Origin Stories :: Makena Strong

Let's get right to it, right to the heart of Makena Strong, who she is, how she's wired, how she got here, from Las Vegas to Missoula to be a freshman on the Montana softball team.

Call it the Cliffs Notes version, if you only want to read a few hundred words instead of a few thousand. You'll get the gist of it but you'll miss out on the substance.

Story 1: Her parents called her "Bird" as she was growing up, still do, because she was like those winged creatures that hit up your backyard feeder. They land, nibble, fly off to their next thing. Always in motion, never to be held down. Going, going, going, always on the go.

She was small for her age but that doesn't mean she didn't hold big, oversized ambitions.

If catcher was the most important position on the field, the one everything revolved around, well, that's the one she was going to play, just like her older brother, Connor, did for his baseball team. If he was doing it, she wanted to do it.

"She wanted to take on the biggest position on the field, and in her mind that was catcher," says her mom, Danielle, an event coordinator in Las Vegas. "It didn't faze her that she was the tiniest player out there.

"She looked at what the biggest challenge was going to be and said, that's me. And we supported it 100 percent."

So, driven from a young age? And from a family that encouraged her to dream as big as she wanted, then did whatever it could to make those come true? Check and check. And we're off and running.

Story 2: Makena Strong did not graduate from Arbor View High with a perfect GPA. Among all those A's was a lone scarlet letter, a B.

Freshman English. She finished with an 89.95. There were no A-minuses or B-plusses. If a student was in the 90s, she got an A. If she was in the 80s, she got a B. She was as close to 90 as a girl could get without actually being there. It was one multiple-choice answer, one more point on a short answer.

"It was an unfortunate series of events. It was a very tight B," she says, triggered into recalling something that happened years ago but remembering it like it happened this morning. "It was almost an A. They wouldn't round up. It happens."

She rolled through this past fall with a 4.0 in her first semester as a college student, as an integrative physiology major. She wants to study exercise science, thinks maybe being an athletic trainer is in her future.

That English class was four years ago and has no bearing on really anything to do with today or tomorrow or what she pursues or accomplishes going forward. But you know it bothers her, don't you? You know she thinks about it, don't you? "All the time," she admits.

"I hold myself to a high standard, both on the field and off the field." And that can be tough on a parent, who wants to encourage her daughter to try to be all she can be without allowing the pursuit of it to consume her, to spoil the journey.

"She wired that way," says Danielle. "We've had to say, Makena, you don't have to be perfect. She's always said, it's what I want. We're behind her. It's about supporting those expectations but keeping her from drowning in the pressure of what that looks like."

Catcher didn't last, nor did her time in the outfield. She discovered her happy place in the infield, and that's where she finds herself today, a utility player who is understudying this season behind senior Kendall Curtis.

"I love learning from Kendall. It's a blessing to get to practice with her. I'm excited to implement what I learn into my own game," she says.

And if you need to leave now, you have our blessing. You've learned a good deal about Makena Strong already, enough to have a working knowledge of who she is and why she is how she is.

But this is the Montana softball program we're talking about here. Nothing is about taking a shortcut, the easy way out, doing the least amount of work just to get by. It's about investing, both time and energy.

It's why Strong is here, because in a TikTok world, when anything that takes more than 30 seconds of your time is just too much of a drain, too much of a commitment, Griz coach Melanie Meuchel continues to hold true and faithfully to an old-school recruiting approach.

She talks. She listens. She talks some more. She listens some more. Then she tells you she wants to do it again next week. The conversation might be about softball. It probably won't be. She doesn't want it to be. She's dealing with a person who happens to play softball and treats them like it.

There is a long line of players queued up outside her program's door, hoping to get invited inside. That door is opened for only a few, only those who are the right fit for what's already inside, who is already there.

And that takes time. Sure, she'll lose out on some players. While they are getting to know Meuchel and everything about her program, the university, Missoula, the state, other coaches prefer the speed-dating game with the high-pressure approach. This offer might not be there next week.

Meuchel does it to protect her program, to give her players the best chance to be surrounded by quality teammates. And that process can't be rushed. It just can't.

"It works because it creates a family," says Danielle. "Mel was very specific not only about the type of player but the personality of that player and how it fit with the way they coach and the way in which players respond and react to each other.

"I think that's missing in a lot of places. It was incredibly refreshing to have Mel and the team of coaches spend so much time getting to know Makena. As a parent, it was absolutely fabulous and really the key selling point to Makena's decision to go to Montana."

