There isn’t a WBPL team in Philly, but the league provides a path for area girls’ baseball players
The WPBL's inaugural season ended with the Los Angeles Queens, featuring Philly's Mo'ne Davis, on top. Along the way, girls in and around Philly were watching and learning from the pros.
Growing up, Sabrina Robinson wanted to play Major League Baseball.
Robinson, a northern New Jersey native who started playing baseball at age 5, followed in her older brother‘s footsteps and played on the same team as him. Her father’s philosophy was that if her brother didn’t have to eventually switch to softball to see a future in the sport, she shouldn’t, either.
“He never did see a difference between us, and I just like baseball better,” Robinson said.
But despite not wanting to switch to softball, there was no clear path forward for Robinson in baseball.
That was, until this year.
Robinson now plays for the Boston Hunters, one of the four teams in the Women’s Pro Baseball League. The WPBL’s inaugural season, which began Aug. 1, ran until Sept. 22, when the Los Angeles Queens beat the San Francisco Firebells, 2-0, to win the league’s first championship. Little League World Series legend and Philly native Mo’ne Davis was on the winning team.
» READ MORE: Mo’ne Davis made opening day history for the Women’s Pro Baseball League, and a crowd back home watched her in action
And just as the WPBL provided a path in the sport for Robinson, it also provided a previously unthinkable future for girls like the ones Robinson coaches at Philly Girls Baseball in her spare time.
“These girls have a whole new path, and people literally can’t tell them that women can’t play baseball because there’s really a whole professional league now,” Robinson said. “Just pull up ESPN if you want to tell them they’re wrong.”
Philly Girls Baseball is a nonprofit that began in 2019 and now draws girls from as young as 8 years old from Philadelphia and the surrounding areas to play baseball on all-girls teams.
Erin Nunes Cooper, the founder of Philly Girls Baseball and a coach, said the WPBL has caused an uptick in interest, which she expects to have a “trickle effect” as the league grows. But the main difference, she said, is in how the girls see a future in the sport.
Joey Eckstein, another Philly Girls Baseball coach, said that the presence of the league even changes the discussions she can have with parents.
In the past, parents expressed concerns about wanting their daughters to focus on soccer, basketball, or other sports that could provide a direct path for their children in college and beyond. Now, Eckstein said, she can remind them that the WPBL is an option, especially as the league continues to create new opportunities as the girls grow up.
“The league is growing, and if they’re 12U right now, who knows what it’s going to look like in like eight to 10 years when they’re graduating from college,” Eckstein said. “The opportunities are there, and they’re only growing.”
Having someone like Robinson as a living example and coach for the girls only adds to that. In July, Philly Girls Baseball took five teams of girls to the Baseball For All national tournament in Rockford, Ill., where the WPBL is based. Cooper rotated the coaches to make sure each team had a game learning under Robinson.
“Every single one of our girls had the opportunity to learn from a WPBL coach and have this relationship with her,” Cooper said. “So now, when they go to the games, and we have had several players make the trip out there to watch in person, they literally know players on the field, which is so awesome. They make them signs, they sign autographs, and then I think there’s another really special thing that WPBL is doing, which is that the players and the coaches are all there to welcome girls as spectators, and they’re so gracious with their time and what they’re doing to talk to the girls about baseball is just really special.”
That’s what Robinson tries to continue while coaching these girls as well.
Though Robinson admits it might not be the best thing to admit as a coach, when she’s working with these groups of young girls, she said she’s “not super focused on the baseball.” There’s not much she can change in a weekend, she said. She’s focused, rather, on the mindset she can help them develop.
“Especially with girls, I see them getting in their heads a lot, and I know exactly how that feels,” Robinson said. “I could see a bunch of the girls doing stuff that I would do, and I had to talk myself out of. So it’s nice to be able to understand them fully and be able to help them.”
But the biggest thing, Robinson said, is just giving them something to believe in, which was difficult in the past when there were no professional women’s baseball players for them to look up to.
Robinson herself said when she was growing up, she had WNBA players or golfers to look up to as far as female athletes. Now, Robinson gets to be the role model she never had in her sport.
“I feel like the girls actually can believe it and see it now when we tell them, you can keep going in the sport,” Robinson said.
