For the first time in decades, female baseball players will get a league of their own.

Julie Croteau dreamed of playing professional baseball. Her dream came true. But for her whole career, she shared the field with men.

Normally, high school girls may join softball teams. Baseball teams? Those are for the boys. 

 But some girls make it into baseball. During the last school year, about 1,300 American high school girls played on boys’ baseball teams. If they wanted to play baseball, there was no other choice. And they had to work for it.

“When I see that number, I think that there’s 1,300 people who had to sort of basically buck the system to keep playing the sport that they love,” says Ms. Croteau. “They’ve had to stare down an athletic director or approach a baseball coach, and they’ve had to make it happen.”

The same goes for college sports. The National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn’t offer women’s baseball. But in 2024, nine women played on men’s baseball teams.

A coach told Justine Siegal to play softball instead of baseball. That was back when she was 13. But in 2015, Ms. Siegal became the first woman to coach a Major League Baseball team—the Oakland Athletics. 

Now she’s co-founding the Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL). The league plans to launch in 2026. It will be the first professional women’s baseball league since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. (That group no longer exists. It dissolved in 1954.) Ms. Siegal wants to open the league to women in a very broad way—including even busy moms.

Will people watch the women’s league play? And will players want to join? It looks like it. More than 400 athletes wanted to try out right away. These athletes include some of the best female players from around the world. 

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. — Colossians 3:23