EAST HELENA — While the crack of a bat and the plop of a baseball hitting a leather glove aren’t the typical sounds of Montana during winter, they were the sounds filling East Helena’s Granite Peak Athletics Wednesday morning.
Gov. Greg Gianforte and Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen recognized the indoor baseball and softball training facility while announcing that the state saw nearly 64,000 new businesses created in 2024, surpassing 2023’s record by nearly 4,000 businesses.
Co-founders Nolan Gilbert and Connor Moore opened Granite Peak Athletics in October.
“I grew up playing baseball my whole life, and we had opportunities,” said Gilbert, who is originally from Virginia. “We had six of these places within 20 minutes of each other. So, when I first came in here and started training athletes, I saw the void. This was a need for people, especially with snow on the ground six months out of the year.”
Moore explained how the business went from dream to reality.
“Yeah, it was funny,” said Moore. “Nolan actually just called me one day with the idea. And there was kind of the back and forth for a long time of whether or not it would work. And we spent a lot of time just planning it and thinking about how it would look. And then one day, we kind of realized that, hey, this could work.”
Granite Peak Athletics offering area baseball and softball athletes a place to work on their games year-round caught the eye of East Helena High School’s varsity baseball head coach, Ethan Hoffman.
“This has been a game changer for us,” Hoffman said of his players using Granite Peak Athletics’ facilities. “The last couple years we’ve been utilizing one of the elementary school gyms for our preseason training, but when Nolan got a hold of me and said this organization, this facility, was coming in, we were super excited to get involved. We’re in here twice a week for two two-hour sessions. And they’re getting a lot of reps that we wouldn’t have been getting otherwise with the Montana weather and not having a field in East Helena.”
Gilbert and Moore said that offering the East Helena baseball team a practice space during the winter months aligns with their business’ mission.
“We started this place for the community,” said Gilbert. “It was to give the kids the opportunity. They’re going to get better at baseball and softball, that’s the byproduct. We really care about improving the livelihood of the youth athletes and teaching them the skills that they can then carry on after they’re done playing the sport one day.”
