New Pasadena Girls Softball Association Earns Impressive Wins at Recent USA Softball Tournaments

Pasadenan Robert Milton says four years ago there was no youth softball league in Pasadena and young girls had to visit other cities to play the sport. So he and some local parents established the Pasadena Girls Softball Association (PGSA).

The results have been “amazing.”

Recounting the early days of the league, Milton, who is the PGSA’s President, said as soon as the league’s inaugural season started, local residents, especially kids, came “in droves” to watch and cheer.

The league does not have their own playing fields in the beginning so they would go to whatever fields Pasadena would allow them to use. Eventually, he said, the City provided them the Jefferson Park and John Muir High School as their home fields. 

“With having an actual home field, we just started to grow some more. And with our growth, what we did was we started to bring in a lot of professionals to kind of train [the kids],” said Milton.

“We’re only four years in, and we doubled every single year. And the growth within our league was amazing.” 

Because the association brought professional trainers, the girls in the league became better at the sport as days went by. 

PGSA’s teams: 8U, 10U and 12U, qualifying for the USA Softball State Championships held in Palmdale last June, is a testament to this.

All teams qualifying for the state tournament is a big achievement for a young league for Milton, as he added that in other associations, only one or two of the age groups make it to the state. 

Of the three teams 8U, which is hailed as district champions for two years straight, is the only team that made it past the state tournament and competed in the regionals in San Diego earlier this July.

The team however did not make it to the nationals.

Milton attributes the success of the PGSA teams to training and the support the players are getting from parents, board members and volunteers.

“No matter what opportunities or resources that you put in place, if you don’t have parents that are kind of all in, then none of it works.”

“So I think the first thing would be our dedicated parents and volunteers.”

Milton dreams that in the future, PGSA will be able to help more girls who not only want to play the sport for fun but also those who want to take it to the next level and join their highschool or college team. 

He believes the sport helps in the overall development of young girls. “It creates not only a sports environment, but it also creates a social environment because they’re with their friends and they’re having fun and they’re having a good time.”

Currently, PGSA offers basic level softball clinics and advanced level softball clinics to teach kids how to play the sport.

To learn more about the programs of PGSA, visit: www.pasadenagsa.com.