A Women’s Baseball is Coming Back for the First Time in 70 Years

This past month, there was an announcement on the future of women’s baseball in America. Women's baseball will have a professional league of its own. This will be the first time since 1954, which ended for many reasons including new televised games. Prior to this announcement, there was talk and rumors surrounding the potential league starting up. Now it has finally happened. 

This is a huge step for the future of women in sports. We already have a women’s hockey, soccer, and basketball league. The Women's National Basketball Association which has made some bold moves for this upcoming season, was first founded in 1996 and only recently started to rake in a huge fanbase. The Professional Women’s Hockey League was only recently established in 2023. These are two hugely successful leagues as well. It was only a matter of time till we got Women’s baseball too. Though it seems that baseball was a little further behind as there are no high schools offering women’s baseball in the United States and the NCAA does not offer women’s baseball at all. 

The start-up of WPBL is all thanks to women who play and women who advocate. The founder of Baseball For All, a nonprofit organization, Justine Siegal, is a pioneer for women’s baseball and women in professional sports in general. She made great strides as the first woman to coach in the MLB in 2015 working with Oakland Athletics. She also worked with the Cleveland Guardians back in 2011 with batting practice. Siegal made and is still making major impacts on the baseball scene. Now, she advocates for women in sports and has been part of the creation of the Women’s Professional Baseball League. 

The new league is expected to start playing games in 2026. There are only six teams expected for the first season and an expansion to eight teams is expected soon after. We have a predicted 40 games lined up for 2026. So far this has picked up great traction and feedback among sports fans. I imagine they will be playing on professional fields like the MLB in no time, For now, they are to use college and minor league fields as they continue to grow. As of now, there is still discussion surrounding who will own and sponsor the clubs. With that, we can see the league is only in its infant stage but there is reason for excitement nonetheless. Girls everywhere will finally be able to have a Professional league to dream about and role models like Justine Siegal are to thank.

Clement Kirsch

Clement is a sophomore at Thomas More University. He is double majoring in Life Science and English, while he hopes to become a science writer and journalist.

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