A game of their own

Women's baseball struggles to gain a foothold in the U.S., but it's alive and well.

Allison Merims, a 13-year-old Lufkin Road Middle School student, is precisely what is wrong and exactly what is right about women’s baseball in the United States.
Merims grew up playing America’s pastime. When she arrived at Lufkin Road a year ago, she had to decide between a sport she loves, baseball, and one she was vaguely familiar with, softball.
 
“They hit that fork in the road. The only thing ahead of them is softball. And their parents start looking down the road, and they don’t see any of this going on,” said Jim Glennie, USA Baseball’s head women’s scout who has been integral in the development of the women’s game during the last 15 years. “And they think if they really want to continue as an elite athlete, the way to do it is in softball. It’s in college and all of that. So we face that battle, and we’re trying to get the word out so that girls know they can come and play baseball.”

It’s a decision that thousands of precocious teens have made and will continue to have to make for years — likely decades — to come. Merims chose to do what anyone would do if they want to see women’s baseball blossom.

“Last year, I switched to softball so I could join the middle school team,” Merims said. “But I love playing baseball. I will never give it up.”

Part of the reason Merims will never give up baseball is because she hopes one day to be a part of the USA Baseball Women’s National Team, which she saw up close at the lightly publicized International Friendship Series with Canada and Japan Sept. 1-3 at the USA Baseball National Training Complex in Cary.

While the series was an opportunity to let the teams play in a year when there are no major international competitions, it also served as a way to expose people to the fact that the United States has a national women’s baseball team.

“A what? I had no idea. None,” said Lisa Fiorito of Apex, who brought her two daughters, Danielle and Janine, to a clinic run by Team USA players and coaches on the first day of the series. “But I’m glad there is.”

The seeds for women’s baseball in its current shape began sprouting in the early 1990s.
 
Glennie, whose official title with USA Baseball is director of player identification, founded a league in Lansing, Mich., in 1992 after his daughter expressed an interest in playing baseball. That was also the year “A League of Their Own,” the film based on the World War II-era All American Girls Professional Baseball League, was released.

As the Internet began connecting the country in the mid ’90s, Glennie found pockets of women’s teams scattered throughout the United States.

By 1993, Glennie formed the American Women’s Baseball Federation and staged a national championship.

In 1999, Glennie was contacted by Japan, which had a well-organized and well-run national team that was looking for some place to play. So they came to the U.S. championships.

Two years later, the AWBF organized the Women’s World Series, which was held each year until 2004. That year, women’s baseball was sanctioned by the IBAF, the world governing body for baseball, which encouraged its members to pull women’s national teams under their umbrellas.

The IBAF staged the first Women’s World Cup in Edmonton in 2004, which was won by the U.S. The U.S. won it again in 2006 in Chinese Taipai, and the IBAF has sanctioned biennial tournaments through 2012.
 
But the work isn’t done, Glennie said. The infrastructure is built, but not enough people know about it.

“The thing elite athletes really get excited about is a national team,” he said. “That keeps your players going. This is a crazy thing. You’ve got to grow it from the top down. You can’t grow it from the bottom up. If there’s nothing to dream about at the top, they’re not going to work at it when they’re younger.
 
“So I realized we had to form this first, and then we’ll start to get the youth leagues around the country, and we’ll start digging and finding the players.”

The players come from all corners of the country — at least 15 states were represented during Labor Day weekend — and varying backgrounds.

Judy O’Brien, a catcher, sells 401K plans for ADP in Raleigh.
 
Donna Mills, an infielder, is a court officer in Massachusetts.
 
Jen Hunter, a pitcher, is a high school student in Tarpon Springs, Fla.

But they were all in Cary playing for their country and dispelling the notion that women cannot and do not play baseball.

“I never had that opportunity,” O’Brien said. “We had a softball program, so I just played softball. … You’d walk by the baseball field, and they had the lights and the fence. I wanted to know what it felt like to hit a home run over a fence. I didn’t come to baseball until after college. I love it and wish I’d always played baseball.”

Lilly Jacboson, 19, is trying to do what O’Brien would have liked to. Jacobson played baseball all through high school in Reno, Nev. This year, she plans to try out for the baseball team at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

“Once you prove that you’re a consistent player, you’re just one of the teammates,” Jacobson said of her high school experience. “All the guys on my team were great. They treated me like I was anybody else. When we went out of town, it was a little different.”

It was different largely because it’s rare that girls play baseball in high school and most people are unaware that some do.

While the spotlight has been slow to shine on the team, players can take a modicum of solace in that their counterparts on the women’s national soccer team lived in anonymity in their formative years, too.

In 1991, the U.S. soccer team went to China and won the first FIFA World Cup. Few knew they were gone, and fewer knew what they had accomplished when they came home. Eight years later, that same swashbuckling soccer team played before sellout crowds at the 1999 World Cup, including 90,000-plus in the final at the Rose Bowl, which the U.S. also won.
 
No one knows if the U.S. baseball team can accomplish a similarly meteoric rise and capture the dreams of today’s adolescent girls looking for athletes to emulate.

“People just don’t know,” said Mills, who was the 2006 World Cup Most Valuable Player. “I don’t know what it’s going to take because we’ve been in existence since 2000, and we’ve won two World Cups. I don’t know what it’s going to take, other than media attention. Hopefully, the word gets out.”

Word is getting out, though it’s trickling instead of bursting through the floodgates. Those in the loop know the goings-on, whereas the casual observer’s attention is captured somewhere else.

Jaymee Hannan falls in the former category. She knew about the International Friendship Series well in advance. She drove with her father from Louisville, Tenn., to Cary — roughly 370 miles — to partake in the clinic and watch the women’s team play.

The Pellegrini De Paur family — all six of them — piled into the family minivan and drove more than 500 miles from the Bronx, N.Y., so daughters Colette, 11, and Indigo, 9, could join the likes of Hannan at the clinic and also watch the national team in person.

Hannan, 14, has no plans to give up baseball as she arrives at the same fork in the road as Merims did. Baseball, not softball, is her game and her pursuit.

“When I was growing up, I played T-ball and I played with all the guys,” she said. “As I got older, I kept playing. I didn’t really like softball. I found it harder to throw the ball, and it didn’t really make any sense to me the way the rules worked because I grew up with the baseball rules. So I just kind of stuck with it.”

Hannan’s logic is music to the ears of every women’s baseball supporter.

But it was Hannan’s baseball jersey, with its white script letters set against a deep red polyester blend, that encapsulated everything about women’s baseball.

It said what she is, as are the other seven girls who attended the morning clinic, people like Glennie, the coaches, the two dozen members of Team USA and the players from Canada and Japan: Trailblazers.

Contact Tim Candon at 460-2606 or tcandon@nando.com.