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Told as a teenager to play softball, not baseball, Justine Siegal heard something else entirely: a call to become a trailblazer in the sport she loved.
Decades later, her efforts to make baseball accessible to women and girls has opened doors for young athletes nationwide — including Lincoln High School junior Lola Snopkowski.
Snopkowski, who plays catcher and pitcher for Lincoln — the only girl on the varsity squad, playing predominantly male high school lineups— has also played for the organization that Siegal founded 15 years ago, Baseball For All. The organization, which is working to build gender equity in the sport, has sent Snopkowski and her Bay Area teammates to annual national tournaments and to a world championship in the Philippines.
After building Baseball For All, Siegal co-founded the Women’s Professional Baseball League (WPBL) last October, which announced Tuesday that San Francisco will be one of four cities represented by a team in its inaugural season next year.
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The new baseball league is the first of its kind in the U.S. and has instantly provided athletes like Snopkowski something bigger to gun for. “It gives something more concrete in the future,” she said. “It was always a dream, but something we weren’t really expecting. Now there’s a concrete path to follow.”
The Bay Area is a hotbed for women’s professional sports, and a place where women have broken barriers in baseball.
In 2015, the Oakland A’s hired Siegal for a brief stint as an instructional league assistant, making her the first woman employed in a coaching capacity by an MLB team. In 2020, the San Francisco Giants named Alyssa Nakken a full-time assistant coach under former manager Gabe Kapler.
Last summer, the Oakland Ballers signed Kelsie Whitmore, who became the first woman to play in an MLB-partner league, the Pioneer League. Whitmore is among the most prominent players that will be eligible in the WPBL’s November draft.
The other three WPBL teams will represent New York, Boston, and Los Angeles for a seven-week season that begins in May. The four teams of 15 players will compete through four weeks of regular-season play, one All-Star weekend, and cap off the opening campaign with a two-week playoff.
The introduction of a women’s pro baseball team follows the successful launches of the Golden State Valkyries to the WNBA in San Francisco in 2025 and Bay FC to the NWSL in San Jose a year prior. The Bay Area’s willingness to embrace the franchises has helped shatter records — the Valkyries led the WNBA in total home attendance this season and Bay FC’s match at Oracle Park in August set the all-time high for attendance at any U.S. women’s professional sporting event in history.
Now, the WPBL is on deck — almost.
San Francisco will not host its team for the league’s debut season. Instead the four teams will play at one or two neutral-site venues to be announced at a later date.
The Bay Area won’t get the chance to fill a stadium for the WPBL in its first year, but the league made deliberate choices in selecting its cities, eager to establish lasting connections in regions with proven track records of uplifting both women’s sports and baseball.
In San Francisco, it’s a perfect combination.
“These cities aren’t just markets; they’re cultural powerhouses ready to set the tone for a league built to last,” the league said in a statement.
Nine years ago, when Snopkowski first joined the San Francisco Bay Sox, an all-girls youth baseball team, it was for the joy of the sport. Now she’s one of eight girls playing at the high school level in San Francisco (there are two at Lincoln, two at Lowell, and four at Lick Wilmerding). With the 2026 launch of the WPBL, Snopkowski has a reason to dream about a long-term future in the sport.
The best part? It’s happening where she lives, San Francisco.
“It brings the possibilities closer,” Snopkowski said. “There’s always been people playing, and you could see Team USA on Instagram, but for it to be so close and on a larger scale, it’s definitely more impactful.”
This story has been updated with the total number of girls playing baseball at the high school level in San Francisco: eight.