A summer after Mo’ne Davis captured the sports world’s attention by dominating the Little League World Series, a host of girls from across the country will get the chance to play baseball on a different national stage. On Saturday, Baseball For All, an organization aimed at advocating for increased girls’ participation in America’s pastime, will launch the first-ever national all-girls baseball tournament for young players.
In all, 12 teams built regionally and nationally among girls who already play or want to start will descend on Orlando, Fla. for the event, which encompasses two age groups and hopes to “provide a genuine opportunity for girls to play baseball,” according to Justine Siegal, the Baseball For All founder who has been working to build girls baseball for nearly two decades and dreamed up the tournament. Girls who wanted to play could sign up individually or as a team for a guaranteed six games at the tournament.
Davis’ success in Williamsport last year, along with recent news stories about girls accepting college baseball scholarships and the addition of women’s baseball to the 2015 Pan-American Games, provided a groundswell of momentum for this sort of event.
“It’s the right moment,” Siegal said in a phone interview this week. “This is a tipping point for girls and women’s baseball. We knew we had to launch something radical.”
While Davis and others have done “a phenomenal job representing girls who play baseball,” Siegal added, “the next point we need to make is that you shouldn’t have to be a superstar to play.”
Siegal, who grew up playing baseball, was once the only woman coaching in collegiate baseball and was the first to ever coach a men’s professional team, after she was hired as the Brockton Rox first base coach in 2009. She was the first woman to throw batting practice to a Major League Baseball team when she did so in 2011. That feat was repeated last year by Florida high schooler Chelsea Baker, a knuckleballer who is hoping to earn a spot in a men’s collegiate program next season.
More than 1,200 girls play high school baseball across the country, according to national statistics, meaning even more likely play at lower levels. But that pales in comparison to the nearly half-million boys who play the sport, and many girls face limited opportunities because of the idea that baseball and softball are equivalent, rather than distinct, sports (both, as Emma Span explained in the New York Times last year, in legal and practical ways). Most of them play primarily against boys rather than in all-girls leagues or tournaments, and by the time many girls reach their teenage years, they are either forced into softball by a lack of baseball opportunities or pushed there by their own belief that they cannot pursue baseball later on.
Based on the number of girls playing, “it’s easy to see the interest is there if only there were opportunities,” Siegal said. And because girls tend to perceive the limits of their opportunities at a certain age, she and Baseball For All chose the tournament’s age groups — one tournament for ages 8-to-10, another for 10-to-13 — deliberately.
“I have seven year olds who think they need to quit. I have seven year olds who’ve been bullied to quit,” Siegel said. “And 10 to 13 is crucial age when girls quit. Our next task will be to start even younger, to get to girls right out of T-ball.”
Siegal hopes the national tournament will promote awareness of girls baseball to everyone involved. Parents will be able to attend meetings about high school, college, and Team USA opportunities while giving girls a chance to earn spots on national all-star teams. It will help show parents, coaches, and local and national governing organizations that there are girls who want to play baseball, and that as a matter of equality those demands deserve to be met. And the tournament should also signal to girls that they can grow and thrive in the game, not just playing against boys but against other girls with similar interests too.
“It can be lonely being the only girl out there,” she said, adding that the lack of opportunities often occurs because stops to think that girls want to play baseball. “They need to know they are believed in.”