While Emma Charlesworth-Seiler was growing up, she was “baseball obsessed.” She loved playing, but also watching games, listening on the radio, collecting baseball cards, reading the game stats in the newspaper — she couldn’t get enough.
But then she entered puberty. She wasn’t encouraged to keep playing baseball. Everyone recommended switching to softball.
“It wasn’t a malicious thing, but it was more so people saying, ‘we think you should play softball, that’s what girls do.’ I sort of dug my heels in and was like ‘I’m not going to play softball, I don’t want to do that,’” she said.
Charlesworth-Seiler’s story isn’t unique. She followed the same path of girls and women across the state who ended up being the lone player on their schools’ all-boys team. Once in a blue moon they may even face each other in a game, but it’s rare. Charlesworth-Seiler wanted to break the pattern, so in college in 2014, she started the Minnesota Girls Baseball Association.
More than ten years later, things are starting to shift.
The goal of the association is to provide girls with more opportunities to stay in the game through clinics, partnerships and other events. Soon, they got the attention of the Minnesota Twins.
The Major League Baseball team had shown interest in the past in elevating women and girls in baseball with their camps and women in baseball installation at Target Field that honors local women have held while advancing the sport, including local legend Toni Stone and the Minneapolis Millerettes, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League team that played for one season in 1944 at Nicollet Park.
Charlesworth-Seiler works as a youth clinician for the Twins. She said they had been discussing forming their own girls baseball team for a while, but the timing never felt right. In 2025, local talent at the 14U level looked strong. The Twins decided to go all in and be the first MLB team to fully fund a youth girls team.
They launched an application process online earlier in the year requesting information and videos, and soon the team was formed. A few months later, a team of girls are headed to Nevada to compete with girls teams across the country and world for the Baseball for All National Championships which starts Monday and ends Wednesday.
Charlesworth-Seiler serves as a coach with Chelsey Falzone, the manager of youth engagement for the Twins. Like most women who help with the program, the two have bonded over their shared history of being the only girl on their teams.
Falzone started playing baseball accidentally. She was called into her twin brother’s game because she happened to be wearing a red shirt, the color of the team’s jerseys.
“I just never stopped playing. I loved it so much and played even after my twin brother stopped. These girls are just like I was when I was their age and younger, they love baseball too, and so this is the Twins saying, ‘girls belong in baseball and we are committed to finding opportunities for them to be on a baseball field,’” she said.
While things are changing, progress can be slow. Some girls on the team have had their communities rally around them, others have felt overlooked and undervalued. And the most popular question, “why don’t you just play softball?” doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
Under Title IX, athletic programs that receive federal funding like public schools and colleges must provide an equal opportunity sport. If they don’t, then a student can play for the team that may not match their gender. For Charlesworth-Seiler, Falzone and the girls on the team, they say softball doesn’t measure up, it’s a completely different sport.
Field dimensions are much shorter in softball, softballs are bigger than baseballs which can impact throwing speed and batting speed, baseball pitches throw overhand, softball pitches throw underhand and a myriad of other reasons all back up the claim.
While Falzone is often asked about the comparison, it can still be hard to explain. Moreso, she wishes she didn’t need to explain.
“I’ve heard it said you don’t ask a tennis player why they’re not playing ping pong, it’s sort of the same. Baseball and softball are very different. Some of these girls have played softball and may play softball later, and that is great. We don’t want to pull girls out of softball,” she said. “I think girls just want to hit the small white ball and be out on a big baseball field.”
For captain Kyleigh Salden, 14, that’s the case.
“I just like baseball more,” she said. When she got the call she made it on the team she was thrilled. For the first time, she wouldn’t be the only girl on her team. She’s spent the summer getting to know her teammates from Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota.
“All these girls have different stories of how they’ve started playing and I just love listening and playing with them,” she said.
The tournament can be streamed on GameChanger.
