Retro RFH Girl Playing the Boys’ Baseball Field

RFH Class of '78 alumni Nancy Whelchel was the first girl to play on the boys' baseball team. Photo/George Day — RFH Class of ’78 alumni Nancy Whelchel was the first girl to play on the boys’ baseball team.
Photo/George Day

Nancy Whelchel, first girl on the RFH Boys Baseball team
Photos/Nancy Whelchel

Yes, it’s all about the high school baseball season being benched right now over the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s game-changing news. Who knows if things will ever be the same on the high school baseball field. And back in the 1970s, the idea of RFH girls breaking into sports that were traditionally boys’ turf was taboo. Then came another game changer — a girl who wanted to be one of the boys on the field. That was Nancy Whelchel of the RFH Class of ’78.

Whelchel broke the barrier and changed the game. She played. She succeeded — in making it a norm. She may not have played first base, but she was the who on this gender rule breaker first.

So, when she joked in a comment recently that she saw herself sitting in the dugout among the guys on the “boys baseball” team, who may have been busy shunning her, it prompted classmates, her teammates, to let her know how much a true part of the team she was.

“Maybe they were thinking about how much they didn’t like me sitting there?” Whelchel said.

“Nancy, you were a part of the team,” answered teammate Jim Mellaci. “We all accepted you. You were the start of change, which was a good thing. Years to come, more women sports opened up.”

The dugout snapshot showed Whelchel’s hair under her baseball hat, longer than the guys’. It was a shot, by George Day, of the “1974 freshman ‘boys’ baseball team, of which I was a proud member – a shockingly big deal back in the day….(I’m the one with shoulder length hair),” Whelchel said.

We forget what a real big deal it truly was, because it is, as it should be, the norm now. We also forget how girls couldn’t even wear pants to school only a few years earlier than that. Girls pummeled through that barrier by wearing pants under their skirts and dresses in the freezing cold to make their point.

And Nancy Whelchel nonchalantly made her move to play baseball with the boys, because it was something she wanted to do and saw no barrier blocking her goal. And, she said, her dad was there to cheer on his trailblazing girl.

“My father left work early so he wouldn’t miss a single home game — I’m quite certain it was the thing I did of which he was most proud (like, waaaay more than getting a PhD…)”

Whelchel was the first girl at RFH to hit a home run for high school girl athletes trying to play the baseball field. And Chris Bowden, a couple of years earlier scored the same sort of goal for girls in soccer.

So, the Retro Pic of the (George) Day honors Nancy Whelchel. The top shot is a snapshot of Nancy on the field with Ward Tietz, president of the RFH Class of ’78 that same year Whelchel first got up to bat on the boys’ team — 1974.

We’re not sure if this is an actual team practice shot or just one in which she was just tossing the ball around for fun with a couple of the guys from her class.

Still, there she is playing ball. She had the guts and the sports acumen to break the good ol’ — or young — boys’ sports network.

Home run.

I somehow don’t recall any sort of rebellion from the boys. She was good. That was all that mattered.

What was Nancy Whelchel’s specialty on the baseball field?