Changing the game

A pitcher breaks cultural obstacles to reach national baseball and cricket teams, and tries to inspire the girls of her village to follow her.

By Taylor Hanson

Jyoti Sain, 21, stands in front of her town of Peoda, India, Jan. 9, ready to throw a fastpitch. Jyoti represented India in the 2023 Women’s Baseball Asian Cup, where India ranked sixth overall. Now, she practices every day to secure her spot in the 2024 World Cup that will take place in Canada. “You may take many pressures in life, but just relax, play well and win,” Jyoti said. | Photo by Taylor Hanson

Jyoti Sain sat on a plane about to take off for Hong Kong in 2023. At 20 years old, she was leaving India for the first time. Flying for the first time.

She had been preparing for this moment for a year. She had gone through competitions, tryouts and 6 a.m. practices to make the international baseball team. All so she could make the phone call to her family when she announced she would pitch for team India.

Jyoti attends Kurukshetra University in India’s northern state of Haryana as a two-sport athlete. She dreams of becoming independent from her family and coaches the game of baseball to the young girls in her home village of Peoda.

“Girls should be able to do anything. They have the potential to learn anything in their life. To drive, to become an athlete,” Jyoti said. “It’s my motivation that every girl becomes independent from her father. To stand on her own feet.”

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Jyoti grew up playing cricket in Peoda. In a village of 5,000, she grew up in a home with two rooms: one bedroom and one kitchen, along with an outdoor space where neighbors could sit on cots and drink chai. It’s a town where girls wear dresses and women cover their faces.

But Jyoti walks around in cargo pants and sneakers.

Throughout Jyoti’s childhood, her family struggled financially. With five kids living on her father’s laborer income, her parents struggled to support them. Her father operated a printing press and had very little education. But he wanted his three daughters to study.

“Her family has been very supportive. Most families don’t allow their daughters to be like this,” community organizer and activist Kumar Mukesh said. “The neighbors were always discouraging her family about her playing with the boys. But her parents were always supportive of her sports instincts.”

So Jyoti went to a public school where she would play cricket with the boys. She loved playing with them. One day, while playing cricket at recess with her friends, one of the coaches saw her pitching.

He asked the other teachers, “Who is that boy?”

But the other teachers laughed at him.

“That’s not a boy, that’s a girl.”

With her short-cut hair, she blended in with the boys. But she didn’t care. She only cared if she could beat them.

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Jyoti and her best friend Nitu laugh as they spread white chalk down along the dirt, with the outline of Peoda in the distance. They tease each other as they turn a field with no grass and no bases into a baseball diamond. They play on the same national team and take the same courses at Kurukshetra University. They were also the first young women in their village to show interest in baseball.

Photo by Emma Carmichael

During their final year of high school, a new coach showed up who knew nothing about cricket — he only knew baseball. He started coaching Jyoti, turning her spinning cricket tosses into curveballs on the diamond. After a year of playing baseball, she made India’s international team for the Women’s Baseball Asian Cup in 2023.

For a while, only four girls knew how to play in the village. But to have a complete team, they needed nine players. They recruited friends from Peoda. As they continued to practice after school, Jyoti and Nitu decided they wanted to start coaching the younger girls for fun.

They went around the village asking for donations to fundraise for their team. They asked for fundraising from government sources who refused, saying they had never heard of the game of baseball.

So with no financial support or help from anyone, they held practices for the younger girls in the village. It started out with only a few girls from the village, but now they coach 50 girls. Nine girls tried out for the national team. Nine girls made the national team. All nine had been coached by Jyoti and Nitu.

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For a while, Jyoti struggled to find space for the girls to practice because the village leaders didn’t want them to practice. They believed that the girls should be staying at home with their mothers.

“Choosing cricket as a village girl is quite uncommon, because she was a ‘tomboy’ type of kid, which is very rare in this part of Haryana,” Mukesh said. “And then choosing baseball, which is a very rare sport, and going to the international level is quite rare.”

When she first started to train the girls, the men of her village sent buffalo and cows to the practice field to prevent the girls from playing. Jyoti would argue with the villagers, claiming that she had a right to coach the girls on public grounds.

“There are a lot of problems in life,” Jyoti said. “I have been fighting with the villagers since I was a child.”

Before Jyoti made the international team, she says people in her village did not support her as a female athlete. But her family never told her to stop chasing her dreams. She says they encouraged her to study and become whoever she wanted to be.

“People were talking behind my back, saying it was just a dream,” Jyoti said. “[I] had to take strong action, to stand against it.”

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“People were talking behind my back, saying it was just a dream. [I] had to take strong action, to stand against it.”

The women’s baseball team of Peoda, India, plays in a scrimmage Jan. 9. Jyoti and her best friend, Nitu, played baseball and cricket together when they were younger. But now, they are coaching the next generation of players in their village. “They are upbringing this new generation so it is easier for these girls who are learning,” community organizer and activist Kumar Mukesh said. “But it was very difficult for Jyoti and Nitu ten years back.” | Photo by Emma Carmichael

Jyoti Sain gathers 23 girls to play baseball on a weekly basis in the dirt fields of Peoda, Haryana, Jan. 9. Jyoti has always loved coaching and playing baseball, so to help these boys and girls play and learn makes her nothing but happy. “[Girls] won’t depend on anyone. The main thing is that girls should be able to do anything,” Jyoti said. | Photo by Emma Carmichael

Jyoti started playing cricket for her school team in 11th grade. A year later, the team qualified for nationals.

