A Fresh Sport in Bozeman
Illustration of a baseball and the Gallatin High School Logo by Claire Adlington.
Over the summer of 2025, school baseball teams in the Gallatin valley turned from a dream to reality. As the sport grows in popularity across the state, Bozeman has decided to consider it as well.
The Bozeman School District held a board meeting on September 23, 2024, discussing the process and idea of having official MHSA high school baseball at Gallatin High School. Then, they proposed an ‘If, Then’ pathway, which included gauging student interest and balancing gender proportionality in the district’s sports catalogue.
The board set out to cap gender data variance at 5% after the addition of baseball. Unfortunately, GHS female participation in athletics needed to increase by around 80 students to mirror Bozeman High School’s disproportionality of approximately 3%. So, GHS female participation rose with another year of school and gender equality in funding through sports to get equal gender proportionality, which allowed room for baseball to be added in the gender participation data. Because both required parts of the pathway were met, the district moved on to the other parts needed for baseball to become a reality.
Next, the district needed to secure private funding of approximately $100,000 for their first year of a new athletics team. They also needed rental space, planning for long term facilities, fit the cost for baseball into the fixed athletics/activities budget hence why $100,000 was needed and finally securing BSD7 Board and MHSA approval of adding baseball. Long range planning for the sport including cost and location of facilities, payment of coaches, equipment etc. is important to continue the growth of GHS and the sport in general. The district needed as much private funding as they did because short term rental space is expensive and hard to find in Bozeman so they also used funding for as much long term planning as possible. Furthermore, coaching stipends were costly, which impacted the funding proportions to get baseball on the right footing. The most important step was getting approval from the BSD7 Board and MHSA because they represent the community and would help us represent the state through another competitive activity.
In the end, all of these logistical necessities were covered, and baseball was made an official sport offered at both high schools during the summer of 2025. Coach John Graham played baseball for 14 years throughout his life and has been coaching it for the last 26 years around the northwest. He then came back to Bozeman and was a gym teacher at Chief Joseph Middle School before applying at GHS to be an underclassman gym teacher. Then, when the position of head baseball coach became available, he applied and was accepted as head coach.
In an interview with Coach Graham, he spoke of the new team’s season, which began on March 16th with tryouts and practice schedules. The team will compete in its inaugural games after spring break at the Legion Field at Heroes Park, located at the Fairgrounds. Gallatin’s team will be considered part of the Eastern AA division, which includes Great Falls, CMR, Billings West, Billings Senior, Skyview, and Belgrade. Along with a non-conference game (non-con) against Butte, which is in the Western division, they will have a non-con against Missoula Sentinel, and are hopeful for more opportunities to compete.
However, this raised the question of how much money Bozeman’s two teams had to raise. Graham found that,“as a community last year in an attempt to adopt the sport…the baseball community in Bozeman raised over $100,000 and got that to the school district,” Graham continued by noting, “in addition to that, we've had to raise, and we're in the process of raising quite a bit more,” continued Graham. The head coach commented that funding raised by the Bozeman Baseball Initiative in 2025 has helped the team to purchase equipment and uniforms, but he’s already looking ahead to Gallatin’s second baseball season. “Next year fundraising comes back on us completely, so the fundraising efforts will have to be pretty dialed in.”
Coach Graham’s hopes for the 2026 season are to “get the guys to buy into each other and trust one another”. He also wants them to focus on the process, not the results. Coach Graham is entering the season believing that outcomes speak for themselves, and the only thing the youthful team can change is their process. “I think that the game naturally rewards you, right? But when you do that, you learn to play as a team and work as a team, and the level of selflessness goes up. The buy into the process improves,” he said.
As for this season's success and a chance at the state championship, Coach Graham believes that if the team trusts the process and works as a team then they will be a great addition to the Bozeman community. And seeing as GHS has had many wins this year including Championship titles in both volleyball and girls basketball, Graham trusts that his team will be a competitive organization that adds to the success of GHS sports. But his main hope is for the lessons to be learned, to trust in each other, be competitive and to focus on more wins than losses at the end of the day. So good luck this season to the GHS baseball team!
