Courtesy of Baseball For All
When Justine Siegal was 13, a coach told her she couldn't play baseball anymore, even though she was one of the best players in the league. To the coach, all that mattered was that she was a girl. "I don't want you on my team,” he told Siegal. “Girls should play softball."
Instead of giving up, Siegal stuck with her favorite sport, going on to become the first woman to coach professional men's baseball (in 2009, with the Brockton Rox), the first woman to throw batting practice to an MLB team (in 2011, with Cleveland) and the first woman to coach for a Major League Baseball organization (in 2015, with the Oakland Athletics instructional league in Arizona).