One of the few times Genevieve Beacom can remember boys or men objecting to her playing baseball among them came when she was 11. She was a star pitcher, even at that age, and a boy on another team was so adamant about not facing her that he began to cry.
Was he fearful that he would be humiliated by a girl, or was he opposed to her very presence in the game?
“I think it was a bit of both,” Beacom said with a chuckle in a telephone interview from her home in Australia on Monday.