her one instruction. Don't let them see you cry. The softball code, even at that age. Stockton didn't. She held it in until she got into the dugout.

"As soon as I sat down, I started bawling," she says. "I just lost it." What just happened? she wanted to know.

What happened? After the dust had settled, after it was determined Stockton had survived, with limbs attached, there was this: she held on to the ball. She had made the out. Inning over. Run: not scored.

She's asked a question: Did she want to be a catcher more or less after that play? "More. I love collisions and being able to be a part of them," she says.

We could stop here, make this the shortest entry in the Origin Stories series, and you'd have a pretty solid summation of Riley Stockton.

You could arrive at Grizzly Softball Field this weekend for the series against Sacramento State, see No. 8, the one who looks strong and powerful enough to truck you into oblivion, and think, OMG, that's her.

You wouldn't need to learn about the backyard batting cage that Brad Stockton built for his kids once they started showing an interest in bat-and-ball sports or the bags of ice they kept in the freezer, the cure-all for the afflictions of the position, once their household became the cradle of catchers.

You wouldn't need to know what it was like for Joy Stockton to sit in the stands and see first their oldest, Hayden, play the position, then his younger sister follow in his footsteps.

You wouldn't need to learn what she was thinking at the time of that memorable play at the plate, when her daughter was lying in a heap, facemask probably sitting in the parking lot, still spinning, just like Riley's world.

"I know Riley is able to take it on, so I love it," says Joy. "I love it when she makes a play like that." Okay, maybe you did need to meet Joy, adrenaline junkie herself, an ER technician who's seen some things, who understands the rush.

You put Brad, seller of heavy equipment, and Joy together and you could have put catcher on the birth certificates. If just feels natural, doesn't it?

Hayden loved it from the start. Standing around was anathema to him, the waiting for something to happen on the diamond. So he gravitated to the position. He was good enough to eventually play collegiately.

"It was the position that was most involved in every single play," he says. "I liked having a position where I couldn't take a single play off. You have to be mentally in it and focused completely from the start of the game to the end of the game."

The family would attend the baseball games, but the daughter was more interested in playing in the sand, building castles, until one day something -- the sound of ball hitting leather, the chatter between teammates, the ping of ball off bat -- connected with her. She wanted to give it a shot.

She wanted to be like Hayden. "That's when I really saw him, catching and blocking. He had a cannon for an arm. He could throw it frickin' hard," she says. "That's what really drew me in."

So she said, Mom, I want to play baseball. Well, you can't do that, but you can play softball. What's that? It's the same thing but for girls.

"I remember my first tryout. I always threw with a baseball because of my brother. I pick up a softball and I'm like, what is this? I looked at my mom, like, why is this thing so big? I'm supposed to throw this thing? Now here I am," she says.

Call it the Education of Riley Stockton. Her brother was five years older than she was and learning the advanced techniques of the position as he advanced through the age groups. Almost every day they would head out to that batting cage and brother would pass on his newly discovered tricks of the trade.

While her peers were learning how to catch a pitched ball and other subject matter in Catching 101, she was learning how to get down and block balls in the dirt, then spring up, ready to throw out an unsuspecting runner who didn't quite realize the strength of the Stockton arm, his or hers.

"He would take her into the backyard and get her into her catching stance and throw balls at her so she could drop and block and work on her technique," says Brad, who raised his family in Spanaway, Wash., south of Tacoma, before moving recently south to Vancouver. "They did that a lot.

"Then they'd go out in the street and practice the long throws and hitting grounders. Hayden helped her tremendously. They spent a lot of time together."

Of course that only came after she had spent years denying her true calling. "She did not want to be like her brother," says her dad. "She wanted to do her own thing."

That meant anything but catcher.

"In tee-ball I got thrown in back there and I hated it. I just kind of stood off to the side. I had the chest protector, the shin guards, a huge helmet. I hated it," she says again, just to reinforce the idea in case it didn't connect the first time.

"Mom, I'm never doing this again. Absolutely not."

But that was tee-ball. It wasn't softball. It wasn't being a true catcher, the one who runs the field, the defense, the one everybody listens to after they take the lead, the more addicting elements of the position for those so wired. She had to play in a real game, learn what Hayden had learned.

