We all know that 2020 has been a year. This virus has impacted millions of people’s mental & physical wellbeing as well as posed financial difficulty for even more. In the sports world, it has been defeating. Thousands of people have been furloughed or laid off, and even more of my colleagues in Minor League Baseball are unsure of their future due to the MLB/MiLB PBA ending.
Nevertheless, sports executives and government officials worked tirelessly to get sports back to as normal as possible. The greatest sports feat of 2020 was not Joe Burrow making his NFL debut. It was not LeBron James winning an NBA Title in LA the year that Kobe Bryant died (although we can all say that was emotional). It was not Clayton Kershaw finally winning a World Series. The biggest sports moment of 2020 was on November 13th when Kim Ng broke the gender barrier in North American professional sports when the Miami Marlins named her their General Manager.
I don’t want to dwell on the length of time it took her to be appointed to a position she was well qualified for; I only think we should be celebrating the fact that it happened. With so many mentally-draining events to occur in 2020, the news on November 13th gave me something I have not felt much this year: hope.
Baseball, and the sports industry as a whole, have made great strides to try and bring more women into front office positions compared to when Kim Ng entered baseball in 1990. Many people I work closely with from various organizations are talented, powerful, and determined women. Still, 30 years after Ng joined baseball, you rarely see a woman on the operations side of the game. The females in most organizations are in the more “feminine” job areas; i.e. Community Relations, Promotions, Merchandising and Marketing. We still have a large gap to close but progress is being made
I came out of the womb loving baseball & football. I could probably still recite every word to Jerry Maguire (probably not the most appropriate movie to be watching as a kid but that’s besides the point). Growing up, I didn’t have someone in the sports industry that I aspired to be like. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who was a hardworking business woman that showed me how to succeed in a male-dominated industry. She showed me at a very young age what it was like to be a minority in a meeting, a workplace, and an industry. When I told my mom at the age of ten that I wanted to work in sports, she looked at me and said, “Not a lot of girls do that. You are going to have to work very hard. You are very smart, and you can do it, but you are going to have to work very, very hard.”
I am so grateful to Kim for giving young girls, like I once was, someone to aspire to be. At 24, I am looking up to her and smiling thinking about the path she is paving and the endless opportunities that women have in the sports industry. There’s a lot more work to do in all major sports, but for now, let’s grab a broom to help Kim clean up the glass ceiling that was shattered. It’s our time.
BasicBinBaseball 