Photo Credit: IAmThatGirl.com
With football and basketball jumping on the ship to hire women as coaches, all eyes were on baseball and hockey to see who would be next. The Oakland Athletics answered that for everyone when they announced that they would be hiring Justine Siegal as a guest instructor from October 4th to October 17th. Her hiring would make her the first woman to ever coach in the majors.m With a sport already dominated with such commanding women like Kim Ng, Siegal’s hiring was inevitable at this point especially with the NFL finally making some progressive choices.
Besides being the first woman to coach professional baseball, Siegal is known for her involvement with young girls and sports. Siegal is the founder of her own organization, “Baseball For All” whose focus is on including everyone in baseball but mostly young girls. According to her biography on the website, Siegal has one mission, “Her life passion is to help girls follow their baseball dreams”.
Her focus on young girls is particularly important, because in society today where girls who play/like sports are either seen as a stereotype or are completely ignored by their male counterparts.
Siegal’s Ph.D. in Sports Psychology has granted her many opportunities outside of her hiring as an MLB coach such as being the first woman to throw during batting practice in the majors. She has thrown for the A’s, the Indians, the Rays, the Astros and the Mets. She has coached both professional and collegiate level men’s baseball, graduated from the MLB’s Scout Development Program and is the Chair for the Women’s Commission for the International Baseball Federation. While those accomplishments are important to Siegal, her biggest accomplishment is her daughter, Jasmine who is 17 years old.
Everything Siegal does is to show her daughter that women can truly do whatever they put their minds to and to chase her dreams. Whenever Siegal is asked about her daughter, she completely lights up, “My daughter thinks she can do anything and she’s ready to tell anybody that. She just has a belief that you can really do anything. That’s the whole point. My daughter actually doesn’t play baseball, and that’s fine with me.”
While many have been inspired by Siegal’s story, her real inspiration is being passed on to the one she cares about most and that’s something that is rarely covered by the media.
Her motivation is really what makes Siegal so important, though. Like Welter, she worked as hard as she could to get where she is. However, Siegal has hinted that she would like to become more involved in baseball and would like to continue to make her way up even higher. Her organization is really her true passion though and with determination, the first female MLB player could come out of Baseball For all and it would be all thanks to Justine Siegal.
