GREAT FALLS — Last spring, Great Falls High softball placed seventh in the Eastern AA, and heading into this season a new coach now leads the varsity program. Robb Soltesz, who previously was the junior varsity head coach, is now leading a senior-laden Bison team.
"It's been great, the girls are great," Soltesz said at the Multi Sports Complex during Tuesday's practice. "We got nine seniors who know how things work. The seniors have been leading the charge and it's good that I can rely on them. We had open gyms all winter and they get those set up, and that's great."
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Soltesz replaces Don Meierhoff at the helm of Bison softball, and the new coach said he's instilling a different culture to the program.
"They've been open to the changes we've made and really bought in to what we're trying to accomplish," Soltesz said. "Which really is to make a team and bring it together in a way that it elevates the whole team."
Outfielders Ava Newmack and Elliana Frank are two of the Bison's seniors. Both spoke highly of how it's been playing under Soltesz thus far.
"It starts with him keeping his spirits up. He never gets down on us. He never talks bad to us. He's always kind to us," Newmack said. "He also drills it in to our heads to just breathe and wait for the next play, because you can't do anything about what happened five seconds ago or five minutes ago."
"Having him coach me on JV the past years, it's been great," Frank said. "We get along well with him as a team, and our freshman year we did really well with him as our coach."
Great Falls dropped the first two games to Billings Senior and Billings Skyview, but the senior duo said there were positives to take away from those contests.
"We just kept our spirits up. Kept talking, which I think really helped us not get so down about the score in our first game," Newmack said. "We have some things to prove this year and, honestly, I think we're on the road to proving it."
"It's something to build from, it's just a starting point," Frank said. "I think that working up from that is great because we can see where we went wrong and just build from that automatically, because usually we do start with non-conference games, so it was a change."
As Frank previously mentioned, this senior group played for Soltesz as freshmen. Soltesz said that team had a similar start to what this team has had.
"We lost our first three games, we didn't lose a game after that," Soltesz said. "So I think they have it in them."
The scheduled home opener for the Bison on Thursday has been postponed due to poor weather in the forecast. They will next be in action Saturday on the road against Belgrade.
