Women’s Club Baseball Stepping Up to The Plate at Cal Poly
The 2010 World Series game flickers across every TV in the Bay Area. Despite not being baseball fans, Arwen McCullough and her family tune in as well. The San Francisco Giants take on the Texas Rangers, fighting for the spot as champions. The young McCullough sits in front of the screen, mesmerized by the fluidity and rhythm of the game. Her parents watch her carefully, shocked by the stillness of their ADHD daughter. Despite never watching baseball before, when the game ended with the Giants as champions, and all of the Bay Area shook in excitement, McCullough turned to her mom and said “I wanna play that."
McCullough went on to play baseball up until high school, where she then dabbled in softball. But baseball was her true love, leading her to create the first-ever women's club baseball team at Cal Poly.
Facing challenges in her youth as a woman playing a male-dominated sport, she wanted to create a space for women to play the game comfortably, saying, “I'm doing this for my younger self.”
Women's baseball is a growing sport gaining traction around the world. Some may be familiar with the movie ‘A League of Their Own,’ a true story about the first-ever women's professional baseball league in the U.S. Taking after the pioneers of women's baseball that inspired the movie, McCullough and her team are building something for themselves so that the future of women's baseball may be carried on.
The team is made up of girls with a variety of different stories and backgrounds but the same desire for a space to play baseball where they do not feel like an outcast. Established in 2022 and the first real season at the beginning of 2024, the team is still developing but has made great progress.
.jpg)
Like McCullough, a few of the young women on the team grew up playing baseball.
Kendra Wise, a sophomore at Cal Poly, shares her story. Taking after her older brother, at a young age, Wise fell in love with baseball. But growing up, often being the only girl on the team, posed its challenges. “It built a lot of character and kind of forced me to be with all the guys, which was fine because I have two older brothers, but it was difficult at times, especially when we got into high school, and hormones started raging.”
Wise played baseball throughout her childhood and through high school. She loved the game for what it was and when asked why she didn't play softball, she simply would say “It's a completely different game.”
Throwing the ball, especially pitching, is wildly different between baseball and softball, as well as some of the rules and flow of the game, making each sport unique to itself. For example, home plate to the pitcher's mound is 60 feet in baseball and in softball, it's 43. Generally speaking in softball, the outfield fence reaches around 200 feet whereas in baseball it's over 300.
At practices, the girls work on ground balls, pitching, and hitting. During a bullpen, McCullough helped one of the freshman pitchers with her form. Growing as a sport means that each second of practice is important because it's an opportunity for a girl to learn, and every opportunity for a girl to learn the game is an advancement in the sport.
Being one of six colleges with a women's club baseball team, Cal Poly is making strides in creating an atmosphere for women to play and be celebrated in the sport.
Going into its 2nd season, McCullough reflected on the time spent building the club as a freshman and shared her challenges. Being a sports management major gave her a leg up in the process, but the ins and outs of creating a club were something still foreign to her.
From the financials, scheduling fields, uniforms, dues, and so on, McCullough shares that this has been a “growing experience”.
But her hard work paid off. In partnership with Baseball for All, the team had to opportunity to meet Maybelle Blair, one of the original members of the first women's baseball league featured in “A League of Their Own.”
Training twice a week, the team made it to the National Championship at the Los Angeles Dodgers Training Academy in Compton, where they placed second against Western Washington University in their first season.
Liliana Gean, a junior on the team and L.A. native, enjoyed the opportunity to play at her home team's training academy. She got time in the cage and worked with some of the coaches, but her greatest excitement was meeting the members of the other college teams.
“It was cool to meet all the other teams and kinda see that there is a community of girls learning to play baseball and competing”
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment