SPRINGFIELD, Illinois – Rocky Henley got in the car to head to Robin Roberts Field, and it finally hit her.
Her son and assistant coach, Jackson Henley, turned the radio to Kirk Franklin’s “Lean on Me.” It was the song they used to listen to with her late husband, Robert, when they went to tournaments together.
This time, the South San Francisco native was headed to manage the New York Heights as a pro women’s baseball coach.
“I just kind of broke down,” she told the Bay Area News Group. “It’s just been like, ‘Pinch me. Is this a real thing?’”
If the Women’s Pro Baseball League was made for anyone, it was Henley, a longtime player and coach whose work has developed much of the talent that makes up the new league. She estimated she had coached around 40 of the 60 players who make up the four-team league.
She had worked with commissioner Justine Siegel with the national girls program Baseball For All, and called her to ask to be involved with the league. Henley, 57, was a talent evaluator for the player tryouts in Washington, D.C. a year ago, and she decided to apply to be a manager.
But when WPBL CEO Keith Stein called her with the offer to manage a team a few months before the season began.
Rocky Henley in her San Francisco Bay Sox uniform. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Bay Sox)
“I was thunderstruck,” she said. “Of course I was going to say yes.”
The growth of girls and women’s baseball in the past decade-plus can be directly tied to the work of Henley, who will manage her Heights against the San Francisco Firebells Saturday in Springfield as part of the WPBL’s third weekend of action.
In 2014, Henley founded the San Francisco Bay Sox, now the largest all-girls baseball program in the country, as a part of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks department. Then she co-founded Evolution, a non-profit program to develop girls across the Bay Area outside of San Francisco.
“She knows the game so well,” said Evolution co-founder Alex Oglesby. “She has such a high baseball IQ. She’s played the game herself at a very high level, and she’s an incredible communicator. If you’ve ever had time to sit and work with her, talk to her, you know right away that she’s somebody who is a great listener and can communicate back what her needs are and her feelings about a situation. So all of those pieces together, I think, just she is going to do really well within this league.”
More than a dozen alumni of the two organizations are on WPBL rosters now. New York catcher Alyssa Zettlemoyer worked with Henley, as did Maggie Foxx, who bats fourth for the Los Angeles Queens. Megan Grant, now a star in the Athletes United Softball League after breaking the UCLA home run record this season, played for Evolution as well.
Rocky Henley with San Francisco Bay Sox alumni in their high school baseball jerseys. (Courtesy of the San Francisco Bay Sox)
Sebastopol native and San Francisco Firebells reserve player Kaija Barzzano got her introduction to women’s baseball through the Bay Sox and Henley.
“She has the ability to draw from (her experience) and translate it in a way that can help her players to develop and to learn and deepen their understanding of the game,” she said. “That’s something I think that’s a skill as a coach, right? So many coaches have that pedigree, but she and a special few others really have that ability to teach.”
Annie Jupiter-Jones, whose three daughters all played baseball for Henley, was inspired to get involved with what Henley was building locally.
“I think she thought it was a longshot,” said Jupiter-Jones, now the general manager of the Bay Sox program. “It feels so well deserved because Rocky has just been on her own journey from a player to then have her be the first woman manager of this league, to me, it makes complete sense. There’s nobody better, and we know firsthand not just the vision, but like the detail, the organizational part that Rocky does so well about how to build a league and build a program.”
Henley played professional baseball with the Colorado Silver Bullets and the San Jose Spitfires. She has previously coached with the Bay Sox and Evolution, and was the only woman named a manager in the fledgling league.
“Back then, in 1994, the women talked about (a league),” Henley recalled of her time with the barnstorming Silver Bullets. “On bus rides. We wanted to participate and compete against other women, and we wanted to make it fair and even. We talked a lot about that, and just never came to be.”
Growing up in South San Francisco, Henley lived across the street from a baseball field. A “quiet, shy kid” without many friends, she looked forward to shagging fly balls for a boys team after school. When she was 10, she was allowed to play for the team.
“Baseball was just for me,” she said. “I felt good. I felt confident. I was good. That’s how I felt. I got my accolades. You know, you just get good praise when you do something well.”
Evolution co-founders Rocky Henley, left, and Alex Oglesby, right. (Courtesy of Megan Zimmerman)
She moved on to softball, as many girls do, and coaches told her she “swung the bat like a baseball player.” After four years playing for San Francisco State, she returned to baseball.
Through baseball, she met her husband, Robert, who passed away last year. She coached her son, Jackson, who is now an assistant coach for the Heights.
“When I was playing semi-pro, he’d be in the dugout running around just like Stillwell Angel,” she joked, referring to the kid in “A League of Their Own”.
Henley’s face lit up when talking about the 10 girls on varsity high school baseball teams in the Bay Area. They all played with either the Bay Sox or Evolution.
Last week, she was supposed to be in Cooperstown, New York — home of the Baseball Hall of Fame — with the under-12 Bay Sox team. Right before her new job in the WPBL was publicly announced, she video-called the team to explain why she wouldn’t be there.
“That was a special moment that she got to be able to see their faces as she gave them a first peek into the info before it had been announced,” Oglesby said. “So I think that helps bring it to light when she is able to reach the girls that are 12 years old, all the way up to the girls who are playing in the WPBL.”
Henley jubilated over having a playbook. She was the only WPBL manager to know her starting lineup before the first games, joking she had a “leg up” on the other three managers who were new to the women’s game, including the Firebells’ Matt Williams, a former Giants star.
“I’m always really impressed by her confidence on the field,” Jupiter-Jones said. “I can’t imagine her coming up both as a player in this male-dominated sport, but then as a coach with tons of men around who I’m sure think that they know everything there is to know about baseball, like how she’s been questioned and challenged in that way. So that strength and confidence that she brings, without having to like yell loud and take up space in that way, it’s amazing.”
The day of the Heights’ first game, former player and longtime women’s baseball champion Maybelle Blair came through the media area and stopped for one person: Henley.
“It’s good to see you!” Blair said with a hug.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Henley grinned.
Rocky Henley coaches a young San Francisco Bay Sox player. (Courtesy of San Francisco Bay Sox)