Origin Stories :: Chloë Saxton

Julia DePonte had it. Good lord, did she ever have it.

When she was a senior at Washington, in 2018, with the Huskies facing Oklahoma at the Women's College World Series in Oklahoma City for the chance to advance to the Championship Series against Florida State, she showed what it is, what it can be, what it's capable of.

Her RBI single in the bottom of the first off the almost unbeatable Paige Lowary put Washington up 1-0. Her solo home run off the almost untouchable Paige Parker in the bottom of the fifth, her 15th of the season, the 33rd of her career, made it 3-0.

And that's how it would end up, with Washington winning 3-0 and advancing to face the Seminoles for a national championship. DePonte finished the day 3 for 3.

There are players who have an abundance of talent who don't have it. And there are players who have the drive to be the best who never attain it.

What is it? It's it, that which can't quite be described. It's being a five-tool player who, probably more importantly, checks all the boxes for every intangible you would want to measure. And Julia DePonte had it.

It's why she made her way from Vacaville, California, to Seattle in the first place, because Husky coach Heather Tarr saw it, recognized that DePonte had it and wanted it in her program.

It's why DePonte's first collegiate hit, as a freshman in 2015, came against an Oklahoma team that would win 49 games, why her first home run came against a UCLA team that would make the Women's College World Series.

Why she was NFCA third-team All-Pacific Region as a sophomore, first-team all-region and first-team All-Pac-12 as a senior. Why she was on teams that won 183 games over four seasons, played in four NCAA tournaments, including 2017 when Washington hosted Montana in the Seattle Regional.

Why Notre Dame gladly accepted her into its Master of Science and Management program. Why CBIZ, a management consulting company, hired her out of Notre Dame and why OpenGate Capital, two years later, came headhunting for her, wanting her on its team.

They knew what they were getting. "If it wasn't for softball and going to the University of Washington, I definitely wouldn't be here. One of the reasons I was hired at this job was because I was an athlete," she says.

Not strictly because she was an athlete but because of what athletics can bring out of person: DePonte, because of softball, showed she had it, and OpenGate Capital wanted it. Because it doesn't come and go. A girl has it or she doesn't.

And sometimes it takes one who has it to see it in another. And sometimes it takes the influence of that person to lead a sister of it to the next level of it-ness.

That was the situation years ago, when DePonte was a Husky and Chloë Saxton was a just-happy-to-be here softball player, the latter playing for the Seattle Spice, the former helping coach the Spice girls.

DePonte saw it all as a youth coach, more often than not kids following (read: force-fed) the dreams of their parents more than the other way around, of parents helping and supporting their kids realize and chase their own dreams.

"A lot of times when you're giving lessons or helping out, it's very obvious it's their parents who are pushing them to be there," says DePonte.

And then into DePonte's life walked Saxton.

Nobody saw this, a girl's love for softball, coming, especially not her parents, Ben and Shannon. They had watched as she followed her brother to the pool, passing on swimming but giving diving a try. And gymnastics, where the coach saw enough that he wanted her to go full in.

"That wasn't her path," says her dad.

Her older brother, Jasper, was playing baseball at the time, and Chloë was along for the ride, until one day she picked up a bat and ball herself and never looked back. She was smitten.

"Softball wasn't on our radar at all," says Shannon. "She was doing dance and gymnastics. Her brother was playing baseball, so she watched a lot of his games. She came and said, 'I want to play softball.' It was all her decision. And it was kind of no looking back."

Little league turned into the Seattle Spice, where life was just about perfect for a girl that age falling in love with the sport. All of the best of youth sports was able to comingle: fun, play, friends, laughs, a little competition, all in full helpings. "It was a great environment. Very healthy, very fun," says Ben.

That's what DePonte had in Vacaville, though it was baseball, not softball, the latter not played at a high enough level at that age to please her. So, she played baseball with the boys through sixth grade.

Then the wayward sheep found her shepherd, a coach, Anthony Trujillo. Come give Sorcerers a try, he told her. You won't regret it. If you want to get to where you want to go, and I know you have the talent to get there, it's a must.

She did, for one year, then went back to a local team in seventh grade. And had she stayed local, where it was easier and more comfortable and less challenging? She never would have discovered that she had it.

"I think if I went down that route, I would have played a different sport," says DePonte, who played for Sorcerers from eighth grade until she departed for Washington, where she later found herself in Trujillo's shoes, seeing it in someone else who had no idea she had been blessed with the gift.

"You never know what your kid is going to want to do and if they are going to want to stick with it," says Shannon. "Chloë was very motivated to get better.