Just don't tell anyone. Don't reveal the secret. Because something special is happening with this year's team. Meuchel started sensing it last fall, as the team practiced and made its way through its exhibition schedule.

There was a camaraderie that only the best teams are able to achieve. And those that do are capable of accomplishing big things together, unexpected things, at least to outsiders, not to them, and it is together, unified, everyone in lockstep.

"It's hard to find 19 girls who get along. These 19 girls, we all get along and mesh very well. Even the seniors have said this is a team that meshed immediately," says Strong.

"The environment we create in practice, it's just different. We all get excited for each other. It's going to be hard to find for anyone else and hard to beat."

Danielle was born in Springfield, Illinois, moved to Scottsdale when she was 8 and attended Arizona before she and Chris decamped for Las Vegas.

He's from North Hollywood. That's California. He arrived in Tempe after high school, attended Arizona State, met Danielle, who went to that other school.

"I'm half Wildcat, half Sun Devil. Chris is all Sun Devil," she says. They've made it work for 33 years now, in Las Vegas, a few years in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, then back in Las Vegas.

She broke into the convention industry, event planning and coordinating. He tapped into another of Las Vegas's markets: he began working toward a golf-teaching career. And off they went, out the door early every morning, home late at night, no reason to do otherwise.

Then Connor arrived, or at least the prospect of Connor arriving did, and some life-changing conversations had to be held.

They could do what millions of American families do. Have children and raise them with the help of outsiders, and who knows what that would have looked like, given the nature of their given careers? Early drop-offs, late pick-ups. Parenting by proxy.

Or one of them could go all in on family, be there always for Connor, then Makena. They looked tradition in the eye, scoffed at what it suggested, that is was she who would stay home, and took their own path.

"We were both starting pretty high-level careers, pretty time-consuming careers," Danielle says. "As we were on the cusp of making those decisions, we made the decision to raise our own children.

"We decided that my career path would take us further financially and that my husband loves to be a dad, loves to cook, all those stay-at-home dad things, and he was up for it. That meant no fancy cars, no fancy houses, no fancy vacations but a very stable home environment."

The reward? Connor graduated recently from Nevada with an engineering degree. He's working back in Las Vegas for the firm that is helping construct the new Fontainebleau Las Vegas, a luxury hotel that is opening later this year.

One of Fontainebleau Las Vegas's early employees? Danielle Strong, who got to realize her dream of working for a hotel from its grand opening.

It's that environment in which Makena Strong was raised and nurtured, someone always there, usually both of them when it came to extracurriculars, why she gravitated toward softball, because that's the sport Connor was playing and Chris was coaching and what better way to hang out together?

Through it, she would come to gain an appreciation for the sport, something no other sport provided. "I think it's the competitiveness. We play a game of failure. It's not necessarily how much you can succeed but how you can eliminate as much failure in a game of failure," she says.

"I'm not playing a game of success where it's just going to get handed to me all the time. It's always pushed me and taught me a lot about life. It's taught me how to deal with failure across the board, in school, in personal life."

Her drive, there from birth, and the sport's ability to draw in and feed that type of personality? Magnetic. She acquired the dream, embraced it, the one she is living now as a college softball player, at a young age. It remained in a dream state for all of them until two eye-opening moments.

For her, it was a trip to California for a camp, at the age of 12 or 13. A college coach approached her and turned that vision, something that was way, way out there, maybe not even reachable, into something much more attainable. The coach told her she was on the right track.

Obviously, you're very young, but you're going to go somewhere, she was told. "That's what sparked in my mind, I can make it somewhere if I just put in the work for it," she says.

For Danielle, it was at that time, around the same age, at the City of Lights showcase event in Las Vegas. Her daughter was playing for the Scorpions, her very first travel-ball team.

She left for the field that day viewing the future one way, hazy about what may come. She went home hours later with a much clearer vision.

"There were a bunch of coaches there. After the game, her coach called her over and said, just wanted to let you know Colorado State is very interested and would like to speak to you," Danielle recalls, adding that recruiting rules have since changed regarding permissible contact.

"We all just had a pause moment. That was the moment she went, wow, this could be a reality and never looked back."

After playing catcher at an early age and admitting it probably wasn't the best position for someone who was still afraid of the ball, she moved to the outfield. That didn't quite click either. "Outfield is a little too, a little too every-once-in-a-while, not necessarily every play," she says.

She landed in the infield and found what she had been looking for. "You're covering a bag, you're covering a throw every play. Infield is just more exciting to me. It keeps my brain working a little more," she says.