"You have to take charge," he says. "Everyone looks to you to be their commander during the game. So you need to be not only physically tough but mentally tough." And that doesn't happen in tee-ball.

She thinks it was probably around 10U. After spending the entire season telling her coaches she was not a catcher, an injury forced her to give it another shot for the final game of the season. "She caught the bug," her mom says. Her dad adds, "She absolutely loved it."

It was going to remain in the family after all, like brother, like sister. Thus the ice bags in the freezer, always at the ready.

"They would come home and both be putting ice on their arms and their legs. They'd be all bruised up from the games, so we had ice bags in the freezer ready to go," says Brad.

(Quick aside: There is a third Stockton, Jenna, also a softball player, age 15. She has thus far stayed away from the catcher position, preferring third base or center field. Riley is still working on her but it might be too late. That die may have been cast.)

She played on lower-level travel-ball teams until one day her coach, a father who had a daughter on the Washington Ladyhawks, told the Stocktons that it was time to get their daughter on a better, more high-profile team. Her talent deserved it. She was going to be that good. That meant the Ladyhawks.

She made the team, the one that sent Delene Colburn to Montana, then Kendall Curtis. She started getting noticed. The first offer arrived from a school in South Carolina. The second from Idaho State. And she committed. She wanted to be a Bengal.

And she may have been preparing to face Curtis and the Grizzlies later this month in Pocatello had Idaho State coach Candi Letts not been let go in June 2019, five months before national signing day for Stockton's class.

"It was kind of stressful. She was to the point, what do I do? It was kind of a mad dash because of the timing. Everyone was a little stressed out," says Brad.

Meuchel and her staff know the Ladyhawks. They knew Stockton. But they also knew that she had committed, so that removed her from their recruiting board.

But they still had "Catcher, 2020" on their list of needs. It was even printed in the tournament program for all to see, including players, at a recruiting showcase in Florida not long after Letts had been let go.

"I saw she was there looking for a 2020 catcher," says Stockton, so she reached out to Curtis and asked her what to do. Should she reach out to Meuchel? Oh my gosh, do it! Here's Mel's number!

But Meuchel wasn't going to meddle, wasn't going to interfere or cross that ethical line, not with a player who was committed to another program. Other coaches would have pounced and not given it a second thought. Everything is fair in recruiting, right? Except Meuchel isn't wired that way.

"I texted Mel so many times. She was very hesitant about communicating with me, but I had already made up my mind that I did not want to be at Idaho State. Little by little we built that relationship," says Stockton.

An unofficial visit was set up on the back end of a family vacation in Wyoming. It was like Dorothy, her spinning house having landed on solid ground, stepping into Technicolor when the family first put foot on Montana's campus. It was immediate.

"Did she tell you what she said? 'This is the school I've been looking for since I was 12 years old.' That was pretty cool," says her mom.

"We toured universities all over the country. When we were walking around the Montana campus, I could see it in her face. I knew it."

No matter where Stockton ended up, there was going to be an introduction of sorts, a new face with a different way of doing things in that most intimate of on-field relationships.

For as spaced out as things are on the defensive side, the pitcher-catcher dynamic is unique, working together, a small part of the greater team.

It's not just one throwing to the other, with the other dutifully returning the ball and then awaiting the next pitch. They work in unison, in a small triangle of trust between coach, catcher and pitcher.

Last fall Stockton arrived at practice for the first time and met Tristin Achenbach, one of the top pitchers in the Big Sky Conference. And then there was Ashley Ward, Allie Brock and Anna Toon, each with her own quirks and her own way of doing things. Stockton had never caught a single ball from any of them.

In a bond unlike any other in the sport, the process of discovery began.

"That's one of the hardest things coming in as a freshman. I'm a freshman, I don't have any idea what's going on," she says. But she'd learned from her brother, catcher as commander, with nine players on the field and eight of them directing their attention to the plate, where the buck stops.

That's true whether the player is a freshman or a senior.

Even Achenbach acknowledges it. Watching from the stands, you might think it's heavily weighted toward the pitcher. She disagrees. Stockton didn't have to earn Achenbach's trust. It was the other way around.

"You have to trust them, but they have to trust you even more," she says. "I'm setting up for this pitch over here. If she throws it over there, I'm not going to get it, I'm not going to catch it. So their trust in us has to be maybe even a little more than our trust in them."

