Gary Sementelli was bracing for a fight. His daughter Marti had been a baseball player before she was a kindergartner, tossing plastic balls and swinging a tiny wood bat from the time she was 3. She had been a solid player at every youth level, and sometimes a star. In 2007, Nike even featured her in a television commercial in which she wore a baseball cap backward and mused about playing for the Boston Red Sox.
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| From Girls Making it in High School Baseball |
The 5-foot-2 Sementelli pitched in the Women’s World Cup. “And I’m really dedicated to the game — nothing gets in my way,” she said.
Yet Sementelli was beginning to doubt whether he would find a high school that would allow Marti to go out for the boys baseball team. Two parochial schools near their home in North Hollywood, Calif., rejected the idea. At a couple of public schools, Sementelli said, he was told to investigate whether the rules permitted girls to play on the boys team, then get back in touch.
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| From Girls Making it in High School Baseball |
Finally, Sementelli located a school as happy to have his daughter as she is with her toe on the pitching rubber. At Burbank High School, Marti, a 16-year-old sophomore, is on the junior varsity squad…
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More about the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS)
For a list of State member organizations to the NFHS and their positions on girls playing Baseball in High School (As we hear back from each member organization we update with the response and any follow up correspondence. We are still contacting a number of the organizations to begin with – others, we have contacted, have not responded to our original inquiry or our message was caught by their Spam protection… We do follow up by phone when the message via email is not clear.)
Girls Play Baseball® 