Central High’s Sofia Meer has been playing baseball for years, but now she’s adding softball to her plate
Sofia Meer had been the only girl playing baseball in the Public League for three seasons. Now, she's the only one playing both sports.
Sofia Meer didn’t want to play softball.
At age 5, Meer played catcher, alongside her older brother, Luke, in the Taney Youth Baseball Association. The two, who are 15 months apart, formed a close bond on the diamond, but it was the competitive nature of baseball that led Sofia to fall in love with it. In fact, it’s still her preferred sport.
Her dream was to play professionally. As she got older, that dream shifted to playing collegiately in Division III. But the Central High School senior has high academic aspirations for herself — she hopes to be a pediatric oncologist one day — and coaches recommended that she had a better chance of extending her athletic career in college by playing softball.
So this year, after three seasons on Central’s baseball team, she decided to do both, with softball being her priority.
“I had always wanted to play baseball in college,” said Meer, who primarily plays shortstop and also played basketball. “Then as I learned more about college, I thought that softball could give me a better opportunity financially. Also, just the idea that in college, boys are getting a lot stronger, and it might be a little challenging.”
Meer attends softball practice when she doesn’t have a game for either sport and plays in every softball game, but if she has a baseball game when there isn’t a softball game scheduled, she’ll play with the baseball team.
Although it was mentally tough to change sports, considering her love of baseball, she said the transition to softball has been seamless, and it turns out she enjoys it.
Next year, Meer hopes to walk on at the University of Pittsburgh, where she’ll be studying biology. Pitt is holding a softball prospect camp in July for transfers, junior college, and high school players. Steve Bandura, the founder and program director of the Anderson Monarchs, plans to assist his former player with the opportunity.
“I’m going to contact the Pitt coach and find out what their walk-on policy is,” said Bandura, who famously coached Mo’ne Davis and the Taney Dragons to the 2014 Little League World Series. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Sofia can play there. I know it’s the ACC, Power 5 conference, but she’s definitely good enough to play there, and I think she will.”
Meer began playing for the Monarchs at age 8 and stuck with them till she transitioned to the older age group, the Philadelphia Stars.
She has played just about every position: from catcher to second base to outfielder, though shortstop is her favorite. She even pitched as a sophomore in her varsity debut with the Lancers.
“She’s a completely unselfish player,” said her father, Rod Meer. “Shortstop is her primary position, but if a boy needed to play shortstop for his ego, she would play second base. Then when they were 13, they moved to the bigger fields down at FDR Park. There’s a big backstop, so the catchers couldn’t stop the ball. They were giving up a lot of steals. One of the coaches said, ‘Let’s put Sofia back there.’ She always had a strong arm, and the pitches never got past her.”
But playing baseball hasn’t always been easy as the only girl on the field. During T-ball, there were handful of girls on the team. By age 8, there were three girls on her team.
“Then at 12, there were no more girls on the team,” Sofia said. “People have definitely been a bit not accepting at times.”
She learned to ignore the gasps or comments, especially by opponents and their parents, but it put a chip on her shoulder. Each time she stepped on the field, Sofia felt the need to “prove to them that I am deserving of being there.”
“It’s sometimes scary just to walk out on the field and be the only one,” she said. “I know that people are sometimes staring. … One of the times I specifically remember was during summer ball, when I was sliding into second base, this random guy, he was playing shortstop. He said something along the lines of, ‘[Expletives] shouldn’t play baseball.’”
She laughed it off. In a male-dominated sport, she figured an incident like that would happen at some point, so she didn’t take it personally.
But her parents and her Philly Stars coach were livid when they found out. They pried her to tell them who it was, but she didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, so she kept that information to herself.
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“Those opinions don’t really matter much to me,” Sofia said.
Her high school baseball teammates were supportive of her playing. It also helped having Luke on the team. Sofia caught for the junior varsity team in her freshman year. In her sophomore year, she split time between JV and varsity, and as a junior, she started most varsity games at second base.
Alex Meer, Sofia’s mother, said the relationship between those two grew exponentially at Central. The best part, she said, of watching them play together was seeing them jump in the air to high-five each time Sofia came on the field.
Luke, who’s now on the club baseball team at Temple, made an impact on his sister more than he may have known.
“Sofia wrote her college essay about how she always wanted to be like him,” Alex Meer said. “Luke would give her pointers and help her out because eventually Sofia wasn’t as strong as the boys or not as tall as the boys. The hitting she had to really work on to hold up with the boys. He would always help her with that, working on her swing.”
In December, Sofia had a conversation with Central baseball coach Kenneth Devenney about her plans for the future. He suggested to get some exposure on the softball team, if she wanted to play college sports.
While it’s been a busy spring managing both, she doesn’t mind.
“There are weeks when I have two softball games and three baseball games,” Sofia said, “and I’m never in my sixth period class. I’m leaving my fifth period class all the time. It’s definitely been a little tough, but I would do it again.”
Playing softball has given her a different perspective on how to be a leader and teammate. She hopes to help both teams earn Public League championships. Last season, Central’s softball and baseball team each achieved a Pub title.
For the last three years, Sofia Meer has been the only girl in the Public League to compete on a baseball team, and now she’s the only girl to play both sports.
“You’ve got to show a lot of resilience and sometimes having a team to fall back on has been a crucial part in it, too,” she said. “But you’ve got to keep going, no matter what anyone says to you.”