Wood River Softball Star Rewrites The Record Books With Her Father At Her Side
BY Mark Dee
Looking back, some of Matt Nelson’s favorite moments coaching his four daughters might have been his most miserable. He calls them “shins and chins” practices, set up behind the plate as low fastballs pelted his legs and spiked curves leapt from the infield dirt up into his face. Nelson raised his girls in the game. They could all hit and pitch and field their positions. They were all competitors—on the diamond, in the yard, over a deck of cards in the living room. One-on-one, though, the Wood River High School head coach hoped to impart a bit more—a sense of how to approach the game, and through it, their lives after.
With his second daughter, Wood River High School star senior Makinzie Nelson, he can pinpoint the moment he saw those lessons take: First inning, versus Sugar-Salem, on April 8. The Wolverines had limped to a 1-8 start, still warming up as their fields greened in Hailey. Nelson, a three-year varsity player already committed to play at Division I Montana next year, had been solid. With her first at bat, her season turned spectacular. Nelson hit two home runs in the game, leading the Wolverines to their second win of the year. And she didn’t stop, homering in each of the next eight games.
“Every ball she hit just exploded off her bat,” Matt Nelson said. “I was like, ‘Holy Cow.’ I mean, the kid’s locked in. Here we go.”
In softball, where long seasons are defined by routine and superstition, the best thing a player can hear is nothing at all. Just like no one mentions a pitcher is nearing a no hitter, no one speaks about a hitter on a streak. And for much of this season, Makinzie Nelson’s teammates—and her father—didn’t say anything about what she was doing.
“It’s like ‘Fight Club,’ you know?” Matt Nelson said. “You don’t talk about Fight Club.”
She didn’t think about it, either—avoiding stats and doing everything she could to quiet her mind. At home, she’d draw or paint; in the dugout, she’d think about her dog; at the plate, she’d repeat the simple mantra she’d coined for herself and shrink the world to the grapefruit-sized yellow streak beaming in her direction. “See ball, hit ball,” she’d say, and more often than not, she did.
On Thursday, Burley beat Wood River to end the Wolverines’ season one game shy of a state tournament berth. With it ended one of the most dominant statistical seasons ever posted by a Wood River High School athlete. Over 28 games, Makinzie Nelson batted .709, in the top 100 nationally, per stats recorded by the high school athletics clearinghouse MaxPreps. She drove in 58 runs and slugged 1.663, both top 50 in the country. And she hit 19 home runs, top 25, including her nine-game streak, a run Wood River Athletic Director Kevin Stilling called “simply outstanding.”
Kevin Stilling has seen school records set before. He thinks of Johnny Radford reaching the mark for points in basketball, or Alec Nordsieck and Cade Schoot setting back-to-back passing records on the football field. Tanner Dredge’s 39-goal soccer season comes to mind. So do the All-State girls basketball runs of KT Martinez and Haylee Thompson.
“I am not, however, aware of athletes whose numbers ranked nationally the way Makinzie’s have,” he said. “Credit to her and all the work she has put in to make this record-setting season possible.”
For Makinzie Nelson, it was years coming. As a child, she learned softball with the girls seniors on this Wood River team. Then, her skill pulled her away. She sought more and better competition, playing on travel teams in Boise or Idaho Falls. Softball hasn’t always been a strong sport in the valley, she said, where the long winter means seasons invariably start with indoor practices and road games. She played where she could, and lost the connection to teammates close to home.
As a rare freshman on varsity, Nelson was thrown straight into the fire, starting the season as the team’s number one pitcher.
“I was a scared little teenage girl,” she remembers. “I didn’t know any of the girls I was playing with. They were all older than me.” Through the seasons, she got stronger. Familiar faces joined the team—girls she’d played with as a nine year old. “That connection came right back.”
“The more comfortable I got, the more loose I got,” she says. She grew more, was more confident off the field, and it translated in her play. “And this year, something hit. I felt like I could own any pitcher that came against me. On the mound, (I could) pitch to any batter that was hitting against me. Something just clicked this year…It’s probably the best year of my life.”
It didn’t start that way. In late December, a teammate died suddenly. Before every game this year, her friends hung her jersey on a ski pole and raised it in the dugout like a banner. Her name, Matt said, was Faith. His voice cracks thinking of her. This season, he wanted to help his team remember her, too. So they’d hang the jersey, and their coach would remind them that “faith is the stuff you can’t see anyway.”
“You gotta believe it,” he said before the Burley game. Honoring their friend has “been good for the healing process for those kid,” he said. “The bond is hitting right now.”
As for coaching his daughter, Matt said the hard part is over. She knows how to play. She loves the game. This year was about fine tuning her mindset, and making sure she savors her last high school season—the kind of a coaching parents do every day.
“It’s like having a violin,” he said. “You wind that thing too tight, it’s going to snap. So we always try to keep her enjoying the game. As long as she’s enjoying it, I’m all for letting her do whatever she wants. You play your game, play it hard, play it the best you can, and that’s all you can do. When you don’t enjoy it anymore, put your spikes in the fire pit and let them cook, just end it right there.”
That’s the lesson he saw sprout in the first at bat against Sugar Salem, and blossom in the games since.
“There are so many fundamental things that he has taught me, but this year I’ve been a pretty mental player, just ‘because, you know, the whole world feels like it’s been on my shoulders,” she said. “But he pulls me off to the side and he, he always just tells me, ‘Do what you can control. Do the best that you can be. Nothing else matters, just perform to your best. And if your best is, you know, hitting maybe one line drive and then getting out the rest of the time, I’ll still love you. If it’s, you know, striking out 10 girls, and then hitting it out every time, I’ll still love you. Just know that whatever you do is, you know, just do it to, to the best of your ability and I’ll stand by you for the rest of my life.’”
After the Burley loss, Matt Nelson gathered his girls on the field. Some, he’d coached half their lives. It was the last time he’d coach Makinzie in competition.
“I just let the girls know how proud I was of them and their effort they gave me this year after all the tragedy and record-breaking events that happened,” he said later. “I just told them how proud I was of the resilience and unwavering ability to keep a smile on their faces.” He told his seniors that their lives are “gonna be full of dream-makers, and heartbreakers, and that this little game that doesn’t mean anything” can teach you everything, in a world where you need mental toughness, determination, teamwork and faith. He reminded them that in uniform or out, they’re part of “a group of people that would do anything for you for the rest of your life.”
Before the loss, Nelson told me that just thinking of Makinzie on the diamond made him smile.
“I’m gonna be there one day as an old guy sitting on my front porch, watching the sunset,” he said, “and my wife and I will reminisce about the kind of year she had this year, and just how amazing it was to watch.”
Maybe Makinzie and her sisters will be there too. And she’ll share that her favorite memory from her high school career isn’t really about her at all. In it, they’re in Buhl. She’s standing on second base. Her sister Paityn, now a sophomore, is at bat, her father—her coach—is in the dugout. She’s looking to him for a sign. Instead, she hears the resonant thwack of Paityn’s bat, the unmistakable sound of a ball on its way over the wall. She looks at Matt before she starts to run, and sees that he’s near tears. When she pictures it now, she sees the rest through her father’s eyes: His daughters jogging the base paths, smiling on their slow way home.
