HELENA, Mont. – At 10 a.m. Mountain time Friday morning in Clackamas, Ore. Carroll College will take the field to face No. 17 Oregon Tech. It will be the 1,402nd game for the Owls, a program that started in 1976 and won the 2011 national championship. For the Saints, it will be game one.
 
Carroll was supposed to have their first game over two weeks ago against Simpson College but a heavy rainstorm prevented a trip that would have given Carroll six games. Instead, the Saints stayed in unseasonably warm Helena and continued to prepare for a delayed season opener.
 
"After a little delay the time has come to throw the first pitch," head coach Aaron Jackson said. "The team is ready to go and they are excited to make history."
 
Jackson isn't making it easy on his first-year team. The Saints play Oregon Tech twice, No. 15 Concordia (Ore.) and No. 21 College of Idaho as well as unranked Northwest Christian and Eastern Oregon, Jackson's former school.
 
"This weekend will be a good measuring stick for us as we will face off against some of the top teams in the country," Jackson said. "We look forward to the challenge and have been waiting for this moment to finally arrive."
 
As a first-season team, the saints are a freshmen-laden team, but Carroll has a senior three juniors and a pair of sophomore pitchers on the 18-member squad.
 
University of Great Falls transfer Maddie Jones will be the backstop for the Saints. She is one of 12 players from Montana on the squad.
 
The Saints have three pitchers on the roster, Kathryn Zink, a sophomore from Billings, Megan Gipe, sophomore from Trabuxo Canyon, Calif. and MacKenna Landis a freshman from Boise, Idaho.
 
Jackson, a Helena native and University of Montana graduate, coached for three seasons at Eastern Oregon where he compiled an 83-36 record. Prior to his stint at EOU he was an assistant coach at MSU-Billings.
 
Coverage of the game is available on the Concordia website here.