"She was the kid who was out in the backyard, wanting to play catch or doing something repetitive until she got it. That was all her. It was her dragging us out there, not the other way around. She is very self-motivated."

Most coaches, who haven't been around it enough, would have seen Saxton at that age and thought, Hey, there's a nice player. She's pretty good! DePonte saw Saxton and alarms started going off in her mind. They were telling her:

1. She's just like you, and
2. You have to help push her to a bigger, better organization, one where her talent can thrive with advanced coaching and a higher level of competition.

To do anything less would be to spoil the gift, for talent to go unfulfilled.

Saxton knew none of this, of course. She was just a girl having a good time. The best time. And, anyway, a girl doesn't leave her friends behind in service of self. "She had great friendships. She is a fiercely loyal person," says Ben. "It was a Spice-till-I-die kind of thing."

Then this girl comes into your life, who's doing what you think you'd like to do one day, which is play college softball, and she tells you something you both love and hate hearing: you need to move on, move up. You have too much talent. You need to think about yourself and what's best for you.

You're not going to get where you want to go if you stay here. "That landed like a ton of bricks with Chloë," says her dad. "That revelation led her to have to make a really tough decision for her at the time."

But DePonte saw it, had to tell Saxton that she had it, that she needed something different if it was going to come out and be all it could be.

"You can tell right away. You either have it or you don't. And Chloë had it," says DePonte. "Over time you kind of develop it. It's a gut feeling.

"It was clear there was something special about her, both in her ability and more importantly in her attitude. It was clear it was something she wanted. She was always happy, excited, motivated when we worked together. She had the it factor."

Who knows how it came to be?

Ben graduated from Washington, then raised his hand when the Peace Corps came calling. He didn't know where he was headed career-wise with his degree in political science and when you've lived a good life for nearly two decades, some people just feel called to pay it back.

"I was blessed being born to great parents and great opportunities," says Ben, who was raised in Seattle. "It was an altruistic sense of wanting to give back."

He returned to the States after serving two years in Honduras, set up in the Bay Area, then bumped into Shannon while back home visiting. She was born in Oregon but spent most of her life in Washington. They were both Huskies. They just didn't know it at the time they were there.

"We had been in a lot of the same locations but had never crossed paths until we did," she says. Game over. They settled in Seattle and didn't look back.

Jasper arrived first. He graduated from O'Dea High with honors and passed on college to pursue a career in the United States Naval Special Warfare Command. He's stationed somewhere in the world. That's all you need to know.

His younger sister? All she did was graduate from Holy Names Academy with enough gusto that she arrived at Montana in the fall with 30 credits to her name. That's why she'll likely graduate in three years, then pursue a master's degree while playing as a senior.

"High academic, very driven," Griz coach Melanie Meuchel says of Saxton. "Driven family."

All Ben and Shannon can do is simply shrug their shoulders and admit they tried their best and it all happened to work out.

"I think unconditional love and support breeds the confidence it takes to go out and be a high-achiever," says Ben.

"We treated them like a prince and princess until they were three, then we treated them like people who had to do what they were told. And when they were 14 or 15, we gave them a lot of respect and treated them like young adults."

Shannon adds, "I think it comes down to love, patience, accountability and respect. We did a lot of encouraging and following whatever their passion was at the time."

And after DePonte rocked Chloë Saxton's world, filling her in on a little secret that she didn't know about herself, that she had something special inside of her, that she had it and it needed to be nurtured or it would never grow to full maturity, Saxton needed to sleep on the revelation.

Her heart told her to stay, to be faithful to her friends, to the Spice organization. But her dad is a self-employed commercial mortgage broker, her mom the president of a financial outsourcing company, so she's got that side to her as well, an understanding of investment and return.

She'd been going to Washington softball games over the years, star-struck every time she set foot inside the gates of Husky Softball Stadium. Now here was one of those Huskies telling Saxton that if she wanted to play at the Division I level, she needed to think bigger.

"She came to us the next day and said, I've got to find a higher level of play," says Ben. "That was a big moment for her."

It can be akin to navigating through the wilderness, advanced youth sports can be. And what the Saxtons discovered on their journey from Spice to Grizzlies was that the coaches who are involved in the day-to-day of an age group can make all the difference, more so than the name of the club.

The trip from Seattle to Puyallup, home of the Washington Ladyhawks, is an hour in the best of circumstances and that's rarely the case in the growing Seattle metroplex.

But it's the sacrifice the Saxtons were willing to make. "It was a big stretch for us," says Ben. "It was more commitment, more competition but still not the type of coaching."

