Happy Tuesday, Beacon readers! Lauren Frick here, and it’s hard to believe we’ll be flipping the calendar to September in a week’s time. It feels like it was just yesterday that my parents were in town visiting and we were enjoying some brats, standing under an awning at Glacier Bank Park to escape the drops of a late May rainy day. I’ve blinked, and all of a sudden, the rain is gone and Flathead Valley’s Pioneer Baseball League team is entering their final home stand of their fifth season.
Starting tonight, the Glacier Range Riders will close out their final home games before heading to Utah on Sept. 6 for their regular season finale with a series against the Ogden Raptors.
Baseball fanatics and general brat enjoyers can catch the Range Riders at their home on McDermott Lane in Kalispell for night-time matchups Tuesday, Aug. 25 through Saturday, Aug. 29 (if you’re lucky, you may even spot some wild Beacon staff members at Thursday’s game). The homestand against the RedPocket Mobiles will conclude on Sunday with a 1:05 p.m. start time.
The Range Riders enter this weekend on a five game win streak following their home series against the Boise Hawks. After dropping the opener 3-1, Glacier won five in a row to climb back above .500 overall. The run began with a 16-2 win on Wednesday when the Range Riders scored five in the first inning and finished with 17 hits, and continued with 5-1, 7-5, 9-3, and 11-4 victories.
When Glacier Bank Park’s gates close late Sunday afternoon, it won’t just mark the end of another season’s home slate, but also the conclusion of the fifth year of Range Riders baseball in the Flathead Valley.
To honor the milestone, let’s take a little trip down memory lane.
On Aug. 13, 2021, Ridge Run Baseball secured the rights to bring a Pioneer Baseball League (PBL) franchise to Northwest Montana for the first time. Less than 10 months later, on June 14, 2022, the newly named Glacier Range Riders were scheduled to play their first home game.
Between those dates, the to-do list was as follows: 1) build an organization from scratch 2) build a ballpark during a Montana winter. No biggie, right?
“When you look back at it now, it almost seems impossible that we were able to get everything done in that amount of time,” the team’s president, Chris Kelly, said in the organization’s “Building More than a Stadium” series. “We were looking at a construction site in the middle of a Montana winter knowing that in a matter of months, thousands of people were going to be walking through gates that hadn’t been built for a professional baseball team that hadn’t been named. There was really no room for the timeline to slip.”
The organization eyed an empty field along McDermott Lane and quickly got to work. Steel, concrete, playing surfaces, and facilities were being built while the front office sold corporate partnerships and season tickets for a vision fans had yet to see.
“A lot of what we were doing was asking people to believe in something they couldn’t fully see yet,” Kelly said. “You could show them the plans and talk about what the ballpark was going to become, but nobody had ever sat in those seats, nobody had ever watched an event here, and nobody had experienced a Range Riders game day. The support we received from the community and our partners before we ever played a home game was huge.”
On May 21, 2022, the inaugural team departed to open their season on the road, winning their first-ever game 15-1 in Colorado Springs on May 23. But back in Kalispell, the stadium remained unfinished, lacking even bowl seats for the fans who were eager to come for the team’s home opener slated for three weeks later.
On June 14, 2022, just 305 days after the franchise was announced, the Range Riders hosted their inaugural home opener on a cold, Montana night, and the following evening, a ninth-inning home run and a PBL Knockout Round victory gave them their first home win.
In the five years since, 14 Glacier players have signed with MLB organizations. Five players have earned affiliated contracts during the 2026 season alone, with a sixth advancing during the offseason.
Former Range Riders pitchers Logan VanWey and Jonathan Pintaro both made their MLB debuts during the 2025 season. Both have continued to receive Major League opportunities in 2026. Their debuts made Glacier the only Pioneer League organization to produce multiple Major League players since the league began operating under its current structure.
Behind that professional pipeline success is a coaching and advisory group with 81 combined seasons of Major League playing experience and an organization committed to finding players, developing their abilities, and helping them earn their next opportunities. In addition to sending players to the next level, two Range Rider coaches have also moved into MLB organizations.
To read more from the Range Riders’ “Building More Than a Stadium” series, click here. To purchase tickets for this weekend’s games, click here.
Well, time to round the bases and get on with the rest of today’s Daily Roundup. I think we really knocked it out of the park, if I do say so myself.
Girls on the Run Western Montana Appoint New Executive Director
Gerda Reeb, who previously spent two decades at Flathead Valley Community College, was tapped to lead the nonprofit that combines life-skill development with physical activity for young girls across the Flathead Valley.
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