Watch highlights from the Uganda Baseball Panel at 2024 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference
At the sixth annual SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference on September 22, 2024, the Uganda Baseball Panel included USA Baseball national team players Anna Kimbrell and Meggie Meidlinger, and moderator Kat Williams.
Kimbrell has been affiliated with USA Baseball since 2006. She has been a part of seven medal-winning teams, highlighted by gold medals at the 2015 Pan American Games and 2019 COPABE Women’s Pan American Championship, and a silver medal at the recent 2024 WBSC Women’s Baseball World Cup in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Meidlinger is an eight-time Team USA alum who also made her USA Baseball debut in 2006. She has earned four medals, including a pair of gold medals at the 2006 IBAF Women’s World Cup and the 2019 COPABE Women’s Pan-American Championship.
- Video: Click here to watch a replay of the Uganda Baseball Panel (YouTube)
Here are some highlights:
On discovering baseball in Uganda
- Meidlinger: “Part of the story that I love so much is certain stories are so transcendent, no matter what country you’re in. Anna and I have similar stories of we’re the only girls out on the baseball field. Sure enough, that first day I went out to the baseball field in Uganda, it was a group of guys out there playing baseball, and there was one girl out there playing baseball, ready to go with all the other guys. It was something that I had to chuckle to myself. It’s like, ‘I’m all too familiar with this story of the only girl out there on the baseball field.’”
On empowering the game in Uganda
- Kimbrell: “It’s just been kind of cool to watch from 2019 to now, how we still keep in touch with almost all those guys today. So that was a really fun, exciting experience for me, just to be able to go over there and share my love of the game with people who had no idea—no clue—that really girls or women play baseball. But just to be able to teach them the basics and to watch it grow over the last few years.”
- Meidlinger: “What I love is so many kids show up for these events. We have so many girls signed up for the events, but if kids want to play, anybody is welcome to play. One of the guys’ teams in Kampala came over to play as well, and we asked the kids, you know, ‘How do you want to divide up the teams?’ The girls immediately go, ‘Boys vs. girls—we’re playing boys vs. girls,’ and all the girls got lined up and they challenged the guys. I think they ended up beating them 3 to 2 or something. It was really cool to see.”
On growing progress and development in the game
- Meidlinger: “Women’s baseball has now grown to 8 different regions all throughout Uganda, and over 400 girls are playing baseball in Uganda. Every single region that we went to, we had hundreds of kids show up, and the level of growth and development of their skill set for baseball has just grown astronomically.”
- Kimbrell: “We divided all the kids up because we had been there four years previously. Instead of just going over the basic stuff with the catchers, we had a Q&A, ask me questions, what do you want to know because I’d rather us not go over the same stuff. To go from the first camp, we were talking about ‘this is how you hold a ball, this is how you throw a ball, this is how you catch a ball,’ all those sorts of things, to now they were asking me about, ‘what do you do on first and third situations, what do you do for rundowns,’ all the situation stuff that we work on here all the time and it was really cool to be able to see that ‘oh wow’ they’ve progressed that much.”
On the impact of inclusion
- Kimbrell: “It’s just been really cool to get to go over there twice and just to have interactions with the younger kids and the adults as well. But to be able to talk to the girls and tell them, ‘Hey, we want you to have a team to come play us,’ and their eyes get like really big because they have never even thought about going on an airplane, going anywhere really, to do something that they love and it’s something that Meggie and I have been so fortunate to be able to do for a long time.”
- Meidlinger: “It doesn’t matter where the kids are; they throw down bases and they pick up and they play the game. It doesn’t matter if they have cleats or shoes at all; it doesn’t matter what they’re wearing for that day; they are ready to show out and play the game of baseball.”
Transcription assistance by Tim Ryan.
For more coverage of the 2024 SABR/IWBC Women in Baseball Conference, visit SABR.org/women-in-baseball-conference/2024.
Originally published: September 25, 2024. Last Updated: September 25, 2024.