Women's baseball pioneer Justine Siegal: "It’s beautiful to see how the game has grown around the world"

Women's baseball pioneer Justine Siegal was a guest first base coach for the Sultanes de Monterrey of the Mexican Baseball League (LMB, a WBSC Associate Member). She also held clinics for Mujeres en el Diamante (Women on the Diamond).

"I have been the guest coach for six pro teams in Mexico to help elevate the conversation on women coaching baseball," Siegal said. "It's beautiful to see how the game has grown. When I first started in women's baseball, the countries with Nationals Teams were Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States. And now, women's baseball is worldwide, including in counties like Pakistan, China, France and Venezuela. I absolutely love the growth."

Born in 1975, at 13 Siegal was discouraged to play baseball, "a boy's sport."

"Baseball is a sport for everyone. We need to continue to put the work into ensuring girls from a young age have the opportunities to play as the boys do. Softball is strong, a fun sport, but it is different from baseball. And the more we accept those differences and celebrate what makes each game great, the more chances girls and women will have an opportunity to play a bat and ball sport. For me, baseball is my game, and I just want to ensure girls know it can be their game too."

Siegal started coaching at 16. In 2002, aged 27, she formed the Sparks, an all-girls baseball team. She became the first woman to coach a men's professional team when she joined the Brockton Rox of the independent American Association of Professional Baseball in 2009.

Siegal also became the first woman to pitch batting practice for a Major League Baseball (MLB) team, the Cleveland Indians, in 2011. She worked for the Oakland A'S and coached Israel at the World Baseball Classic Qualifier in 2016.

In 2013, Siegal, then the International Baseball Federation Women's Baseball Development Commission chair, said in an interview: "We need to market, both globally and nationally, that baseball for girls and women is a reality. We then need to ensure that there are opportunities to play." The WBSC asked her how well things developed in the last decade.

"The WBSC Women's Baseball Commission has done an excellent job providing more opportunities for women's National Teams. This is evident by how many countries now have women's teams. Building gender equity throughout the WBSC and its committees will only make everyone stronger. I think the next step is to build more opportunities for girls to play internationally which will help Federations build at the grassroots level while also supporting their National Teams."

In 1998 Siegal founded Baseball for All, an organization that works toward gender equity in youth baseball by strongly encouraging and providing opportunities for girls to participate in baseball.

"Every day, I think about how I can serve the girls' baseball community. I founded the nonprofit Baseball For All to help ensure girls have access to play, coach and lead. This summer, we will have 600 girls, ages 8-18, playing baseball at our US National Tournament from 12 to 16 July in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. There is still a lot of work to do, but I'm grateful for where we are and where we are going. Our strength is in our community. We can only grow by working together."

To help grow women's baseball on the international stage, the WBSC launched a new two-stage Women's Baseball World Cup format. The first stage of the ninth edition will involve 12 teams split into two groups: Thunder Bay, Canada, from 8 to 13 August and Miyoshi City, Japan, from 13 to 17 September.

"The new two-stage format is essential to the global growth of women's baseball, added Siegal. "The more opportunities for Federations to enter a team into the Baseball World Cup means more resources will be put into ensuring girls and women get to play too. The two-stage format was a genius move by the WBSC."