It was when Chloë joined the organization's 16U team and began playing for Joe and Chris Breer that everything changed. For the better.

The coaches put the players through a grueling five-hour clinic and the Saxtons were heading home, Ben at the wheel, Chloë in the passenger seat, grinning from ear to ear the entire way.

"She was exhausted but just beaming with happiness," says Ben. "She knew what she had just experienced. I remember looking at her and I was just as giddy. I knew we had finally found a coach who could get Chloë's talent level to its potential.

"It was a marriage of high-level drills and great instruction. On the drive home I said, Chloë, this is it. As long as you have the love and maintain your want-to, with your talent you can't help but turn into a Division I player under this coach. He's going to shape you into that type of player."

And then COVID struck, with Washington getting as locked down as any state in the country. Finally, small glimmers of hope arrived in the fall of 2020, with a handful of out-of-state recruiting tournaments taking place … which Saxton had to miss because of a concussion.

Then it was Memorial Day, the end of her junior year. And she was not only uncommitted, she had gone largely unseen because of the shutdowns and the limited fall events she was forced to miss.

So, a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do. Or, more accurately, a family's got to do what a family's got to do. They grabbed the calendar, a map and made a plan. Ben and Shannon would spend a month working on the road, and Chloë would play everywhere she could to be seen.

Olympia and Richland in Washington, Oregon, Colorado and California. "It was crunch time. It was intense," says Shannon.

"I told her, by the time we get home, you're going to have multiple offers and hopefully you're going to have a hard decision to make," adds Ben. "She went at it with a vengeance. There was going to be no denying her. With coaches in the stands, she shined even brighter. It was a fun ride to be on."

It was at that second event, in the Tri-Cities, that former Griz assistant coach Sarah O'Brien first spotted a shortstop that she had to tell Meuchel, who was recruiting in California, about.

O'Brien slipped her business card to someone with the Ladyhawks, told them to tell Saxton that the Grizzlies would be in Oregon the next weekend. And this time the head coach would be there to check her out.

"No pressure!" says Ben. "Sure enough, she showed really well when Coach Melanie was there."

There had been some initial talks with some schools in Washington, but once Montana entered the picture, there was only one thing on her mind: the Grizzlies and Missoula.

The Ladyhawks have been good to Montana over the history of the program, and Montana has been good to the former Ladyhawks once they've arrived in Missoula. And that word spreads, among parents, among players.

"As soon as Montana contacted me, it was a little higher up on my list. The more I talked to them, the less I was interested in other schools," Saxton says.

"You don't want to put your eggs in one basket, but when I was thinking about my future, the main school that would come up was Montana. I tried to not get my hopes up, but it was a little bit of that. I was hoping it would happen."

All she had to do was be herself, which she was that recruiting weekend in Oregon.

"She was impressive," says Meuchel. "She played with a big heart, with a lot of passion, was competitive. Every time she goes out there she has the chance to make big noises on the field. We knew we'd be getting a great athlete."

Finally: the moment of truth. Another Zoom presentation, of what Montana could offer Saxton, of what the coaches thought Saxton could bring to the Grizzlies. Then: an offer.

"It's a little heart-stop moment. I was pretty much speechless," says Saxton. "It wasn't out of the blue but you don't want to get your hopes up."

She played it cool, until Meuchel told her to give it some thought, then everyone logged off, the offer hanging out there. She knew what her answer would be but she had to get something out of her system.

"I screamed with my parents a little bit. Then I called my club coach. Probably no more than 15 minutes later I called her back," says Saxton, who said yes.

And it's already happening, just like DePonte saw it. Saxton got her first collegiate RBI, against Middle Tennessee, in her first start of the season. In Weekend 3, a home run against Grand Canyon. During Montana's home stand against Carroll and Providence, she hit safely in all four games.

She isn't a stud in the making. She's already arrived.

DePonte is on the operations team at OpenGate Capital these days, based in Los Angeles. Their job is to find companies, perhaps undervalued, buy them and turn them around and sell them for a profit. It's no surprise she is thriving professionally, of seeing things others aren't.

It started with Chloë Saxton and, yes, the umlaut is official. It's right there on her birth certificate, though a left-side infielder with an emphasis on e maybe isn't ideal. So, let's change our thinking. Let's say the emphasized e is for elite.

"That will be fun to watch," says Meuchel, when asked of Saxton's ceiling. "There is no boundary for Chloë. She is a determined individual who loves to compete. She packs a big punch and loves to elevate her game. She is going to do great things here."

How can she not? She's got it.

University of Montana Athletics

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