Obsessed with baseball and passionate about changing stereotypes about girls in athletics, Rachel Gansner in 2024 formed an all-girls baseball league in Warren Park in the West Ridge neighborhood.
The fall league drew 20 to 25 youngsters age 6 to 9 in its first year. Gansner was intentional about her league’s initial age range, as its high end is right before the time — around age 10 — when girls typically transition from co-ed baseball leagues to solely playing girls softball.
Last fall, the North Side league grew to more than 40 participants, and Gansner had enough interest to add a second league for girls age 10 to 12.
“Her biggest passion was getting girls into baseball,” said Michael Phelps, a parent who coached with Gansner for four years and served on Warren Park’s athletic board. “And she was a doer. If we needed people to show up to an event, she’d rally them. She just really, really cared a lot.”
Gansner, 45, died April 4 of stomach cancer, said her husband of 14 years, Jeremy Gansner. A resident of the Edgewater neighborhood, Gansner had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in December 2024.
Born Rachel Caplan in Chicago in 1980, Gansner grew up in Lincoln Park and graduated from Francis W. Parker School in Chicago.
After getting a bachelor’s degree in 2003 from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, Gansner worked for a time as a massage therapist before enrolling at DePaul University and getting a master’s degree in education in 2009.
Gansner taught early childhood education, including at Francis W. Parker School, before moving with her husband to Philadelphia, where she taught at The School in Rose Valley, a private elementary school in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania.
Gansner and her husband returned in 2011 to Chicago, and she taught for a time at Catherine Cook School before stepping away to raise her family, her husband said.
Gansner later taught yoga, and then in 2023 she taught physical education at Francis W. Parker for one school year.
Despite being a baseball fanatic, the always-athletic Gansner — who had early dreams of being the first woman in the NBA — lacked the option to play girls baseball herself when she had been a youngster.
She played softball during high school and college, and after college, she joined a women’s softball team, the Chicago Gems, playing second base.
Still, baseball continued to tug at Gansner.
“For me, it was easier to feel successful in baseball because I could throw and hit the (baseball) so much further and faster (than a softball),” Gansner told the Tribune in 2024.
In 2021, Gansner began coaching her son and his teammates in baseball. Those experiences sparked her desire to start an all-girls, fall baseball league at Warren Park.
“It was a lot of fun, and she was excellent at (coaching), and once she got to a more advanced level, she thought, ‘This is what I want to do,’” her husband said of Gansner’s desire to form an all-girls league.
For Gansner, the concept of a girls baseball league targeted girls interested in playing either baseball or softball, her husband said.
She also formed a nonprofit, Let’s Play Too, which aimed to help those interested in girls baseball to form leagues at other parks around the city.
“I’m generally passionate about changing some of the stereotypes we have about girls in all sports,” Gansner told the Tribune in 2024. “Baseball and softball is a great place to start because it’s the only sport where the counterpart for girls is actually a different sport.”
The girls baseball concept gained traction after its first season in fall 2024, when 23 girls were divided among four teams: the Blue Sox, Comets, Peaches and Belles.
In fall 2025, the number of participants increased to the point where Warren Park offered two leagues — one for girls age 6 to 9 with coaches pitching, and one “kid-pitch” league for girls age 10 to 12.
“The younger girls would play first, and a lot of times the older girls would come and show their support. But the other cool part was that some of the young girls built a lot of confidence and skill and were able to jump up and play with the older girls afterward,” Jeremy Gansner said.
Rachel Gansner told the Tribune in 2024 that her aim was “to get these young girls before they believe that there is no space for them to stay in baseball, to show them that they belong.”
Phelps recalled Gansner’s disappointment that Warren Park’s baseball fields’ infields became overgrown with weeds during the summer months. Ahead of fall play, she, her children and other parents descended on the ballfields with 5-gallon buckets and weeding implements in hand.
“I remember her being worried saying, ‘We can’t have the girls playing on this field,’” Phelps said. “She thought it was telling the girls that they weren’t as important. So a lot of us would go over and pull weeds. She wanted girls to feel as respected as the boys.”
Steve Hendershot, a fellow parent, recalled Gansner’s “excitement and optimism,” and what he called “a positive vision that she laid out forcefully but in a very inviting way.”
“She did it with such joy,” he said. “There was the work pulling weeds to get the fields ready, and then Jeremy would emcee the games and play music. It had the highest production values. These felt like big, kind of red-letter games. It was civically valuable stuff, but also, I can think of no better stuff that I’d want to do on a Sunday afternoon.”
Julie Sipchen, president of Let’s Play Too’s board, called Gansner “thoughtfully aggressive and fiercely fair,” as well as “determined, brave, a little sassy and a lot funny.”
“She loved and lived baseball, but she was more than that,” Sipchen said. “She was complicated: a yoga teacher who practiced martial arts and West African dance who was equally comfortable on the field, in the classroom, in the boardroom and in the community. She competed hard and appreciated a good manicure. Rachel was a trailblazer, a warrior but also more than anything, she was the kind of woman who made everything better just by being in it.”
Jeremy Gansner said the goal is to further his wife’s mission, and that he and other board members plan to advocate for the girls baseball league to continue this fall.
In addition to her husband, Gansner is survived by a son, George; a daughter, Eloise; her mother, Judith Caplan; two brothers, Seth Caplan and Gustav Caplan; and a sister, Sally Caplan.
A service was held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
