Montana adds Pac-12 transfer

Maggie Joseph, who spent the first two years of her collegiate career on the pitching staff at California, signed a scholarship offer recently and will join the Montana softball team as a junior for the 2021-22 season.

Joseph, from Sparks, Nev., pitched just 5 2/3 innings for the Golden Bears over the 2021 and shortened 2020 seasons.

"Being able to add some depth to our pitching staff will only make us better. She has some credentials that will make our staff a little more complete, a little more whole," said coach Melanie Meuchel.

"Experience is great for people. They understand the process of what's sitting in front of them as far as being a student-athlete at the Division I level and being able to perform."

Joseph will join a staff at Montana that lost Tristin Achenbach to graduation but returns sophomore Allie Brock, who appeared in 23 games as a freshman, junior Ashley Ward, slugging sophomore Anna Toon and incoming freshman Dana Butterfield, of Hillsboro, Ore.

Achenbach, the Montana career leader in wins and strikeouts, ate up 196 of the 321 innings that Montana played last season, including every inning and every pitch of the Grizzlies' memorable five-game run at the Big Sky Conference tournament.

"We have talented pitchers in our program, and things are wide open for people to take. They are unique and very different from one another and will work as a complete staff, but they will also compete to get as many innings as they can get," said Meuchel.

"I'm excited for them to continue to develop and be who they are, because they bring some very good qualities."

To read that and only that, you might assume Joseph is a bit of a softball mercenary, a player from out of the region and looking for an opportunity who finds a temporary home in a faraway program that just happened to be seeking another strong throwing arm in its search for championships.

Both sides getting what they want out of the other for a handful of seasons, then going their separate ways, a win-win that's more transactional than emotional.

Except that's not the story. That's not the story at all. The ties go deep. Really deep.

"My dad was born in Butte, raised in Missoula," Maggie says of her father, Rick, who attended Loyola Sacred Heart High School. "He's a Montana boy at heart.

"It goes back three or four generations with his family in Montana. It's a huge mining family. Pretty much all of my dad's side is either from Butte, Missoula or Ireland."

So she's no outsider, someone just coming to town for the chance to play softball. She's as much of an insider as anyone you might know. Her top hobby on her biography on the Cal website is fly fishing, and there she was last week, on the Beaverhead River, fishing for trout with her dad.

"I go up every year to Butte and Missoula for a family vacation," she says. "There is no place outside of my own home that feels this much like home."

Her dad's brother and her cousins live just blocks away from Grizzly Softball Field, and she's climbed to the M on Mount Sentinel more times than she can count, walking across the grounds of the university each time to get there.

She made her way across campus, for a more serious purpose this time, when she was a freshman at Bishop Manogue High in Reno and on an unofficial visit back when Jamie Pinkerton was still the Montana coach, with Meuchel serving as his assistant.

It was long enough ago that the Grizzlies had played just a single season to that point. But no matter the draw that playing for Montana might have been, it couldn't, in her mind, compare to the bright lights of the Bay Area and Pac-12 softball. Cal it was.

"I was only 13 or 14 when I committed. I had barely even started high school. I didn't know what I wanted. At such a young age, how could you?" she said.

Perhaps the Golden Bear coaches had been there that day, in March 2015, when she threw a perfect game, part of a tournament when she batted .862. For her travel-ball career: 10 no-hitters, two perfect games.

That happens when you're throwing it 60 miles per hour by the age of 13. And coaches, Pac-12 coaches, tend to notice.

Her high school numbers: a .405 average at the plate, 308 strikeouts when she had the ball in her hand in the circle, a softball wizard you couldn't get out and also couldn't touch. She's the player you didn't want to see, in either half of the inning.

COVID certainly didn't help her experience at Cal. It cut short her freshman season just 24 games in. And it kept her separated from her teammates for 88 days this past season, from December to March. That kind of time gives a girl a chance to think and reflect. And look ahead to what else might be out there.

"I loved and respected the coaches so much. They taught me so many life lessons, but at the end of the day I didn't feel that Berkeley was the place for me," she said.

"I wanted to go somewhere that felt more like home, somewhere like Montana." But she didn't think of Montana, as in the Griz softball program, as a possible landing spot until Meuchel saw Joseph's name in the transfer portal and reached out.

She'd been to Missoula a number of times growing up. Had even taken that unofficial visit. But this time it was different. She knew what she wanted and what she was looking for when she took that walk across campus.

After all, priorities can change when you're not having to make life decisions at the age of 13.

"I fell in love. I knew it was the place for me," she said. "(Melanie) told me you're more than just a softball player, more than just an athlete. We look at you in all aspects of life, socially, academically.

"It was eye-opening that they truly cared about me. They also do what they need to do to win, but the way she invited me in and told me all these things, it really opened my eyes."

It wasn't long after she committed that her dad was visiting with Dennis Meuchel, Melanie's father and a longtime volunteer assistant coach for the Grizzlies.

One thing led to another, this story to that, which led to this:

Maggie Joseph's grandfather, Rick Sr., owned a pizza place in Missoula in the 60s. The Sharieff Pizza Parlor sat on West Broadway.

Rick Jr. and his friends would stop by often and be doted on by someone they would come to call Mrs. Pickles, an honorific bestowed upon an employee who would deliver round after round of them.

Mrs. Pickles was Melanie Meuchel's grandmother. A Montana story if there ever was one, one of family and tight bonds.

Mercenary? Hardly. Outsider? Not quite. Maggie Joseph is just a softball player coming back to her spiritual home, the one her father left but never really gave up. Few who leave do.

"My mom and my dad wanted it to be my decision, something I wanted to do. When I did make the decision and told him, I haven't seen him that excited in I don't know how long," she said.

"At the end of the day, they just want me to be happy. I know Montana is somewhere I can be happy and also do what I love and compete against good softball teams with a good softball team."

University of Montana Athletics

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