May 21, 2021
In this episode of The Journey of my Mother’s Son podcast, I sit down and talk with Anna Kimbrell, a member of U.S. Women’s National Baseball team.
As we were mapping out our route on this leg of our journey, I realized that we’d be going through Anna Kimbrell’s neck of the woods. I had seen on Facebook that she had just started conducting some baseball clinics for girls at K3 Sports Academy in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
I reached out to her to see if she’d be ok with us stopping by the clinic and then doing a podcast together. She quickly agreed to the podcast and I was excited to finally get a chance to meet her in person and hear her story.
Kimbrell, a catcher for Team USA Women’s baseball has been affiliated with the organization since she was only 15 years old.
Growing up, she played baseball throughout Little League. She played for Nation Ford High, where she was the first girl to play high school baseball in South Carolina, and later went on to be the first girl to play American Legion baseball in the state. She began playing at age 8 with Rock Hill Little League baseball. She was the only girl to play in a 64-team tournament in Cooperstown with the Piedmont Patriots in 2003.
On July 23, 2015, Anna was the catcher for Stacy Piagno, who threw the first no-hitter in women’s international baseball history at the Pan American Games, in Toronto, Canada. Team USA defeated the Team Puerto Rico 9-0 while Piagno and Kimbrell made history. The United States also went on to win the gold medal of the Pan Am games that same year.
On July 14, 2016, Kimbrell became the third female player to join the Sonoma Stompers where she joined USWNT teammates Stacy Piagno and Kelsie Whitmore. On July 22, 2016, Kimbrell and Whitmore combined to make history as the first all-female professional baseball battery in nearly 70 years.