Under 15 Girls

This year at Baseball SA we are dedicated to introducing new opportunities to increase the number of young girls playing Baseball. Baseball is a sport for all and we have seen significant growth in the area of our women’s baseball with over 250 women now playing the game in club land. We also saw huge success in the SA women’s state team this year bringing home the bronze medal at the National Championships in Canberra.

With our focus now solidly on the U15 age group, we aim to be able to send an U15 Youth Girls State Team away to the National Tournament next year, 2020. We had a group of dedicated young ladies attend multiple training blocks during the off season, led by coaches Kristen Webb, Jack Wade, Alice Prokopec and David Lightbody and overseen by HP manager Chris Adamson, with some of those athletes being invited to join the Women’s High Performance Squad.

We are now looking at constructing a new development squad for ALL U15 girls, this will give them additional skills training and mentoring and we hope to be able to start this squad’s training phase during Term 4, 2019.

Along with this strategy, we will be asking clubs to each find 3-4 U15 girls. From here we plan to form a Super “Girls” League, where we envisage grouping clubs into clusters, giving them a Super League name in line with our elite Super League teams, having some promotional fun with the teams and then offering the girls a one off carnival or shortened competition, details to follow. The girls will wear a special Super “Girls” League playing top and be presented with these tops from the Super League men’s players. This will be an exciting chapter for girls in baseball.

We are fortunate enough also to have a lot of interest in many schools at the moment who are keen to work with girls baseball programs, namely Seaton High School, Mitcham Girls School, Gawler and Districts College and potentially St Peters Girls School, through their relationship with Kensington Baseball Club. Plans for these school girls teams are to invite them down to West Beach to compete in a round robin one day event, again showcasing girls baseball and the opportunities that are available.

So watch this space, we are excited and ready to support, develop and grow this exciting age group in female baseball, we hope you are too!

Cheers

Sarah Kelly

General Manager