Coach Katlyn serves as an Up2Us Sports coach at DC Girls Baseball. For Women's History & Empowerment Month, we asked who or what makes her feel empowered to be a coach and to explain the importance of women in sports breaking barriers and making a difference she wrote the below beautifully articulated response.
Even though women have been playing baseball since the 1800s (when the game began), it hasn't even been twenty years since the first woman was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Baseball pioneer Albert Spalding once declared, “Baseball is too strenuous for womankind”, and assistant professor of physical education at Ohio State in 1929 Gladys Palmer claimed in her own book that “The national game as played by men is unsuited to girls and women.”
By playing baseball, girls are challenging the long-standing gender norms that have crept into gendered sports. Girls in sport have to prove stereotypes wrong, and the fragility women have been assigned and assumed to behold is an undesirable trait in athletes: the presumption a girl athlete will “throw like a girl” has always had consequences. Enduring underestimation is almost a universal experience for all female athletes, but in playing amongst men it’s almost guaranteed.
Girls are gate kept away from baseball at a young age, as the presumed “next step” from tee ball to a female is immediately softball – baseball is often never presented as a viable option of play, as happened to me. This funnel girls and boys are neatly separated and sorted into enforces the barriers women face in the sport, as the innocent action of choosing to play baseball slowly becomes a statement against stereotypes and assumed roles. By pushing the boundaries of typical discourse, girls and women in baseball demonstrate agency that wasn't typically afforded to women historically.
“By playing baseball, girls are challenging the long-standing gender norms that have crept into gendered sports. ”
By high school, many girls slowly but surely pull away or drop from the sport due to pressure and ridicule, and some have to switch to softball for better playing opportunities and scholarships despite the two being ruled unequivalent to each other. I feel my role, not only as their coach but as a fellow girl, is to give my players the confidence and support to take the field and make sure they know they belong on it. My job isn't to only help teach them the game, but to develop their love and sense of belonging in it despite numerous others telling them differently – simply for being a girl. It’s hard to keep pushing through opposition when you feel like there’s no one else alongside you.
While numbers of girls in baseball are growing, the lack of representation and ability to see other women athletes who have “made it” in baseball are still an issue. There have been recent triumphs such as Kelsie Whitmore (a favorite amongst my 9 year old players) who currently plays the highest level of professional baseball a women ever has, or Olivia Pichardo who is the first woman to play Division 1 baseball for Ivy League school Brown, and those women’s baseball legends like Maybelle Blair that young girls look to and see that persistence of defiance can be fruitful.
Baseball is a beautiful sport, and the experience young girls can have playing it can be even more so once they are comfortably afforded the chance to. The question of “Is it worth it?” comes up much too often to girls who choose to stay in the game. As a youth coach my hope is to open up the world of baseball to my girls in such a way that when the time comes, their answer will always be “Yes.”
“I feel my role, not only as their coach but as a fellow girl, is to give my players the confidence and support to take the field and make sure they know they belong on it.”
Read more on Women’s History & Empowerment Month from Coach Haven (Philadelphia City Rowing) & Coach Pilar from (Soccer Without Borders Massachusetts) by checking these posts on social media: Instagram | Facebook | X
Katlyn has served as an Up2Us Sports coach at DC Girls Baseball in Washington, DC, since May 2023 thanks to support from AmeriCorps.
