BILLINGS — This past spring, Steve Nieto made the trip to Lacey, Wash., to watch his daughter Marleigh and her Montana State Billings softball teammates play against Saint Martin’s University.
Rain showers, though, seemed to have put a damper on this trip. While officials made on-and-off decisions of whether to get the game in, Nieto, sitting in the stands, heard a voice from behind him pose a question during one of the delays.
“Why are those girls not playing,” a woman asked, pointing to the softball dugouts, “but those girls behind us are?”
Nieto turned around to look at the adjacent field and saw a women’s flag football team was going through a practice. When Billings Public Schools made the decision to add girls flag football to its Senior, Skyview and West athletic portfolios this spring, Nieto, a longtime football coach himself (33 years between stops in California and the past 10 seasons at West), immediately dismissed the idea of coaching it himself.
But now, seeing those athletes running routes and catching passes, well …
“That’s when the interest starts to peak,” Nieto recalled.
To make a long story just a tad less long, Nieto eventually threw his hat into the ring to be the first flag football coach at West and got the job. At the same time, Nycole LaRowe was handed the reins for the Senior program, and Adam Greenwell was given the keys for Skyview.
The three coaches come from different backgrounds and experiences, but they face the same tough task: Building programs from scratch in the burgeoning Montana girls flag football scene, which has been labeled an “emerging” sport by the Montana High School Association.
While the MHSA is keeping its eye on flag football, it hasn’t yet welcomed it into the stable of officially sanctioned sports. Since 2022, the state’s flag football programs have been aided by seed money from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and the Atlanta Falcons, and the foundation provided grants for 11 additional programs — Billings among them — this season for a total of 28 around the state.
Of the three Billings coaches, LaRowe is the only one with flag experience. She spent the previous two years at Lockwood, and she was the Lions head coach last season.
She became a certified K-12 physical education and health enhancement teacher recently and was able to get a job at Senior. Thus, it seemed natural to be the choice to start the Broncs’ flag football program.
“I saw how empowering (flag football) was for the girls that I started with at Lockwood,” said LaRowe, who begins her 11th season as a coach in various sports. “I mean, they all will, to this day, come to me and say, ‘playing football was the coolest sport I played.’ And I think it's probably my favorite to coach.”
Greenwell has a varied background, as well. A former Marine (he basically signed up as a response to a challenge from a Marine recruiter), Greenwell has been a youth and senior pastor for nearly two decades and is the Falcons’ swimming coach.
His mentors growing up, he said, were his swimming coach and football coach.
“Being able to coach swimming and football in any capacity is a dream come true,” Greenwell said. “So, there’s that level. But also, being a dad of daughters, just really understanding what it means to give these young ladies opportunities.”
There won’t be much time for growing pains among any of the new programs. Practice just started — all three Billings coaches were expecting to have enough players to field varsity and junior varsity teams — with the first games set for Aug. 30. The season wraps up the first week of October with the state tournament in Hamilton.
That doesn’t allow much time to learn a new game with a language all its own, a game that requires skill sets that many players wouldn’t have needed to utilize before even if they’ve played other sports.
That doesn’t mean that the same old goals won’t apply.
“I'm extremely competitive at nature and at heart, but I know that a first-year program and a brand-new sport to some of these kids, it's important to have a little grace in terms of the win-loss record,” LaRowe said. “But I still come in with high expectations. I expect to be competing, you know, at state with the Glaciers and the Kalispells and teams that have been around a long time.”
Said Greenwell: “As far as our goals, you know, getting better every down is definitely one of them. But also, I would love for these girls to walk away with a winning record and knowing that their hard work translated to W's.”
For Nieto, so eager to say ‘no’ to flag football because of his immersion in the West boys football program for the past decade as an assistant coach, he’s just as eager now to get the girls started on their own path.
“As far as our goals, the first thing is the expectation for our girls to compete,” he said. “And then, there’s a standard at West, there’s an expectation at West, there’s an excellence at West. We’re not going to do anything to tarnish that. So, we have to meet that standard and hit that expectation.”
Nieto’s trip to Washington last spring didn’t work out as originally planned. But it bore fruit in its own way.
