Women competing against men, or alongside them. The last frontier is that of baseball, the king of US sports: a woman will play in Boston with the meni. E’ Marika Lyszczyk, Canadian catcher who from next summer will take the field with the jacket of Brockton Rox, a team from Massachusetts that participates in the Futures League. For now it’s just an eight-man tournament for the summer, but it’s also the gateway to new goals in women’s sport.
And now it happens more and more often to see women on sporting occasions that were previously exclusively male. The general public, the one that follows football first and foremost, noticed this at the recent World Cup in Qatar, when Stephanie Frappart of France refereed the match between Germany and Costa Ricaafter making his debut in the Champions League two years ago directing Juventus-Dinamo Kiev.
In Italy there was Maria Sole Ferrieri Caputi who made her debut in Serie A and promises to be the first of many to come while Carolina Morace was at the time, in the summer of 1999, the first woman to coach a men’s team, the Viterbese in Serie C which had Fabio Liverani as ‘director’. But Morace’s adventure, due to disagreements with the volcanic president Luciano Gaucci who wanted to train, lasted just a couple of games. Gaucci would also have liked to have a woman play in the men’s Serie A (“there is no rule that forbids it”, he said), and therefore in his Perugia, and in 2003 it seemed made for the signing of the Germany star Birgit Prinz, deadly ‘gunboat’ to which the patron offered an annual contract of 100 thousand euros per month. But the German eventually gave up fearing she wouldn’t find space among the owners.
But the real pioneer of all this was a Chinese clay pigeon shooting champion. Fu lei, Shan Zhang, to beat his fellow men in the Skeet competition of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and then to conquer the gold, ahead of the Peruvian Giha, silver, and the blue Rossetti, bronze. Not everyone took it well, and perhaps not by chance that was the last time at the Games in which men and women faced each other in clay pigeon shooting without distinction of sex. Now, however, there is the mixed pairs competition desired by the IOC, in the name of gender equity, in which in Tokyo 2020 San Marino won a historic silver with Alessandra Perilli and Gian Marco Berti, ex boyfriends with her better than him at crush the plates.
And America could not be missing. Rebecca Lynn Hammon, a former American naturalized Russian basketball player, on December 30, 2020 became the first woman to hold the role of ‘head coach’ in an NBA game, following the ejection of Greg Popovich during the match against the Los Angeles Lakers. Popovich’s assistant Hammon also coached Spurs himself in the summer league. Instead Nancy Lieberman, known as ‘Lady Magic’, was the first woman in basketball history to play in a men’s professional league, albeit a minor one, the Usbl, making her debut with Springfield who won 122-107 against Staten Island.
Now it’s baseball’s turn, because the Futures League welcomes Marika Lyszczyk, a Canadian catcher who leaves softball and takes up baseball to play with the men she will challenge from next summer, the first girl in the league to do so, wearing the Brockton Rox jacket. She is sure that she too will assert herself on the diamond of the ‘Campanelli Stadium’, meanwhile she succeeds in the NCAA championship, that of universities, playing with the boys of Sonoma State, a California university. Of her, the first woman ever to take part in an NCAA baseball match, they write that she is making history and that “she is incredibly talented”, and someone goes so far as to say that she can “climb Olympus”, receiving a call from the Boston Red Sox: it would be the best. Fantasy baseball? It is not certain, and she is not afraid of the challenge, also stimulated by the fact that some MLB franchise scouts are following her. “I prefer to play with boys-she explained-because for me softball was, in fact, too ‘soft’. And then the idea of changing didn’t scare me, even if there were people who advised me not to do it” . Now all she has to do is continue, because women and sports and women in men’s teams are things that are working “and I’m like all the guys who play with or against me”.
