In my last post, I mentioned a girl who was invited to play on a boys’ Little League team — but only if she would agree to make herself look like a boy and answer to a boy’s name.
That girl was Dot Richardson, shortstop and captain of the 1996 women’s Olympic softball team, the “Cal Ripkin of Softball.” She hit the game-winning home run in the 1996 championship game against China. She was also part of the 2000 gold-medal winning team in Sydney.
After the Olympics, Dot continued with her education and a career as an orthopedic surgeon. Today she is head coach of Liberty University’s Lady Flames softball team.
Born in 1961, Dot grew up in Orlando, Florida, loving the game of baseball and practicing with her brother at local parks. She was the bat girl on her brother’s Little League team, but there were no girls’ teams for her to play on. Girls weren’t welcome in Little League.
Still, she dreamed of playing baseball. “As much as I had this desire to play, society threw back at me, ‘Well, you’re a girl. You’re not supposed to want to play.’”*
One day a Little League coach spotted 10-year-old Dot pitching to her brother, who was a catcher, warming him up for a game. Impressed with her arm, he asked whether she’d like to play on his team. There was a catch, though: the coach said she’d have to cut her hair short and call herself Bob.
“Sir, thank you, but no thank you. If I have to hide who I am, then I don’t think that’s right,” she answered him.**
Lacking opportunity to play baseball, Dot turned to women’s fast-pitch softball. Within a few years, she was one of the best female softball players in the country. Although she regretted not being able to play baseball, she saw that her girlfriends who did play on boys’ teams had nowhere to go with the sport after Little League. In contrast, Dot’s softball career continued through college and beyond — to the Olympics.
But discrimination didn’t end with her entrance into the Olympics. While warming up before the team’s final game of the 1996 Olympics, an official spotted Dot wearing a Rawlings wrist band. He ordered her to take it off. Olympic officials didn’t think women should have the same sponsorship opportunities that men had. Dot’s coach, Margie Wright, stepped up to bat for Dot.
“Dot was ready to walk away from it all,” Margie recalls. “But I talked her out of it, and I made the director accept the wrist band.”***
Despite the discrimination she endured and the opportunities she was denied, Dot doesn’t hold any grudges.
“I was able to be part of the real growth in women’s softball,” she said. “For that, I have to say thanks to that Little League baseball coach who wanted a pitcher named Bob.”****
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* Susan Ware. Title IX: A Brief History with Documents (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc., 2007), p. 45.
** Dot Richardson, Living the Dream (New York: Kensington Books, 1997), p. 20.
*** From my interview with Margie Wright, February 19, 2021.
**** Living the Dream, p. 35.