Both say it comes from bullpen sessions. They work closely together, literally, just a few feet apart, pitchers on their spins, both sides talking their way through it until they connect.

"I don't think pitchers are pitchers without their catcher," says Meuchel, which is enlightening, since she's a former pitcher. "Their catcher can really make them great. It's very powerful."

Beyond the relationship, there is the skillset. Catching it cleanly. Framing a pitch. The dark arts of the position.

"We try to have every catcher get to know every pitcher and be good at catching every quadrant of the plate, but also the pitch that that pitcher throws that might be a little more challenging, whether it's a drop ball or a screw ball that bites a little bit more," says Meuchel.

It's not a game of inches. It's even smaller, more nuanced, than that. The right catcher can make their pitcher look average or great.

"Some catchers can help get a pitcher a strike because of the way they receive a ball down in the zone compared to another catcher. Sometimes we're talking half an inch. It's that small."

It's a craft, years in the learning, never perfected, never mastered.

Another step in the evolution between pitcher and catcher: the on-field, in-game coaching. Achenbach may have twice as many strikeouts this season as any other pitcher in the Big Sky, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have days when she's off.

She compares it to basketball and a great shooter who just can't seem to make anything. They may have taken that shot thousands of times in their life, made it thousands of times, but they can't hit it today.

"Sometimes the ball doesn't move the same. It's just not doing what you want it to do," she says.

Achenbach, by this point in her career, can mostly self-correct, with some input from Meuchel in the dugout between innings.

The rest of Montana's staff is either freshmen or, in the case of Ward, coming off a freshman season when she didn't get a lot of innings. For most of them, Stockton and pitchers, they are learning together.

"That's one thing I love about catching, just getting to know my pitcher and getting to know what she needs help with on her off days and how I can give her little cues," says Stockton.

"I definitely wouldn't call myself an expert when it comes to pitching mechanics, but I've learned the little things to get them back on track.

"They definitely have off days, when either the ball isn't breaking or they're just missing spots. I love being able to help them through that to get them strikes and get us through a game.

"I think most of the time they can feel it, but in a game, I feel like there's so much adrenaline going on that they're kind of pitching in a rhythm, so I think me giving them little hints definitely helps them. It's a very special bond that you create."

The catcher is one point of the triangle made up of coach, catcher and pitcher, but the one everything goes through. Coach signals in a pitch, catcher relays it to pitcher.

Surprisingly, maybe the least engaged with what the batter is doing is the pitcher according to Achenbach.

"I'm a pitcher who never looks at the batter," she says. "Yes, I'm throwing to the batter, but I'm making eye contact with my catcher.

"Someone once told me, as a hitter, they always try to make eye contact with the pitcher just to scare them or intimidate them. I never give them that satisfaction."

Stockton can see things Meuchel can't just because of the coach's position in the dugout. Meuchel can see things in a batter that Stockton can't because of her proximity to the action and her need to, you know, catch the ball or react to something put in play.

"She can see if she has a flaw in her swing. I can just see her bat path and that's really about it," Stockton says. "She can see her stride, her weight, her shoulders, her hips, all that kind of stuff."

The game at its best is when everyone is in sync and everything is flowing. Coach calls the pitch both catcher and pitcher wanted. Pitcher delivers, results follow, 1-2-3 inning after 1-2-3 inning, everything harmonious.

"With Riley, it didn't take long," says Achenbach. "I really feel like that connection came quick and easy. She's been really awesome."

Then there are the moments when everything works to perfection. The right call. The right delivery in the perfect location. Everyone freezes awaiting a strike call ... that doesn't come.

"If (Melanie) asks me where it was and I thought it was a strike, I'll just shrug," says Stockton.

Because the game will always have the human element to it. It's why Stockton missed the season's opening weekend, with an injury.

But she was behind the plate on Weekend 2, starting at catcher against Utah State in St. George, with Achenbach throwing.

"I love catching Tristin. She has great speed and the movement on her ball is insane. And she is consistent with her pitches. I think that's her best feature," says Stockton.

But even Achenbach is fallible. Before Stockton had been on the field for even one out as a collegiate player, Utah State had taken a 2-0 lead in the top of the first on a two-run home run.

Of course, she could always remedy the situation with her bat.

