Going out on top
Cibola alum Olea helped Montana win Big Sky, make NCAAs as senior
Three years ago, when then-Arizona Western third baseman Bethany Olea signed with the University of Montana softball program, she had no idea what her experience in Missoula would be like. After all, Montana was literally a brand-new program, as Olea — a 2013 Cibola High School alum — was a member of the Grizzlies’ first-ever signing class. Three years later, it’s safe to say the experience went as well as Olea could have hoped for. As a senior this year, Olea capped her softball career by once again posting standout numbers individually and — just as notably — helping the Grizzlies do something that once seemed unthinkable: win the Big Sky championship and qualify for the 64-team Division I NCAA Tournament.
“As a fan base everybody thought it would take like six years (to build a successful program),” Olea said in a recent phone interview. “Nobody really thought about making the (NCAA Tournament) this quickly but the coaching staff and the team. To be able to do it in such a short amount of time, and to be able to be a part of it, was pretty cool.”
Olea, perhaps more so than any other Grizzlies player, was very much a part of the program’s rise to prominence.
As a senior, Olea ranked first on the team and third in the Big Sky in batting average (.416), first on the team and second in the Big Sky in runs scored (47) and on-base percentage (.514), and second on the team in extra-base hits (17).
That came after she hit a team-best .408 as a 2016 First-Team All-Big Sky Conference selection, and .300 as a second-team selection in 2015.
Olea arrived at Montana with plenty of lower-tier accolades to her name; in 2014, she was named an NJCAA Division I All-American after hitting .464 for Arizona Western, and in 2013 she capped a standout fouryear career at Cibola by being named the Yuma Sun/Yuma Rotary Club Softball Player of the Year.
But even so, performing at the Division I level is a different beast entirely.
“Going into it I didn’t really have any expectations,” Olea said. “After the first year, I did well, being that if you hit .300 in Division I that’s considered decent. So I just kept setting my goals higher.”
And she kept performing, all the way through her career’s most im-