Jackson Henley is asked to describe his mother, Rachelle Henley, manager of the New York Heights of the burgeoning Women’s Pro Baseball League.
“Oh my gosh. Describe her? Give me a minute,” says the 24-year-old first-base coach of the Heights.
After several beats, he says, “She is enthusiastic. She’s loving. She cares, and she’s a bundle of joy. I wish everybody could experience, or meet, my mom. I feel that, if we had a lot more Rachelle Henleys in this world, it would be a much better place.”
Spend much time walking around Robin Roberts Stadium, where the Heights and the other three WPBL teams are playing in their inaugural season, and you hear a lot of nice things being said about the woman everyone calls “Rocky.” In a league where all the pro players are female, Rocky Henley is the lone female manager in the league.
She was an obvious choice to receive that honor, as she has been a tireless advocate for women’s pro baseball to return to this country for the first time since 1954, when the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League concluded.
Most of the 60 roster players in the league already knew Henley from her days with girls national program Baseball For All (founded by WPBL commissioner Justine Siegal) and from her 2014 founding of the San Francisco Bay Sox, now the largest all-female baseball program in the country.
If they didn’t know her before, they do now. Her smile and always-chipper demeanor are infectious around the batting cages, and the 57-year-old says she truly is “Living on Cloud 9” every day she gets to do her job.
“This has just been a perfect-time, perfect-place thing for me,” Henley said. “I am standing on the shoulders of all the other women before me who didn’t have these opportunities.”
Last year, Henley was in a much tougher place. Her husband of 26 years, Robert, passed away in January 2025, and their son, Jackson, was playing professional baseball in Australia. She had – and still has – a full-time job with the city of San Francisco Parks and Recreation Department, but she didn’t think she had much of a chance when she threw her hat in the ring and applied for one of the managerial jobs with the new WPBL.
When league founder Keith Stein called her cell with a job offer to manage the Heights, it seemed at first almost too good to be true. It still feels that way sometimes.
“I come to the ballpark every day just trying to be so intentional and in the moment,” said Henley, a former All-America softball player at San Francisco State and a member of the 1997 Colorado Silver Bullets, a short-lived pro barnstorming women’s team managed by former knuckleballer and Hall of Famer Phil Niekro. “I leave Post-It notes for my players, to have them have memories and learn, and I keep them for myself, too.”
The full-time smile has been plastered on her face since, and even more so after her son accepted the offer to join the coaching staff. Being together, she said, has helped both of them get through the grieving process of losing a husband and father.
“Robert is here with me, in my heart and soul, and I just know he would have loved being here in Springfield,” she says. “I know he would have loved to try to play all the golf courses around here, or sitting on a porch, reading a book here. But it’s been a beautiful thing for Jackson and I to be together, sharing the grieving process together. We were such a sports family.”
Jackson, who played baseball at Skyline College in San Bruno, Calif., knows his days of being a pro player in any league are dwindling, and hopes to keep coaching in the WPBL or anywhere else. Asked what it’s been like as a male coaching females, Jackson Henley just shrugged.
“I haven’t seen many differences between them and (men). If people think (women) are less competitive than guys, that’s way wrong,” he said. “This league and sport is going to really grow, I feel. We’re just at the very bottom of the pyramid now, but we’re growing very quick. It’s all about development, and I’m very happy to be a part of this new league.”
Says Rocky of her son, “He’s a special, 24-year-old young man. He’s always been around me and baseball since he was 3 months old. I have him on my hip when he was that age, in a baseball picture. I was coaching 15-year-old boys and he was 4 years old, running around the dugout. He would kind of be amazed, thinking, ‘Look at these big boys, listening to my mom.’”
The Heights got off to a 5-5 start and enter their Thursday matchup with Los Angeles just a game out of first place behind San Francisco. Rocky Henley praised Springfield as being a “wonderful place to be playing in our first year; the people here have been so good to us.”
She said she expects the WPBL will feature more women, like her, in dugouts very soon.
“Women’s baseball is still niche right now, but one day I do hope we see all female managers and coaches in the dugout,” she said. “That would be the best-case scenario for everybody.”
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: New York Heights manager Rocky Henley makes WPBL role a true family affair