Had you been able to catch Montana's intrasquad scrimmages in the fall, among the things you would have taken away is this: Riley Stockton can flat-out hit a softball a country mile. She hit it so hard you worried for the infielders who were in harm's way, the outfield fence, the ball itself.

She was a bat-wielding menace.

And yet you wouldn't have said that even a few weeks earlier. Because she didn't arrive as a jaw-dropping hitter. "I've never been a top hitter on my team," she says.

That was until she met assistant coach Magali Frezzotti, who needed about one week of practices last fall to see what needed to be done.

"That's when everything started to click. That's when I started smashing the ball. That's when I was hitting bombs and rockets all the time. That's when my hitting was at its finest," says Stockton.

"It's definitely been a little bit of my mechanics. My hips have a big issue with my front shoulder. No one ever realized it. She was the first person to say something. That's what sparked it.

"A couple of practices later, wow, I'm hitting the ball hard. Then I played the fall games and smashed it. Wow, this is really working." It hasn't stopped working.

She lined out to shortstop in her first collegiate at bat against Utah State. She grounded out to second to end the third.

In the bottom of the fifth, with Montana trailing 5-4, Stockton came up with two on and nobody out. "I thought, I need to do something good right here. Runners on, we were down. Something good has to come," she says.

She looked over at assistant coach Sarah O'Brien at third. "She does this thing, takes a deep breath and lets it out. We do it together. Then she smiles at me."

You might think Stockton, as a catcher, has an advantage as a hitter, like she might know what's coming her way, a secret edge. While that sounds good in theory, she also knows it would be the best way to mess it all up and ruin her hitting. It's too much thinking, not enough instinct.

Working behind the plate, she will have learned the umpire's zone, whether he's calling strikes on pitches up or down, or inside or out. Other than that, she's just like everybody else, just trying to pick up the spin of the ball out of the pitcher's hand. "Then I swing if it's good," she says.

Pitch one: ball.

"Okay, starting off good. Second pitch, waist high and inside. That's my pitch. That's where I rake. Here we go. I swung as hard as I could," she says.

On that swing she became the first player in program history to hit a home run in her first game played in a Montana uniform.

"Three steps out of the box I heard my team just scream, just go crazy," she says. "I look at Magali (at first) and she's just smiling ear to ear. What's going on? I look up and see it flying over the fence. I was like, oh my goodness, that just happened.

"I round second, round third and OB is just screaming at me, so excited. I run home and they just submerged me with hugs and helmet-punches. Seeing my teammates so happy with something I produced, looking at the scoreboard and knowing I put my team in a better place, it was amazing."

She had a hit in her second game played, against Dixie State, then one against Nevada, then Arizona State. A four-game hitting streak to open her career.

And to think, she arrived known for her glove first.

"When she is (at the plate), you feel like you have a chance with her," says Meuchel. "And there is still some growth in her game that will make her a very deadly hitter."

So the question had to be asked: What's better, making a big-time defensive play at the plate or hitting a home run. "Equal," she says.

But you get the sense it will be the defensive side that will always win out in that equation, the stopping of runs topping the producing and scoring of runs. It's just how she was raised. And trained by her brother.

"That just comes from being a catcher. You want that big play at the plate. It's a real adrenaline rush," says Hayden, who has to ice his ankles and knees on a daily basis just to remain functional these days. Shoulder surgery cut his collegiate career short after two years. He feels it in cold weather.

Is he 25 going on 50? "That's what it feels like," and there is not even a hint of regret in his voice.

His sister tells of another memory, this one more recent, in her final season of select ball. Her team was in California. She was behind the plate. There was a runner on third who broke for home on a play in the infield.

Stockton caught the ball in front of the plate and executed a perfect sweep tag, the one now delivering the punishment instead of taking it, flipping this story from start to finish.

"I caught it and just whipped it around. I got her in the head and her helmet went flying. She got up and was all dizzy," she says.

And she gets some sort of satisfaction, some sort of pride, from that?

"I do. It sounds bad, but I do. She slid head-first. She just kind of looked at me and I was like, sorry, don't slide head first and that won't happen."

As Stockton left the interview, I wanted to ask if the other player made it to the dugout before she started sobbing.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Tristin Achenbach

Allie Brock

Delene Colburn

Kendall Curtis

Riley Stockton

Anna Toon

Ashley Ward

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