No path for girls in baseball? This 12-year-old is making one

Baseball runs deep in Gwangju. The Tigers, based in the city, have won 12 championships in the 45 years since Korean professional baseball began. Seven of the 30 Koreans who have played in the U.S. Major League Baseball came from Gwangju. Its residents have shared the highs and lows of the sport. Now a 12-year-old here is adding a chapter the sport has never had. This is Choi Seo-yoon's story.

Female player in Korea's baseball city

The long hair under her cap is already damp and heavy. When she wipes the sweat off the bridge of her nose, dust from the infield dirt comes with it. Leading the warm-up before practice is the captain's job, and the captain is Seo-yoon, a sixth-grader. At her command, her teammates jog end to end across the field. A sloppy stride in the front row catches her eye. "Run all the way to the end!" Between the hard July sun and the chorus of cicadas, her voice echoes through the park.

Gwangju Stream splits off to the right of the Yeongsan River and runs through the city. Follow the water and you reach Champions Field, home of the KIA Tigers, and a little beyond it, Gwangju Jeil High School, which has produced a long line of baseball stars. Farther up sits Seoseok Elementary School, the alma mater of Major Leaguer Lee Jung-hoo of the San Francisco Giants and LG Twins manager Youm Kyoung-youb. Thirty-two children take the field, each carrying a private ambition. Seo-yoon is one of them — and the only girl.

Once in uniform, just a baseball player

"They say there's a recreational baseball class. Seo-yoon, do you want to try it?"

Her introduction to the game was casual. Her mother, Lim Soo-bin, was spending most of her time on the couple's second child, then in kindergarten, and could no longer give her eldest daughter the attention she used to. Over the winter break in fourth grade, she pointed Seo-yoon toward the new recreational baseball class at Seoseok Elementary School. It was meant to be nothing more than playing for fun.

Seo-yoon's athletic ability stood out early. She had already tried taekwondo, tennis, kickboxing and football, but baseball was different. She liked the feel of solid contact when the ball found the sweet spot of the bat, and the way a caught ball settled into the pocket of her glove. She was immediately hooked. After class she rounded up neighborhood kids and swung until dark, then persuaded her father to play catch late into the night when he got home from work.

Yang Yoon-hee, 46, who has coached the Seoseok Elementary School baseball team since 2009, recognized her potential. Against the 30 or so boys, Seo-yoon was better at hitting and running the bases. Yang had watched professionals including Lee Jung-hoo and Han Joon-soo of the KIA Tigers and Kim Yun-sik of the LG Twins as children, which made him more certain of what he was seeing. Even so, he could not bring himself to urge her to join the competitive team. He knew there was no clear route for a girl to keep playing baseball after elementary school.

Her mother, a former athlete herself, understood how hard the road could be.

"To train seriously in Korea until you're an adult, you have to go through the elite pipeline," Lim said with frustration. "But women's baseball doesn't have that kind of infrastructure."

Her father, Choi Hyeok-joon, 39, spoke to Seo-yoon firmly.

"The moment you put on the uniform, you're not a female player. You're a baseball player, the same as the boys. If you're going to give a half-hearted effort, don't start at all."

Her mind was already made up. Seo-yoon was usually the kind of child who built a logical case for what she wanted, but not this time. The only reason she gave was that she wanted to play baseball. Her parents never found a way to talk her out of it. In May 2025, she joined the baseball team of Seoseok Elementary School.

Captain chosen by male teammates

"Thwack!"

Her first time on base, in her first game, came on a pitch that hit her. Her forearm went numb, but she dropped the bat and ran to first as if nothing had happened. The coach, worried by a player who neither cried nor flinched, asked whether it hurt. She said she was fine.

At home later, she told her father about it.

"Dad, the coach praised me for not crying when the pitch hit me. But I'm a baseball player. I was hit by a ball, not shot."

After that, the adults around her stopped expecting her to quit. She trained that much harder. She was a child who worried that the coaching staff might go easy on her because she was a girl. Kim Yoon-ho, 28, the chief coach, said one incident settled the question for him.

"It was extremely hot at the tournament in Boeun, Chungcheong Province, in August last year. After our first game, the players stood in the field for more than an hour of practice. The other kids asked to go to the restroom or get water, but Seo-yoon was different. She never left and never let it show. She stayed focused to the end," Kim said. "That was when I knew she had what it took to succeed."

Her drive and her ability moved her teammates. The boys who had seen her as an oddity elected her captain in November 2025, with 16 of 24 votes. Step by step, she was moving toward what she wanted.

Boys-only rule blocks her

In March 2026, with the cold still in the air, Seo-yoon could see her breath after practice. Kim Yoon-ho appeared beside her, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"Seo-yoon, you can't compete at the National Junior Sports Festival."

An uncertain smile spread under the brim of her cap. He had to say it again. "I'm not joking. It's real."

The reason was simple. Under the rules of the national festival, baseball is offered only in a boys' division, so girls cannot enter. Facing that ruling for a player who had put in a year of hard training, Yang wanted to find a way around it.

