Central New York State has always been a hotbed of reform sentiment. Abolition, suffrage, temperance, religious reform — you name it, people have always rocked the boat here. When it comes to girls and sports, it’s no surprise that a revolution happened here, too.

Before Title IX, young girls found their athletic opportunities limited or even nonexistent, especially for team sports. Team and league officials held the line on girls playing so-called boys sports.

So, sometimes, it’s up to someone else to give girls what they want. And who more than parents know what their daughters want?

Stealing Little League’s thunder

Recently, I wrote about Little League baseball historically banning girls from play. Eventually, some parents in central New York State decided to do an end run.

In 1958, 9-year-old Valerie Hitchens of Corning, New York, wanted to play baseball and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t. She had five brothers who played, so why not her?

Valerie’s mother, Shirley, decided her daughter should have the same opportunity to play sports that her sons did. She enlisted the help of three friends, and they formed a softball league for girls. They called it the Cinderella Softball League, and it started with four teams.

The next year, the league was so successful that the original teams were joined by another four. The next season, another four teams joined and the league split into the American and National division. By 1962, the league was sponsoring a World Series, which continues to be held today, with the participation of Cinderella teams from all around the area.

A friend of mine who grew up near Corning, in Monterey, says she isn’t surprised that the Cinderella League started there.*

“Baseball was everything when I was a kid,” Sandi Hilton says. “We’d start playing the minute we were old enough to hold a ball. Any time we could put 18 kids together — or not even that many! — we’d start a game and we’d play until it was too dark to keep going.”

In addition to neighborhood pickup games, Sandi remembers she and her two sisters playing in church, school, and later, company leagues.

Sandi’s older sister, Diane, was a terrific first-base player. She boasted to the boys that she could play baseball just as well as they could. One day, they took her up on it and put her at first base in one of their games. But the boys weren’t about to give her any help — they wouldn’t give her a mitt, so she bare-handed the balls, and they threw as hard as they could to her.

“She never once winced as she caught the ball. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction!” Sandi says. “But that night, her fingers were pretty well sprained.”**

Way to go, Mom!

Reform was in the air in Sandi’s home, too. Her public school’s dress code mandated dresses for girls. This, despite the brutally cold winters of New York State!

One winter day, when Sandi was in seventh grade, Sandi’s mother had had enough. “You don’t send girls to school without proper clothing,” she declared.

That day, she sent Sandi to school in slacks. Predictably, Sandi was sent to the principal’s office. The school called her mother to take Sandi home to change into a dress. But when her mother arrived, she had a different idea.

“If I take her home, she’s not coming back to school,” her mother said. And she didn’t go back.

This happened a few times, until finally Sandi’s mother convinced a few friends to send their girls to school in slacks. That year — 1970 — the school district dropped the dress mandate from its dress code. 

“That was all my mother’s doing,” Sandi says. “I never would have had the courage to do that.”

But sometimes that’s all it takes, one courageous person to stand up to injustice. Once it starts, it snowballs!

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* All quotes are from a telephone interview on March 17, 2022. Sandi says her childhood was all about proving yourself to the other kids. One favorite dare was to jump from a local bridge into a river filled with snapping turtles! She did it… once.

** Sandi has her own treasured memory on the diamond. One day, the coach plucked her off the bench for the 9th inning in a church softball game, her team down one run, with two on and two out. She hit a ball up the 3d base line and brought the two runners in to win the game!