It’s a big year for San Francisco women’s baseball. The city is one of four with a team in the brand-new Women’s Pro Baseball League, the first for women since the 1940s except for a short-lived attempt 30 years ago.
When the WPBL debuts in August and the SF team takes the field, it will also be a proud moment for the San Francisco Bay Sox, with one of their alumni on the roster.
Run by SF’s Recreation and Park Department, the Bay Sox are the largest all-girls baseball program in the country. Founded in 2014, Bay Sox teams have won four girls national championships at various age levels. And now 10 of their alumni are playing on Bay Area high school teams.
Lola Snopkowski is one of them. Last week, she pitched, played the outfield, and knocked out three hits to help the defending city champion Lincoln Mustangs cruise to an 18-1 victory over the Burton Pumas at West Sunset Field. Snopkowski is the only girl on Lincoln’s varsity team. “She’s exactly what you look for in a baseball player,” says head coach James Burke.
Snopkowski’s been playing baseball since kindergarten, according to her mother Karyn Sanchez. Most girls like her are routed into fast-pitch softball, but Lola followed her big brother into baseball instead.
The games are longer, the infields larger, and the pitcher, using a different motion, doesn’t have to wear a face mask. “She was so small when she started playing,” says Sanchez. “The baseball actually just fit better in her hand. And honestly, it was hard to find softball when she was that young, and we just stayed with baseball.”
Snopkowski has played for years in youth leagues, mostly against boys. But not in 2023 and 2024, when Bay Sox players traveled to Kentucky to compete in the national girls championship tournament. The 14-and-under team won the “minors” division in 2023, and the 16-and-under team won in 2024. The Bay Sox 14-and-under team won again in 2025 in Nevada.
Those victories were thousands of miles and many years away from a neighborhood park in South San Francisco, where one might say the Bay Sox began.
Pioneer spirit
Rachelle Henley spent her childhood in the 1970s hanging around Little League practices at South San Francisco’s Buri Buri Park, hoping for the chance to shag fly balls and field grounders.
“Every day I would go across the street with my glove in my hand and wait at the fence,” says Henley. “Baseball was my first love.” By the time she was nine years old, she had earned a spot on one of the local teams.
That was the start of a lifelong devotion. As an adult, Henley was one of thousands of women who tried out for the Colorado Silver Bullets, a professional women’s traveling team, and made the inaugural 24-player roster. She also played in the short-lived Ladies Professional Baseball League in the 1990s and several years in the California Women’s Baseball League.
Coach Rocky, as Henley is known, has since hung up her spikes. In 2014, she co-founded the Bay Sox with funds from SF’s Recreation and Park Department.
Back then, the Bay Sox had just one team with 12 players, barely enough for a lineup and a few bench roles. Today, they field eight teams arranged by age plus drop-in beginner classes, with more than 150 girls playing year-round.
It’s a game of mistakes and failures. You’re going to fail more times than you succeed. If you’re the only girl in a space like that, your mistakes feel heavier.
bay sox program manager annie jupiter-jones
“It’s not only a baseball program,” says Henley. “It’s about being confident on the field.”
Annie Jupiter-Jones, who manages the program, says it offers girls the chance to try baseball without the pressure of being the only female on a boys team. “It’s a game of mistakes and failures. You’re going to fail more times than you succeed,” she said. “If you’re the only girl in a space like that, your mistakes feel heavier, because you feel like you’re letting down your entire gender.”
Jupiter-Jones’s daughter Rio Alcantar, now on Lick Wilmerding High School’s varsity team, says playing with the Bay Sox was her first chance to have only girls as teammates.
The community they build “doesn’t stop on the field,” says Bay Sox alum Simone Velger-Aurelio, who played on the 2024 14-and-under U.S. championship team.
She was the first girl to pitch for Lowell High School’s junior varsity and now plays on the varsity squad: “It’s been really fun to be able to play against people who I’ve always seen as teammates.”
While Snopkowski and Lincoln were cruising to victory Wednesday, Velger-Aurelio played outfield, walked, and scored a run in Lowell’s 24-1 romp over Galileo.
Lincoln and Lowell will square off on April 29, a rematch of last year’s city championship.
“Some of the girls are definitely pioneers in their high schools,” says Lotta Velger, Simone’s mom. “What an incredible experience to see a girl thrive in a man-dominated sport.”
Baseball around the world
“I started this,” says Henley. “But Phil Ginsburg put the Bay Sox on the map.”
Ginsburg ran Rec and Park for nearly two decades until retiring last year. Henley, a recreation supervisor for the department, asked him for funds and staff time to create a girls team that would compete locally and travel to tournaments.
“There was only one answer, and that was yes,” Ginsburg tells The Frisc. “It has never really made sense to me why, unlike basketball or soccer, baseball has become such a gender-defined or gender-rigid sport. Youth sports are for everyone.”
Henley’s idea for the Bay Sox came from Baseball for All, the nonprofit behind the national tournaments.
In 2022, Baseball For All went international, sending U.S. girls teams to tournaments around the world. In 2024, the Bay Sox went to Manila to play teams from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan. “There’s girls from all parts of the world that are interested in the same sport,” says Lowell’s Velger-Aurelio, who went on that trip. “It was incredible to hang out with them.”
Rio, Jupiter-Jones’ daughter, is most excited about inspiring the next generation: “I want little girls to look up to us playing in high school and know that they can do it.”
That seems likely. The demand for spots on the Bay Sox roster is growing every year, says Henley; they just had to create another 10-and-under team. At first, the Bay Sox accepted girls from all over the Bay Area. Kaija Bazzano, who will play for the SF Women’s Pro League team this year, is originally from Sebastopol in Sonoma County. But with increased demand, the program has recently had to limit rosters to girls from San Francisco.
Women’s pro sports are hitting new highs with record crowds at soccer matches and a hard-fought labor agreement for WNBA players. “Maybe more parents are seeing more women in pro sports and saying, ‘You know, it’s okay for my daughter to play baseball if she wants to do this,’” says Henley.
For now, it’s satisfying enough to see Lola Snopkowski, with a long brown braid down the back of her black uniform, go 3-for-4 at the plate and strike out two batters in a scoreless relief inning.
At one point, as Snopkowski crossed the plate with another run for the Mustangs, one of her teammates couldn’t help but yell: “Lola’s the GOAT!”
Correction, 3/31/26: The story has been updated to note the brief existence of a women’s pro league in the 1990s. The Ladies Professional Baseball League debuted in 1997 and cancelled its second season after a handful of games. We have also corrected Rocky Henley’s playing history.