He appealed to the Korean Sport & Olympic Committee and the Gwangju Metropolitan Office of Education. The answer that came back was that female athletes cannot enter a boys' division event. However good she was, Seo-yoon had no route into the country's biggest youth tournament. A 12-year-old's ambition had hit a wall early.

That day she said nothing and took about 40 more swings into the cold air. Only after practice, home and facing her mother, did she burst into tears.

The daughter who had never once said training was hard said with deep disappointment: "I don't want to keep playing here. If there's a place where I can enter every game, I want to play baseball there."

A few days later her father made an offer to his dejected daughter. "Let's go for a drive and get some fresh air." He had heard that the national team tryouts for the Women's Baseball World Cup were being held in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province. At the ballpark, Seo-yoon and her parents watched through the fence. Seo-yoon could not look away. It was the first women's baseball she had ever seen. Women like her were throwing, swinging and running the bases. The sight reignited her passion.

Then a woman with short hair walked over and spoke to them. It was Lim Hye-jin, president of the Women's Baseball Association Korea and a former player. Once she heard Seo-yoon's story, Lim and the association set aside a corner of the field after the tryouts finished. Kim Ra-kyung, 26, the ace of the women's national team, came over and asked Seo-yoon to play catch. Hyeonah Kim, 26, who had just secured a place in the Women's Professional Baseball League in the United States, was there as well.

"Do you enjoy baseball?" Kim Ra-kyung asked her. "If it's what you love, keep going."

Seo-yoon picked up the bat again. The national festival was not the only tournament there was. She took extra swings and threw with more force behind the ball. In June 2026, a full year after joining the team, unexpected news came. Kim Yoon-ho told her on the bus to a youth baseball tournament in Uljin, North Gyeongsang Province: "You've been selected for Korea's team at the U-12 Asian Baseball Championship."

No girl had ever been named to the U-12 national team. Earlier that June, a scout from the Korea Baseball Softball Association had come to watch Seo-yoon and a boy of the same age, and the result led to her selection. International competitions, it turned out, carried no rule barring women. When they reached the team lodging, Seo-yoon gripped her mother's hands and jumped, and her mother laughed with her.

She played at the tournament in Hangzhou, China, from July 9-15. She started against Thailand and again against Hong Kong, and recorded a hit, a run, an RBI and a stolen base. She also met the goal she had set before the tournament, a perfect stolen-base record. When a pitch hit her and sent her to first, she grinned. Korea won bronze.

Path adults said did not exist

Korean women's baseball is built out of firsts. In 1995, Ahn Hyang-mi, then a middle school student, registered with the Korea Baseball Association, now the Korea Baseball Softball Association, as its first female baseball player. Over the roughly 30 years since, players have sustained careers despite few opportunities: Kim Ra-kyung, the first woman in Korea's collegiate baseball league, and Park Min-seo, the youngest female player to hit a home run in Little League.

On Aug. 1, the WPBL began play, the first women's professional baseball league in the United States in 72 years. Kim Ra-kyung started her team's opener for the New York Heights, threw the league's first pitch and recorded its first strikeout. Hyeonah Kim, taken fourth overall by the Boston Hunters, and Jua Park of the San Francisco Firebells, the 33rd overall pick, also played in the league.

Senior players succeeding abroad have not widened the opportunities for younger athletes. For Seo-yoon, a sixth-grader, the immediate obstacle is middle school. There are no girls' youth baseball teams anywhere in the country, so she has to join an existing all-boys school team or a private baseball club. Most schools have never taken a female player, and none appears ready to be the first.

Even if she fights her way through middle and high school as a student player, Korea has no women's corporate league of company-sponsored teams and no women's professional league, so the athletic pipeline ends at graduation. The one realistic move is switching to softball. Seo-yoon still wants a team that plays baseball well, so she can throw harder, hit better and run faster than she does now.

Where there is no path, someone makes one. Kathrine Switzer, an American college student, entered the Boston Marathon in 1967, when women were not allowed to run the distance. A race official who realized she was a woman ran onto the course and tried to drag her off it. She finished anyway. Switzer broke the assumption that a woman could not complete a marathon, and from 1971 women were formally permitted to enter road marathons.

Ronda Rousey, an American mixed martial artist, brought a women's division into the UFC, the U.S. promotion that had been men-only, through her performance in the cage.

Seo-yoon is becoming a role model herself. Among the fifth-grade girls at Seoseok Elementary who watched her play, some have told the school, "I want to play baseball like Seo-yoon."

"If Seo-yoon walks the pioneer's path through hard circumstances the way the golfer Pak Se-ri did, won't baseball get its 'Seo-yoon Kids,' the way golf got the 'Se-ri Kids?'" the school's principal said.

The adults around her still worry about the road she has chosen. Seo-yoon is unbothered.

"They say there's no path for female baseball players. So wouldn't it be cool if I became the first?" she said.

Back in her ordinary routine after the tournament, Seo-yoon retied the laces on her cleats. Her goal is to knock on the doors of professional leagues in Korea, the United States and Japan. Even if none of them opens, she does not want to give up.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.