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With millions of marketing dollars behind them, professional sports endeavors exclusively for women slam dunked into the American consciousness during 1997. The WNBA and ABL basketball leagues and the Sports Illustrated and Conde Naste magazines for women helped make 1997 the Year of the Women in American athletics.
Building on this trend is San Diego-based Ladies League Baseball, a four-team professional baseball league for women based in Downtown San Diego. The league, which had its inaugural season last summer, is pointing toward a bigger and better year two.
Capitalized with less than $500,000, Ladies League Baseball wasn’t afforded the same luxuries as the WNBA. There were no huge advertising commitments. No TV contracts. No partnerships with major corporations. Ladies League Baseball was privately funded and relied mainly on public relations and grass roots efforts to spread the word about the league, its teams and its games.
Nonetheless, each Ladies League Baseball franchise — the Los Angeles Legends, Long Beach Aces, San Jose Spitfires and Phoenix Peppers — successfully completed a 30-game schedule. The teams played in cozy, minor league baseball facilities, and on given nights attracted up to 800 raucous fans.
The founder and president of Ladies League Baseball is Michael Ribant, a longtime Downtown San Diego stockbroker who isn’t content just to turn stocks. He has always been involved in other business ventures. Ladies League Baseball is the latest and certainly greatest entrepreneurial effort for Ribant.
"The idea first came to me right after the Olympics," Ribant says from his baseball memorabilia-filled office in One America Plaza. "Everyone was hyped by the women's Olympic fast-pitch softball team. And all the papers were writing about the formation of the WNBA and ABL women's basketball leagues.
"I’ve been a baseball fan since I was 5 and I still play hardball with a men's recreational league. I love the game. One night, standing on my balcony looking over Downtown, the light came on: women's professional baseball. It worked once, it can work again."
It wasn’t until several months later that Ribant began to work diligently on the league. And it wasn’t until February of 1997 that he hired a staff and started to turn the dream into reality.
The league went from ground zero to finished product in less than five months. It held a series of player tryouts. It negotiated leases for baseball parks and now pays about $1,000 per game for a stadium. The league gets the entire $5 ticket cost and splits concession revenue with the stadium operator.
Ribant secured investors. The league hired team managers and coaches and venue managers. It developed team handbooks, printed schedules, made travel and hotel accommodations and produced print and radio advertising. It developed a Website — www.ladiesleaguebaseball.com — printed tickets, mailed sponsorship packages, negotiated sponsorship agreements, secured practice facilities, developed logos and designed league and team merchandise. It sold season tickets, hired game day operations staff, implemented public relations strategies and handled the myriad of daily challenges that face all start-up companies.
"We accomplished a lot in a short time," Ribant says. "Many people advised me to take more time in setting up the league. But I felt strongly that this was the year to start. I wanted to be the first."
Ribant modeled Ladies League Baseball after independent minor league baseball leagues for men. The average salary for the women players was $850 per month, the equivalent of men at the Single A level. The league also paid per diems, flew teams from city to city and contracted with major hotels for accommodations.
The teams played in beautiful minor league parks: San Jose Municipal, home of the San Jose Giants; Phoenix Municipal, the spring training facility of the Oakland A's; Blair Field in Long Beach, the home of the disbanded Long Beach Riptide minor league team, and Jackie Robinson Memorial Stadium at UCLA.
Players on the teams had a range of previous experience. The Los Angeles Legends were led by Gina Satriano, who was the first girl to play in California's Little League system, the first woman to try-out with a college men's baseball team and a two-year veteran of the Silver Bullets women's baseball team.
Satriano shared the league's Most Valuable Player award with P.J. Brun, who played fast-pitch softball for the top-ranked University of Hawaii. The league also boasted several other prominent players: Victoria Ruelas, the first girl to play in the Little League World Series; Rocky McCann, an original member of the Silver Bullets and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame; Christina DeLuca, the leading hitter for the University of Oklahoma women's fast-pitch softball team, and Alexandra Sickinger, a 17-year-old catcher who was one of the few girls in the United States to play on a boys' high school baseball team.
All of the players shared a passion for the game that is rarely seen in today’s professional athletics.
"All of us are just so thankful for Mike (Ribant) and the league's investors," says Satriano. "You can’t believe the number of girls and women who dream of playing baseball. It really took someone with guts to come out here and put money into a league. They took the chance on us and now we’re working our butts off to make sure that it continues in the future."
Along with Ribant, staffing the Ladies League headquarters are Rob Schupp, vice president; Marizza Paoli, director of promotions; Ken Jacobs, director of business operations; and Nicole Jones and Cathy Espinoza, administrative assistants. The league also employs Ken Bowman, the full-time director of baseball operations who works out of San Francisco.
Ribant is confident about the league's ability to grow and be successful.
"Instead of three months to plan, we now have a full year," he says of the preparations for year two. "Instead of having an unproven product, we now have thousands of people who have seen our games and can attest to the competitiveness and entertainment value. Instead of having four teams on the West Coast, we’ll expand to the Midwest and East Coast to give the league a national presence. All of these factors will help us get national sponsors and recognition."
The league's second season will have six teams: Phoenix, San Jose and Long Beach in the West, and New Jersey, Buffalo and Miami in the East. (San Diego’s lack of a minor league park will prevent it, for the near future at least, from hosting a team.)
"Ladies League Baseball will be successful," Ribant says. "We will draw the 1,500 to 2,000 people per game that we need to turn a profit. We will build franchise value. And eventually, in two to five years, we will sell franchises. That's where the payoff will come for me and the league's investors.
"In the meantime, this is a great and exciting venture. It’s stressful, but its rewarding. This has been the best six months of my life."
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