But nationals never happened. The COVID-19 pandemic took away her season. In order to be eligible to play for her school team one more season, she didn’t take her exams. She waited so she could have one more season. One more chance.

In 12th grade, she came back ready to pick up where the team had left off the season before. But it wasn’t that simple. Their coach decided to transfer, leaving their school and leaving their team.

The new coach, Bhupinder, didn’t know anything about cricket. He only knew about baseball. He wanted Jyoti to become a baseball player. So she decided to become a pitcher.

In cricket, a bowler propels the ball toward the batter. The bowler can be compared to the pitcher in baseball, but they use different throwing motions.

“Cricket is a technical game and it takes a lot of time to understand it,” Jyoti said. “But with baseball, we understood the rules after two or three practices.”

She worked on her skills, practicing a new throwing motion that pitchers use over and over again, changing what she knew — so that she could know baseball better. And being a left-handed pitcher gave her an advantage on the mound. She can also throw hard.

“When I started playing, my throw was the fastest,” Jyoti said. “Girls don’t have such fast throws.”

And after one year of practicing, Jyoti’s first-ever school baseball team qualified for nationals.

After graduation, she decided to continue her education at university, pursuing a diploma in yoga. She got into Kurukshetra on a sports scholarship to play cricket — and baseball. During her time at university, she represented her school at different championships.

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Then came the tryouts for India’s international team.

Here’s how it works: the five best players from Haryana move on to tryouts for the international team. 20 players were selected to represent India at the 2023 Asian Cup. They selected Jyoti to be the pitcher.

When she called her family to tell them that she made the team, she worried about finances. She didn’t want anyone else in her village to know that she made the team because it was expensive. She also knew the people in her village wouldn’t approve. But when people found out that one of their “daughters” was going to represent India, they were excited. They came together to raise money to support Jyoti. With the financial support from her village and funding from the government, Jyoti became the first in her family to go abroad.

“I can’t even explain the emotions I was feeling,” Jyoti said.

A dozen teams compete in the Asian Cup. Within those 12, the top four teams secure a spot in the 2024 World Cup. India finished sixth. However, the next Asian Baseball Federation meeting will discuss allowing India to participate in the 2024 World Cup. Until then, Jyoti trains every day to ensure that if the team gets selected to compete, she will have a spot. She is confident in her abilities as a pitcher and the potential of her team. And with that, she believes that the next time she leaves India, she will be on her way to Canada.

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From an early age, Jyoti knew she wanted to be independent of her family. In India, it is custom that the daughters are dependent on their brothers and fathers.

Four women in Peoda know how to ride a motorcycle — and Jyoti is one of them. She also decided she wanted to learn how to drive a truck. So now, she takes classes at the Driving Institute of Kaithal with 12 other women.

“My main reason [for coaching] is that the girls are equal to the boys. They won’t depend on anyone. The main thing is that girls should be able to do anything.”

It makes Jyoti proud to see how far she has come in the past few years. To know that when she started this journey, she had the support of her family and the support of her coach. But now, a whole village stands behind her and 50 girls show up each day ready to learn from her.

“My main reason [for coaching] is that the girls are equal to the boys,” Jyoti said.“They won’t depend on anyone. The main thing is that girls should be able to do anything.”

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As the girls arrive to practice, they walk through the gate with smiles on their faces. Each one proudly sports their blue and white tracksuit with the words “play well” printed on the front. They come from two-room homes with laundry hanging on every roof, surrounded by brick roads and mustard fields. They watch Jyoti intently as she leads them through dynamic stretching and a game of catch, demonstrating the motion of her fingers as she releases the ball from her hand.

“She is a very good trainer, but when we make some mistakes, she is very angry,” right fielder Anu Sharma said. “And sometimes, if it is a big mistake, she slaps us.”

The girls run laps around the field before practice begins. Then, they rotate through at-bats, learning to read the curveballs Jyoti throws past them. Jyoti watches intently, never afraid to let them know when they have made a mistake.

“Any girl can make mistakes — even Nitu makes mistakes — so I shout at them very frankly without any hesitation,” Jyoti said. “But they respect me and follow the rules. They accept that I am the coach and I feel that respect all the time.”

They practice each day from late afternoon until the sun disappears behind the outline of buildings in the distance.

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Photo by Taylor Hanson

When Jyoti is on the mound, nothing else matters. The gender barriers, the disapproval from the people in her village and the comments from her own teammates fade away.

“I don’t think about anything,” Jyoti said.

Before every game, the team circles up at the pitching mound. Huddled closely together, they hype each other up by reciting a religious chant used by people in a temple:

“Jaikara maa sherawali da bol sache darbar ki jai, ki jai, ki jai. 1, 2, 3 c’mon team!”

It’s always been Jyoti’s dream to play cricket at the international level. As a little girl, she would sit in front of her television watching professional cricket matches and think to herself, I want to do this when I grow up.

“I represent India [in baseball] but I want to represent India in cricket too,” Jyoti said.

So Jyoti will ride her motorcycle down dirt roads she grew up running through. Past the school that taught her she can learn anything. Past the house that raised her to be a strong woman in a society that tells her otherwise. Past the dirt field where she coaches 50 girls every day. And she will continue to play the games she loves while representing her country.

“I am team India.”