Next month, millions of kids will retrieve their baseball and softball gloves from the bottoms of drawers or from under their beds. After a trip to the store to get some new cleats (after all, their feet have grown since last summer!), they will take the field for another Little League season. This is a Spring rite for kids, shallowly rooted in recent history, but often deeply rooted in family dynamics. Founded 1938 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Little League Baseball expanded rapidly throughout the United States and Canada. By the mid-1950s, Little League Baseball was fully established as a major institution with 4000 leagues in the United States, and further growth into Mexico and other nations.
Prospective women coaches face barriers — mostly informal and unspoken — that divert them away from coaching. Most of the few women who do coach leave after a year or two, after finding the league to be dominated informally by a less-than-supportive “old boys’ network” of coaches. This as a problem that needs to be fixed.
