For the first time in over 70 years, women baseball players have the opportunity to compete in their sport professionally.
The new Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL), which will launch its inaugural season in May 2026, hosted over 600 women for tryouts in August. The league is the first to allow women to play professional baseball since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) that was created during World War II and ran until 1954.
Grass Lake junior and softball player Alaina Brown said the return of women’s professional baseball for the first time since the AAGPBL – which inspired the sports drama film “A League of Their Own” (1992) – is “pretty cool.”
“I watched ‘A League of Their Own’ growing up, and (the WPBL) reminds me of that,” Brown said.
Holland, Ohio, junior and fellow softball player Kiersten Wilkin said the WPBL is going to be “really awesome” for women’s sports. Wilkin played baseball with boys growing up, but was told she had to “switch over” to softball when she got older.
“I had to stop because the guys got so big that they told me, ‘you can’t play baseball with them anymore,’” Wilkin said.
Wilkin added that the adjustment from baseball to softball was “difficult.” Brown, who has only ever played softball, said the sport is “very different” from baseball.
“The pitching is a completely different style,” Brown said. “The pace of the game and the batter’s swing are a lot different, too.”
For Wilkin, the WPBL stands to expand the horizons of women’s sports as a whole.
“It kind of says, ‘yeah, girls can do it too,’” Wilkin said.
Creating Opportunities for Women in Baseball
According to Baseball For All, over 100,000 girls play youth baseball in America – but only around 1,400 of them continue to play in high school. Many girls, like Wilkin, stop playing due to a lack of opportunities to compete in high school and college.
Wilkin said the WPBL could lead to the formation of other baseball leagues for younger girls and women, as well as more recognition for women’s baseball. The formation of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) had this effect, causing “views in college softball to go up,” according to Wilkin.
“I’m hoping that everybody will start advocating for women’s baseball in a similar way,” Wilkin said.
Brown said it’s not likely the WPBL will lead to the creation of high school girls’ baseball teams “because of the way high school sports are divided,” but that the league could lead to “older club opportunities.”
“I feel like club women’s baseball could become a bigger thing like club softball is,” Brown said.
Wilkin said the potential increase in women’s baseball leagues as a result of the WPBL will happen “slowly” and that “it’s going to take a
while” for women to make the switch over to baseball.
Building ‘A Strong Community’
For young girls in baseball, playing on boys’ teams may be their only option. Chances to play with other girls do not increase as they get older – in fact, they become rarer due to lower numbers.
Brown said she “feels more comfortable” on a team with women than she would have if she played with men, and that women baseball players “would probably appreciate having their own space.”
The return of women’s professional baseball presents an opportunity for women baseball players to have that space. There will be approximately 15 women on each team and six teams total, according to the WPBL website.
Wilkin said being a girl affected the way her teammates and opponents treated her when she played baseball.
“I was always referred to as ‘the girl,’” Wilkin said. “People would say, ‘oh, the girl’s playing today,’ or ‘if you hit the girl, you’re mean.’”
Wilkin added she would have had a better experience connecting with her teammates if she had been playing with other girls.
“If I could’ve played the sport I loved – because I loved baseball – with people who looked like me, it probably would have built a strong community of us,” Wilkin said. “We would’ve been a community of powerful women.”
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