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Baseball Reference Player Spotlights
Sixteen-year-old Eri Yoshida became the first woman to be drafted by a Japanese men’s baseball team when she was selected out of high school in 2008. Her calling card was a self-taught knuckleball - a pitch she was inspired to learn after watching videos of Tim Wakefield. After a year playing professionally in Japan with the Kobe 9 Cruise, Yoshida, who stands at just 5 foot 1, spent several seasons pitching in independent leagues in the U.S. She was recognized by the Hall of Fame as the first woman to pitch professionally in multiple countries.
Ila Borders’ baseball career was full of firsts. She was the first woman to gain a college scholarship to play on a men’s baseball team, and the first woman to win a game in college. After she made the roster of the independent league St. Paul Saints in 1997, she became the first woman to play in the men’s professional game since the 1950s. The following year she started eight games for the Duluth-Superior Dukes and earned her first professional win. Borders spent two more seasons pitching in indy ball. She later penned the memoir Making My Pitch.
At the age of ten, Edith Houghton (1912-2013) was the starting shortstop on the Philadelphia Bobbies, a semi-professional women’s team that later toured Japan. During World War Two, Houghton enlisted in the women’s branch of the U.S. Naval Reserve, and played on several military baseball teams. After the war she secured a job as a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies, becoming one of the first women to scout for a major league team. She remained in the role until 1951, when she was called up to serve in the Korean War. No major league club hired another full-time female scout until 2015.
Effa Manley is the only woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame to date. She and her husband Abe co-owned the Newark Eagles; although, Effa took on most of the day-to-day management such as contracts and organizing travel. The Manleys were rewarded on the field with a 1946 World Series victory over the Kansas City Monarchs. Effa later was a pivotal figure in ensuring Negro League teams would be compensated for players signed to AL and NL squads.

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Basketball Reference Player Spotlights

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CFB-Spotlights
On September 12, 2015, April Goss became the second woman to score a point in an FBS game when she kicked an extra point for Kent State in a game against Delaware State. After kicking for two years at Hopewell High School in western Pennsylvania, Goss joined the Kent State football team as a walk-on in the spring of 2012 and made her only regular-season appearance in that game in 2015. After graduating from Kent State, Goss earned a Master’s in Education from Clemson University in 2018.
In November 2020, just six days after backstopping Vanderbilt's soccer team to a conference title, goalkeeper Sarah Fuller was making history as the first woman to play for a Power Five Conference college football team. When Vanderbilt's football roster was decimated as a result of COVID-19 contact tracing, Fuller stepped up serving as the team's placekicker for two games. In her second appearance, she became the first woman to score for a Power Five Conference team, notching two extra points. In recognition of her achievements, Fuller was named SEC Co-Special Teams Player of the Week and her jersey was sent to the College Football Hall of Fame.

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Hockey Reference Player Spotlights
Cammi Granato is one of the most successful and prominent women’s hockey players, having been inducted into the International Hockey Hall of Fame (2008), the US Hockey Hall of Fame (2009) and the Hockey Hall of Fame (2010). She played in every IIHF Women's World Championship from 1990 to 2005, and was a captain on the U.S. team that won gold in the 1998 Olympics and silver in the 2002 Olympics. She is the national team’s all-time leading scorer with 343 points (186 goals, 157 assists). Granato was recently named assistant general manager of the Vancouver Canucks. She is the the third woman to serve as an assistant GM in NHL history.
Manon Rhéaume is best known as the first woman to play in any of the major professional North American sports leagues when she suited up as a goalie for the Tampa Bay Lightning in a preseason game on September 23, 1992. Although she never played in a regular season NHL game, she did appear in 25 games for several men’s minor-league teams in the IHL, ECHL and WCHL. Rhéaume also played on the Canadian women’s national hockey team, winning gold medals at the IIHF Women's World Championship in 1992 and 1994, and earning a silver medal in the 1998 Olympics. Most recently, she participated in the 2022 NHL All-Star game's Breakaway Challenge as a goaltender.

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