Meet the women’s college baseball coach vying for back-to-back championship wins
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Two years ago, Maggie Gallagher wasn’t really interested in coaching baseball.
She figured she would stop playing and walk away from the sport entirely. But then she realized she wanted the challenge of trying to teach people the things that she was able to do as a player.
“I wanted to push myself,” she said.
Gallagher is now the general manager and head coach of the University of Washington’s women’s club baseball team. She also coaches boys’ high school varsity baseball at her alma mater, Kennedy Catholic High School in Burien, Wash.
Gallagher, who is 24, started out as a baseball player, eventually switching to softball in the eighth grade — a common move for girls who run out of opportunities to play baseball as they get older — and was named Washington state’s Gatorade Player of the Year for softball in 2016, her senior year. She played Division I softball at University of Washington for two seasons before she quit to focus on her studies.
With no softball in her life, she found herself with a lot of free time and decided to try out for the men’s club baseball team. She made the team and became player-manager in her senior year.
Her involvement with that team led two students, Katie Firestone and Amber Kelly, who were trying to get a women’s club team off the ground, to contact her about coaching them, an offer Gallagher accepted. This is the second year the team has existed, and Gallagher’s second year at the helm.
Gallagher and the University of Washington are looking to defend their title this weekend as the second Women’s College Club Baseball Championships gets underway. The tournament is run by Baseball For All, a nonprofit that provides opportunities for girls to play and coach baseball.
This year’s tournament will feature three teams playing a three-game series at the Los Angeles Dodgers Training Academy in Redondo Beach, Calif., starting Friday. (A fourth team had to drop out due to player injuries.)
Justine Siegal, founder of Baseball For All, said the goal is for next year’s edition of the tournament to feature eight teams. Ultimately, they want women’s club baseball to become an NCAA emerging sport, which would give the teams access to more resources.
The women’s club teams are student-led initiatives, Siegal said, and Baseball For All sees partnering with those students as a learning opportunity as well as an athletic one.
“We’re really mentoring the (team) presidents on how to create a budget, how to find players, how to get the paperwork in, create bylaws, and so it’s a lot of skill-building,” she said.
The last women’s intercollegiate baseball games took place over 100 years ago; women played on college campuses in the U.S. in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Creating opportunities for women to play at the college level today is going to take work, Siegal said, but she believes it will happen.
“We are in the pioneering stages. These student-athletes are pioneers on their campuses and in the movement of women playing baseball,” she said.
Gallagher said there’s a wide range of experience on her team — people who played baseball growing up, people who haven’t played since T-ball and people who played softball in high school.
They have mainly been scrimmaging against each other in preparation for the tournament; usually indoors, she said, due to the weather in Seattle. They lost a number of seniors from last year and are heading to California with about 10 players, but she said she is confident in their chances to repeat.
Gallagher isn’t that much older than her players but she says it’s no matter — she loves coaching people who are basically her age.
“I can relate to them, especially coming out of college and being where they were … and just trying to figure out my route out after college,” she said.
What she most wants to pass on to her players, she said, is the value of leadership and how important it is to lead by example, especially since she didn’t have many women in baseball she could look up to while growing up.
“It’s great to know that even like me, as a role model, and some other female (players) too, being able to be a role model for the younger girls has helped a lot. Just seeing that, hey you can actually do something and strive for it if you believe in it, and seeing other females do that, I mean, it pushes you.”
Gallagher played and managed a team in the highest division of the Puget Sound Senior Baseball League, a Seattle-based amateur league, for three years. Through a former teammate, she was referred to coach at an MLB Grit event in Seattle, a one-day workout showcase for girls 18 and under, where she saw first-hand how the sport is growing among girls and young women.
She said she is hoping that in the near future, it won’t come as such a shock to most people that girls play baseball, and that the number of teams at the collegiate level increases at a steady pace.
As someone who enjoys seeing girls and women develop as players and relishes opportunities to be around like-minded people, she’ll be one of the driving forces behind bringing that goal to fruition.
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