After Atalanta

So there's an interesting column out of San Diego whose local Little League teams are in their playoff season trying to qualify for the LL World Series in Williamsport later this summer. It comments on a situation in which a team manager appealed to the game umps after it appeared that the opposing team's base runner missed home plate thus giving the appealing team the win. The manager who appealed is a woman. Mostly the story is about how apparently cutthroat Little League has become though the writer kind of shrugs that off and says "c'est la vie"--metaphorically--not literally. He then turns it into a triumph of Title IX story that a woman is a Little League manager and that she was so bold and so confident in her competitive ways (honed in her days as an intercollegiate athlete in softball and tennis). So she's not some softy woman apparently. Loretta Barlow is tough and not interested in the feelings of the other team, the writer says and then, in what I ...

Outsports has a nice piece on Jenny Fulle , the first girl who was officially allowed to play Little League Baseball in 1974. It recounts the history of her case against LLB and the many obstacles she encountered on a local and national level. When I was doing research last year on how Ms . magazine covered women's sports, I came across Fulle's story more than once. This, along with the help she received from the her local chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW), is a good example of how mainstream or liberal feminism did see the importance of, and worked for, girls' access to sport and other physical activities--something that is not often discussed or even considered in historical accounts of this period. And what's Fulle been up since fighting her way onto the diamond? Fighting her way to the top in another male-dominated business--movie production. She's an executive VP and executive producer for Sony Pictures Imageworks. And she's coaching her s...

I caught some of the semifinal game in the Little League Softball World Series last night. First my obligatory women's sports gets less coverage than men's sports comment: while the Little League Baseball World Series has been on the ESPN networks fairly frequently with coverage around the country of the regional games, I have only seen the softball once and it was after the teams had arrived in Portland, Oregon--no regional game coverage. As part of the coverage each member of the team introduces herself. Last night Tennessee played Connecticut and the Tennessee players all gave their names and positions and the name of their favorite player. It was refreshing to hear them all give the names of softball players like Monica Abbott and India Chiles and Caitlin Lowe. When the Connecticut team did the same they gave names like Derek Jeter and A-Rod. But the questions were not the same: The TN team was asked who their favorite player was where the CT team was asked who their favori...