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Former Brockton Rox coach Justine Siegal helps to maintain the dream alive for women by founding the Ladies’s Professional Baseball League
Like many ladies, Justine Siegal grew up taking part in baseball. And like many ladies, when she was round 13, she was instructed it was time to change to softball.
“I actually determined then,” she stated, “I might play endlessly.”
Siegal — who grew to become the primary feminine coach of an expert baseball workforce when she led the Brockton Rox in 2009 — helps to maintain the dream alive for women by founding the Ladies’s Professional Baseball League, which is ready to start play in 2026.
Boston is one among 4 cities to be awarded an inaugural franchise, with New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The league is the primary based for ladies in North America because the All-American Ladies Skilled Baseball League (of “A League of Her Personal” fame) folded in 1954.
Whereas particulars about teaching staffs, branding, and schedule are nonetheless being sorted, the league says it intends to play at one or two neutral-site venues for its first season. The intention is parks with about 5,000 seats — “smaller parks that may replenish,” Siegal stated. The rosters will every function 15 gamers. They’ll be paid from a pool of $95,000 per workforce for the seven-week season, divvied up per recreation and based mostly on expertise. Some league sponsorship income additionally shall be earmarked for gamers.
“One among my favourite issues is with the ability to make folks’s desires come true, as corny because it sounds,” Siegal stated. “As a result of I’m somebody who pursued their dream for therefore lengthy and it was at all times such a tough path, it’s at all times like, oh wait, I can get you in right here.”
Forging her path
Siegal has usually been a primary. The Cleveland native was the primary lady to throw MLB batting observe, for her hometown Indians in 2011. She was the primary feminine coach employed by an MLB workforce when the Athletics employed her for a brief stint of their educational league in 2015.
“The extra folks tried to take the sport away from me, the extra I held on, and the extra I cherished it,” she stated.
Siegal made the choice at 16 to turn out to be a coach — regardless of her coach on the time saying “no man would hearken to a girl on a baseball area.”
She pursued a PhD at Springfield School, the place she was an assistant with the baseball workforce from 2008-10.
In 2010, she based Baseball For All, a nonprofit centered on opening up alternatives for women to play. The nonprofit is now affiliated with groups throughout the US, together with the Pawtucket Slaterettes in Rhode Island and the Boston Slammers, based mostly in Dorchester (however with plans to increase into New Hampshire).
Siegal has practically single-handedly created the pipeline that may feed into the WPBL’s inaugural rosters.
In August, greater than 600 aspiring gamers turned out for a four-day tryout run by national-team standout Alex Hugo and hosted alongside the Nationals in Washington, D.C. They included 24-year-old Mo’ne Davis, the teenage phenom from Philadelphia who starred within the 2014 Little League World Sequence, and Ayami Sato, a 35-year-old pitcher from Japan extensively thought of to be the most effective feminine participant on the earth.
From the tryouts and different avenues emerged 130 gamers eligible for this November’s draft. A few of them, like Ashton Lansdell, performed softball in school. Lansdell grew up taking part in baseball, then helped Ole Miss to its first Ladies’s School World Sequence look this previous spring. She’s spent two summers taking part in for the barnstorming Savannah Bananas.
However the expectation is many gamers will are available in with a baseball background — one solid primarily by taking part in in opposition to males.
“There’s virtually like a survival fee, proper?” Siegal stated. “What number of are beginning at age eight, and what number of are making it by way of the highschool ranks? So, in case you’re making it by way of highschool, and even in case you’re making it by way of school, you’re at a talent degree that’s spectacular.”
Based on the Nationwide Federation of State Excessive Faculty Associations, no states sponsor highschool ladies’ baseball, however 1,381 ladies competed on groups in 2024-25. The NCAA doesn’t provide girls’s baseball, however there are a handful of membership groups across the nation.
The US has a nationwide workforce run by way of USA Baseball. It competes within the Ladies’s World Cup, profitable the primary two titles in 2004 and 2006. It completed second in 2024 behind Japan, which has gained seven straight titles.
On the nationwide workforce is Kelsie Whitmore, one other Bananas participant who performed school softball earlier than working by way of the skilled ranks within the Atlantic, West Coast, and Pioneer Leagues.
“Us girls in baseball have been doing it on our personal for therefore lengthy,” Whitmore told USA Today in August. “… And now, with the ability to produce other folks see the imaginative and prescient we do — that’s the place every part’s going to blossom, the place alternatives are going to develop.”
Betting on the long run
Siegal jumped on the alternative to type the WPBL after being approached in 2024 by Keith Stein, a lawyer in Canada and the proprietor of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a semi-pro baseball workforce.
“He was like, wait, the place’s girls’s professional baseball?” Siegal defined. “And he stated, properly, we obtained to make that occur.”
In April the league added a chair: Assia Grazioli-Venier, the founding father of enterprise agency Muse Capital.
Grazioli-Venier is main the cost for funding within the WPBL. It’s acquainted floor for her. She was the youngest board member of Juventus, the Serie A soccer membership, and helped launch its girls’s workforce in 2017. She additionally helped lead Muse’s funding into the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, the place she assisted Michele Kang to turn out to be majority proprietor in 2022. Kang has since invested tens of tens of millions of {dollars} into the US ladies’ soccer pipeline.
“On one hand, that is an rising sport in that it doesn’t exist,” she stated. “Alternatively, it’s America’s nationwide pastime. There’s nothing rising about it.”
Grazioli-Venier known as it the “good alternative commercially — but in addition for the way forward for girls.”
The founding of the WPBL comes as girls’s sports activities continues its ascent. Deloitte initiatives income internationally round girls’s sports activities will eclipse $2.3 billion in 2025. Whereas the founders intently watch leagues forming and rising across the nation, they imagine their product is what units them aside — 40 p.c of MLB followers are girls, Siegal says, they usually’re already accustomed to the principles of the game.
That’s why Boston is among the many first 4 cities to get a workforce.
“Once you consider the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Pink Sox, you may’t get something higher from a males’s perspective,” Grazioli-Venier stated. “So we have to exit with a bang, and we should always give these groups a girls’s counterpart. These are all nice cities with big baseball historical past.”
From there, Grazioli says, “there isn’t any ceiling.
“Similar to the NWSL and ladies’s basketball haven’t any ceiling. I imply, the truth that girls’s professional baseball has not existed and doesn’t exist is wild to me. I feel it’s going to, on the very least, catch as much as the NWSL. I actually, really imagine that.”
