FEATURED: Glacier softball's championship connection

Catchers never get any glory.

They toil away anonymously, squatting in front of an umpire with their back to the crowd and their face obscured by a mask.

They get bruised by wayward pitches, smacked with the occasional bat and spend their days crouching, leaping, diving, flailing and overheating, all to watch the pitcher — their battery mate and the somewhat literal center of attention — be celebrated with every strikeout and every win.

And that isn’t to say that successful pitchers don’t deserve the adulation. They’re immensely talented with incredible toughness, especially mentally, and critical to a team’s success, particularly in softball, where the best pitchers can sometimes be called upon to throw nearly every inning in a season.

But even pitchers will admit that, like in any good relationship, if you look closely enough at them there almost always emerges a reliable, trustworthy partner, a catcher serving as backstop behind the plate and everything from coach to mother to therapist in the dugout. The two must connect in a way that makes them immune to pressure and ever resilient in the face of adversity.

Flowers may bloom in the spring, but never without strong roots.

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It should, therefore, hardly be a surprise that the Glacier Wolfpack won the Class AA state championship a year ago, and will be among the favorites to repeat this spring.

Their returning battery has a melding of the minds that borders on supernatural.

“Obviously we’re best friends,” Glacier catcher Christine Connolly said of her and Ali Williams, the Wolfpack’s all-state senior pitcher.

“We get along perfectly. We understand each other … a little too much sometimes. We basically read each other’s minds.”

Telepathic or not, Connolly and Williams have played together for nearly a decade and their ability to communicate non-verbally is both uncanny and one of the driving forces behind Glacier’s recent run of success.

They do not call pitch locations — it’s not necessary thanks to the multitude of innings they have worked in tandem — and when Williams fires a ball towards the plate, she does so with great certainty that Connolly is going to catch it, no matter where it ends up.

“I know that if I’m going to throw a rise ball, even if it goes, like, 10 feet in the air, she has to catch it and she’s going to catch it,” Williams said.

“We just say, ‘I’m going to throw it and you’re going to catch it,’ that’s how it works.”

“The chemistry they’ve built is something that can’t be coached or taught,” Glacier head coach Andy Fors said.

“When you talk about that specific relationship (between pitcher and catcher) there’s a lot of things (coaches) don’t see from the dugout,” he added. “Those two have spent so much time together that they have spoken and unspoken communication, and they can make those little tweaks to get back on track.”

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Last year in particular, Connolly did not have many little tweaks to make. Williams’ junior season was statistically preposterous, with the right-hander piling up 272 strikeouts in 154 innings while allowing only 68 hits. She fired seven shutouts and went 20-3, including a complete game, seven-strikeout win in the state title game.

Williams was the Class AA leader in strikeouts, innings pitched, earned run average (1.36) and WHIP (0.69), a number that averages the number of baserunners — via walk or base hit — allowed by a pitcher per inning.

“She’s amazing,” Connolly said of Williams. “Everything she throws, her variety of pitches, she has several different pitches and I think that makes it really challenging (on hitters). And her speed, obviously, is really advanced.

Fors, now in his fourth season as the Wolfpack head coach, has had Williams on the varsity roster since her freshman season and has watched her development as closely as anyone.

“A lot of times in high school you’ll see a pitcher that has a fastball and one other pitch,” Fors said. “Ali had that as a freshman and she’s spent an inordinate amount of time with (pitching) coach (Gary) Evans working on other pitches.”

While her physical skills are immense — Williams was also Glacier’s best hitter with a .459 batting average and 11 home runs a year ago — the Wolfpack’s ace pitcher carries herself with the kind of maturity and discipline that’s unusual, to say the least, among high schoolers.

“Ali, she’s a pretty unique kid,” Fors said. “She’s obviously very talented athletically, but she has a different drive than I’ve seen in very many other kids. She just seems to have a little more internal motivation, a little more focus, a little more determination when it comes to putting herself in position to improve her skills.

“She’s a coach’s dream when it comes to leadership,” he continued. “She’s extremely positive, very good to other girls in the program. When you talk about leading by example, she’s the kind of benchmark you’d like.”

Connolly’s an exemplary player in her own right, batting .328 with a pair of home runs as a junior, a feat made all the more impressive because of the physical toll squatting behind home plate in full gear for seven innings takes on her body. Her ability to think along with Williams also makes her uniquely qualified to tackle the rare instances when her pitcher is not at her best and she’s forced to pay a visit to the circle.

“I understand her more, so I know what calms her down and what she needs to hear, although I don’t really need to say much,” Connolly said. “Then normally I’ll say a joke and she’ll just start laughing.”

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Both players are talented enough to continue their careers in college, but when it came time to make that decision they did not seek each other’s counsel, instead working independently to find which school would be the best fit for each of them.

Eventually, after attending a showcase, Williams committed to play at Carroll College.

A few weeks later, Connolly made her decision.

“We’re both going to Carroll,” Williams said, laughing. “So we’re together forever.”