RIVERSIDE

The ball was punched into the air ever so lightly.

Payton Brun, a sophomore first baseman for the Highland High School softball team, could have easily let the ball just float harmlessly to the ground in foul territory.

Um, no. That’s not how Huskie softball works.

Brun sprinted from her position at first base and dived into the dusty dirt at Highland’s softball field. She stretched her glove out and made the catch, right in front of Huskies head coach Carrie Wieland.

“Way to get dirty!” Wieland shouted from the dugout.

Brun emerged from the dirt with a smile. And the ball.

“She’s always there for us,” Brun said of Wieland. “She’s helping us with every single aspect. She’s always there to pick you up, tell you you can’t get down on yourself.”

She’s always there.

Yes, that’s Huskie softball. It’s a place where Carrie Wieland is now coaching in her 18^th season with her niece, Samantha, a 2006 Highland High School graduate and former player. It’s a place where Carrie or Samantha or Carrie’s husband is dragging the dirt infield at Highland after a game and in the hours before a game. He often drives the team bus. Gary Yoder has been keeping the team’s scorebook for 20 years.

“Highland softball is everybody does the work,” Carrie Wieland said. “We’ve always taken care of our field by ourselves.”

Carrie is a librarian at Highland Elementary in Riverside. Samantha works with special-needs students at the middle school.

It is a perfect combination of family and softball tradition that has resulted in some big seasons at Highland.

“It’s a family affair definitely,” Carrie Wieland said.

And yet, if you dropped in for Thanksgiving dinner, you’d discover it’s not all softball.

“One good thing about us is that in the offseason and when we’re at family things like that,” Samantha Wieland said, “there’s not a lot of softball talk. We’re really good at discussing it when we need to and then leaving it be.”

“I think it’s neat how we do coach together so well, but when we’re outside of it with family stuff, we rarely discuss it,” Samantha added.

But on the field? The intensity, and the joy, is rock solid. The Huskies have won as many as 35 games in one summer and they don’t have losing seasons. It just doesn’t happen and this year is no different, even with Abbi Stransky, a .300 hitter and 29-game starter last season, out with an ACL injury. The Huskies have won 18 games. Friday, they’ll host Hillcrest Academy in a first-round postseason Class 1A tournament game.

One of the reasons is Carrie Wieland. One swing at a bad pitch, and the head coach is standing not far away, in the third base coaching box, giving a player that look and shouting the whole time. A minute later, she’s high-fiving that same Huskie with the care of a loving mom.

“I definitely over-mother them,” Carrie said. “I understand that. It’s something I want them to know, they can come to me with anything, but I also want them to wear sunscreen, I want them to be smart on the weekends. I just want them to understand that somebody else cares about them besides their parents. I’m always there for them.”

“She lets us have fun,” Brun said. “We have a lot of fun on the field. She loves us to have that aspect of it, but then she also makes us drive really hard. We practice every day.”

And another reason for the Huskies’ success is Samantha Cox, who has a voice that is just as loud and just as proud. She graduated at a time, in 2006, when the Huskies were 30-game winners every year.

“It’s awesome,” Samantha said. “You can tell that they understand the knowledge that we have. And most of the time, almost all of our girls are just soaking it all in, taking it all in. Which is one of the reasons why this program is the way it is because of that.”

Is there a little good cop, bad cop going on? Carrie and Samantha both laugh over that. Of course there is.

“There’s days that she will take over and she’ll yell at them,” Samantha said. “And there’s days that she’ll look at me, and, ‘Yeah, I got this.’ Or there’s days that I’ll yell for a second and then I’ll finally look at her, ‘You’ve got to take this one.’ ”

The Huskies fully know what’s expected. And that’s why the team’s dugout is filled with chatter and cheers. Every inning. Every game.

“You’re going to get coached and you’re going to get overcoached and you’re going to get told what to do 90 percent of the time,” Carrie Weiland said.

Carrie doesn’t do social media (“Whatever they say, they say,” she says). She’s old school. But she has changed.

“Kids have changed, people have changed,” she said.

What hasn’t changed is Highland softball. The Huskies won a state championship in 2007 and have reached the state tournament two other times, including 2014. Wieland has coached 16 All-State selections, including Dani Laughlin just two years ago. In the last 17 years, Wieland and the Huskies have won more than 350 games.

“I’ve just had some great, great teams and families,” Carrie Wieland said. “The kids just put their whole heart into softball, so that helps. I am passionate and I am very emotional. I show them fear, I show them sadness. They know it’s real and we’re going to do everything we can to make them better people.”

“It’s just been an amazing ride,” she added.

And the ride is still going strong.

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @bowkerpaul.