Montana has had some success recruiting the Las Vegas area. It blessed the Grizzlies with Michaela Hood and later Kylie Becker. Both were All-Big Sky Conference performers.

If you're wondering how that transition goes, from the hot desert to the mountains of Montana, viewing them simply as extreme opposites and not at all relatable, you're not looking at it the right way. One environment simply prepares a player to deal with the other.

"It is pretty brutal," says Strong of playing an outdoor sport in Las Vegas in the summer, "but it teaches you to handle whatever is thrown at you. It prepares you for the mental side of pushing through weather." Like the softball season opening in January at 46.8721 north latitude.

Danielle? She'll adapt as necessary. She and Chris arrived in Missoula on Friday, for the program's annual Meet the Team fundraiser, to mild weather and rain. They awoke on Saturday to find half a foot of new snow on the ground. They awoke on Sunday to temperatures well below zero.

Thus, the shopping trip on Thursday to find a suitable coat. Is she up for the challenge of having a daughter in Missoula? "I don't think I have a choice," she joked. Because where the children go or do, the parents will follow and support. That's nonnegotiable.

Meuchel and her staff identified Strong as someone to watch the fall of her sophomore year.

"She has a great skillset for the game, and she plays with a lot of grit and passion," Meuchel says. "It was, keep an eye on her. You're starting your list at that time. Keep an eye on this individual and watch her development. She was on our radar."

That would have worked under normal circumstances. But "keep an eye on this individual" went out the window when Covid arrived and shut down both the playing, coaching and recruiting of softball.

Everything was at a standstill. Nobody knew what to do, how to proceed.

Hers was the class that was most impacted by Covid when it came to recruiting. The summer of 2020 was the one between her sophomore and junior year, that time when things start taking shape for prospects, when things start getting serious between schools and those players on their radar.

She was told by that coach in California that she was going places. The Colorado State coach had opened all of their eyes to what might be possible. Now nobody had any idea of what was going to happen, as shutdowns expected to be measured in weeks turned into months.

"Mentally it took a toll. It was hard. It became really stressful," says Strong. She got busy doing something, anything that made it feel like they had some sort of control. She made a list of 300 schools and started circling the ones that met her criteria.

Obviously, it had to offer softball. Then it had to have the right major. Then it had to be in a suitable location. "What was most important to me and what made the most sense for my family?" she says.

"Then we just sent email after email after email. We sent videos, we sent schedules when we could."

When tournaments did start to reopen, it was a full family effort, with all her teammates benefiting. Chris set up the camera. Danielle announced the game to a streaming service so the coaches who couldn't be there could at least see something, evaluate from a distance on a screen.

The stress wasn't just from recruiting. Danielle was the family's breadwinner, and Covid took a toll on Las Vegas, the lifeblood of which is tourists and visitors, all of whom were told to stay at home, stay away, to avoid gathering indoors with others, all of which is indispensable to its fortunes.

The city that has long hummed along on a 24-hour schedule shut down, turned out the lights, told people to (hopefully) come back soon.

"Like everyone else, we thought it was a couple weeks, maybe a month and then we would slowly regain what life used to look like," she says. "After a few months, we knew that wasn't going to be the case.

"We tried to look at the family time together as a benefit, but then the thoughts creep in that the industry is not coming back and what's next? I started looking down the path of what else could I use my skills to do."

Both mom and daughter forged through the unknown landscape – hers professional, her daughter's recruiting -- trusted their instincts and ultimately ended up on their feet, sticking the landing.

"As that was happening, everything started to come back," Danielle says. "I stuck with it. We are back and we are better than before. We've seen a record business return to Las Vegas."

Strong had offers and she had schools she was talking to that had not yet made offers. It was the classic bird-in-the-hand conundrum, just a lot more stressful because this was four years of her life that was on the line.

Does she accept an offer now, before schools that were higher up on her wish list had a chance to make an offer? And if she did that, if she passed on some to sit on others, would they? Does she wait it out and lose the concrete offers she has in the hope something even better comes her way?

The worst part: She couldn't visit any of them, any of the schools that she wanted to know more about or that wanted her to check them out. She had to go off what coaches were telling her and photos and videos. And that can be dicey, especially in the world of recruiting.

"All we could say was, we don't know, Makena. All we can tell you is put your list together, check your boxes and go with your gut. That's exactly what she did," says Danielle.

Meuchel and her staff adapted to this new landscape as best they could. Missoula and campus always were the ace they held, but prospects needed to see it in person to truly behold its appeal. Now that was not an option. They had to recreate that ace as best they could.

