Fall 2021
This signed baseball reflects a time of transition for youth baseball in Mount Prospect. It’s signed by the members of the 1976 Angels team in the Broncos division (ages 9-12) of the Mount Prospect Baseball Association (MPBA). One of those signers, Lisa Scelsi, was one of the first girls allowed to play in the league. She clearly loved baseball. The local sports pages of the Daily Herald show that Scelsi also played in the 1975 and 1977 seasons, even hitting a triple during a May 1977 game.
Scelsi, and many girls like her, were able to play on boys’ baseball teams because of the 1972 passage of Title IX, a federal civil rights law. This act was one of the Education Amendments enacted that year, and it prohibited discrimination based on sex in educational programs or activities that received federal funding. Importantly, it also challenged established assumptions about girls’ ability to play traditionally boy sports. The impact of Title IX was so widespread that, after a 1973 legal battle in New Jersey, Little League amended their charter in 1974 to allow girls to play baseball and establish the Little League Softball program.
Many communities around the United States needed to reevaluate their youth baseball programs as a result of these changes. Mount Prospect was no exception. Their program was called the Mount Prospect Boys Baseball Association until the mid-1970s when the name changed to the Mount Prospect Baseball Association. These names were used interchangeably in local newspapers at least as recently as 1975, but the revised name seems to have stuck by 1976. This transition was by no means a smooth one. The baseball’s donor, Carl Kraft, was one of the players on this team, and he noted that his father, Bob, was an MPBA board member who worked hard to make it possible for girls to play in the league. It is because of the courage and determination of girls like Lisa and adults like Bob that girls growing up in Mount Prospect today have so many opportunities to play sports.