Little League World Series Star Mo’ne Davis Is Back To Play Baseball Again

Mo’ne Davis Is Finally Ready to Play Baseball Again. This time in the Women’s Pro Baseball League. Back in 2014, when she was on top of the planet, when she was the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series, when she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and getting recognized everywhere she went and fielding requests from what felt like every corner of the country, Davis heard something that she never forgot.

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In the immediate aftermath of that wild run in Williamsport, Pa., her coach told her, “Mo, I don’t want this to be the greatest thing you do in your life. I don’t want you to be 35 years old stuffing yourself in your old Little League jersey and signing at a card show.” She took that message to heart.

That was not his plan when he delivered it to her. “When they’re 13, you feel like they’re not even listening to whatever you say,” Steve Bandura says now. He was stunned when Davis, now 24, recently used that quote in a newspaper interview to describe what had shaped her life after that famous shutout. You remember that? Of course she did. Bandura met Davis back when she was in elementary school and had coached her in multiple sports, and he’d always recognized how smart she was, how good a listener, how thoughtful. Of course she would hold on to something like that. 

She was invited to the White House. She published a memoir. She struck out Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, she was the subject of a documentary by Spike Lee, and she had not yet turned 15.Davis continued playing baseball through her teenage years. (She loved her team far too much to leave them.) But she was adamant that she would be done after high school. She did not want to be tied to this forever. A skilled point guard who dreamed of playing at UConn and was congratulated by Huskies coach Geno Auriemma after the LLWS, she focused on basketball at first, and then pivoted to softball, making the same calculation that so many female baseball players do when faced with the value of a college scholarship.

Source: SI