They prepared a PowerPoint presentation, hoping it would connect. It had some softball. It had some campus. It had some city. It had some Montana. And they crossed their fingers.

It landed in Strong's sweet spot. "It wasn't just about the softball program, which was really good for me," she says. "Some coaches talk about the softball program, the softball program, the softball program.

"They don't talk about everything else, and you want to know more about what you're going to be around. It makes it feel more like home when they talk not just about the softball program."

She had offers from as far away as New York. Schools wanted an answer. She wanted to make a visit but couldn't. Her head was spinning. She began to see a sports psychologist to help her make sense of it all.

Then this coach from Montana put her mind at ease. "Mel reassured me, no matter what, we're going to figure this out. Once I had that last Zoom with Mel and the coaching staff, I just knew," says Strong.

"Mel said at the end, we want you. I almost blacked out at that moment. I remember hugging both my parents. It was almost a breath of fresh air. Okay, this is a school that checks all my boxes. This is a program that wants me as much as I want to be there. It was a sigh of relief, like, we did it.

"One of the hardest parts of playing a college sport is getting there. The last seven years of working hard, it paid off. Montana wasn't my first offer, but it was the one that stuck with me the most and was the most emotional for me and my family."

Mom's one rule: Sleep on it. So, she did. When she woke up the next day, she felt even stronger about her decision.

"She wanted to say yes at the end of the phone call. We could see it in her face. We knew that was it," says Danielle. "It wasn't a light bulb, it was a bright, shining star."

Okay, okay, mom's second rule: You have to call every coach, and there were maybe 20 of them, who was still communicating with Strong. She had to tell all of them that she had made her decision: Montana.

When that part-of-growing-up task was complete, then and only then could she could finally reach out to Montana and let them know about her decision.

In last week's Origin Story, about Grace Haegele, she revealed what that moment was like. Every prospect should be so lucky as to have a Meuchel-type on the other end of the line when that conversation takes place.

"I called her and she screamed," says Strong, experiencing what Haegele did. "The pure excitement that they felt made it feel right. Some coaches want you but it's not intense for the coach but it is for the player. Mel met me halfway. She was just as excited as I was. That's how I knew."

She committed without having stepped foot on campus, in the winter of her junior year. The family fixed that in April 2021, four months after saying yes.

"You see pictures of a new house. You kind of know the layout but you don't really know the layout. Then you go to the house. That's how it was for me. You see pictures, you hear people talk about it, then you get to see it and it's 10 times more beautiful, 10 times more exciting," she says.

Danielle says, "The immediate campus feel, walking to the center of campus, walking by the grizzly bear and being in that environment, it just felt right."

In the fall of 2021, the entire signing class – Strong, Haegele, Breiana Bonkavich and Chloe Saxton – and their families came to Missoula on an official-visit weekend. Finally.

The first morning, on their way to breakfast, the four players gathered collectively for the first time. All four were wearing the same color shirt. Coincidence? Not to Strong.

"We all walked out of the hotel and we were all wearing white shirts," she recalls. "It's a small thing. We were just on the same page already."

They arrived on campus a year later, to officially become Grizzlies for the first time. Strong may or may not wear her mitt to class. You wonder if Meuchel is joking. She doesn't smile or laugh.

"She is an individual who is competitive, gritty, who loves softball," the coach says. "You catch her walking around with a glove on most times. She truly loves it and is just a baller."

At the plate, Strong says "I do wear my heart on my sleeve a little bit. I don't think that's a bad thing." Meuchel adds, "She is what we call a hustle double. She can hit gaps well and really move runners around. She has the ability to hit balls deep, but she is not a big bomber. Yet."

You can imagine the jitters, the angst, the butterflies they all felt, the Montana freshmen, when they arrived for the team's first fall practice back in early September. It was a dream come true, but one never knows what's in store. After all, a dream is nothing more than an aspiration.

But they'd been led to believe something through the recruiting process, that they would be joining not a team but a family. Then, Day 1 arrived. And soon, Day 1 was complete. And they came to believe that dreams do come true.

"Over the fall, we were asked to share what we think of the team," Strong says. "My word was electric. The next day, same word. The next weekend, same word. The energy on the field, the energy in the dugout, it's felt electric."

At night, if you happened to be in space, Las Vegas is the brightest city there is, not just in the U.S. but in the world. In Strong's mind, she simply traded one for the other.

University of Montana Athletics

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Makena Strong

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