See that picture above. Check out the girl in the second row. That’s me as the one and only girl on my Little League team back in the early 1980s. I loved playing baseball back then. That’s even my dad as the coach. I’m not saying I was good at it (I most definitely wasn’t) but the boys on my team didn’t care. Most of them weren’t good at it either. It didn’t matter. We were a team. We were in it together.
Here’s what I didn’t know about this picture until now. Just 5 or 6 years before this picture was taken, girls were not allowed to play Little League. It’s true. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that Little League gave in to pressure and dropped its “no girls” rule. I discovered this amazing fact in an article which appeared in Cricket, our award-winning literary magazine for kids ages 9 and up, last summer. It’s about the struggle girls faced in being allowed to join Little League. It nice to know the names of the girls I have to thank for the privilege of playing baseball back then.
As your daughters and sons take the to field this spring, I invite you to share this article, The Girls of Summer, with them. This is a small piece of history that they can actually relate to as they get out in the fresh air and do what kids all across America have been doing for decades. Batter up!
