Advocates trying to grow women's baseball in Czech Republic

The Czech Republic is one of the three European countries to have participated in the first European Women's Baseball Championship, which took place in the summer of 2019.

The European championship marked the debut of the Czech Women's National Baseball Team, which is currently 20th in the WBSC Women's Baseball World Rankings.

The 2019 Czech National Team was made of converted women's softball players. In the Czech Republic, girls tend to play youth baseball on mixed teams until the U-13 category, before playing softball full-time.

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Adela Koubova, who started playing baseball in 2015 as a student in the UK, told the website Milujeme-baseball.cz that she was advised to switch to softball upon returning to the Czech Republic. In the summer of 2019, she competed for the London Mets baseball club.

"We were only two women on the roster," she commented. "It didn't matter."

Koubova is now an advocate of women's baseball development in the Czech Republic. Together with Pavla Miksova, who was on the 2019 Czech Women's National Baseball Team roster, Koubova has scheduled meetings with Petr Ditrich, the president of the Czech Baseball Association (CBA), to find common ground about giving women more opportunities to play baseball.

The next European Women's Baseball Championship is scheduled for 2022, and the Czech Republic has already named Richard Kania as national team manager.