{"id":523,"date":"2024-03-21T16:20:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T16:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/?p=523"},"modified":"2025-02-05T15:51:56","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T15:51:56","slug":"living-my-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/2024\/03\/21\/living-my-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Living my dream\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dr. Kat Williams looks at her career and sees herself as fortunate.<\/p>\n

Not every professor has gotten to work in a place that allows you to morph and grow, she says, and not everyone gets to have a job that that makes you excited about getting out of bed each morning.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/p>\n

Williams has had both.<\/p>\n

As she prepares to retire this year and deliver her last lecture at 6 p.m. Monday, March 25, in the Shawkey Room of the Memorial Student Center, Williams hopes that she\u2019s left her students with some lasting lessons, and she hopes to continue her role as an educator, but with an entirely different mission.<\/p>\n

As the new CEO of the International Women\u2019s Baseball Center (IWBC), based in Rockford, Illinois, she hopes to spread the word about the history and the continued importance of women in the male-dominated sport.<\/p>\n

The title of her lecture on March 25: \u201cWhy Women\u2019s History?\u201d It\u2019s free and open to everyone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is how I started every class I ever taught at Marshall,\u201d Williams said. \u201cI thought it was appropriate to start my last lecture that way as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams has been at Marshall for 23 years, teaching U.S. women\u2019s history and the history of sports. She\u2019s been on a leave of absence this academic year, after being named the CEO of the IWBC last year, following nine years of service to the organization in other capacities.<\/p>\n

\n\t“\u2018It\u2019s all about perspective.\u2019 That is my teaching philosophy in one sentence.”<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t- Dr. Kat Williams<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n

At Marshall, she hopes she\u2019s taught more than simply the facts of history.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope that I have also inspired students to question, to understand that history is an interpretation and that it changes, that it is important for them to think for themselves, to analyze and be critical and not just take whatever the narrative is as gospel,\u201d Williams said. \u201cThe phrase I always use is, \u2018It\u2019s all about perspective.\u2019 That is my teaching philosophy in one sentence. No matter what we\u2019re talking about, there is always more than one perspective,\u00a0whether we\u2019re talking about World War II, politics, or the Suffrage movement. \u00a0Unless we read about, listen and think about those perspectives, we don\u2019t really have a clear understanding of whatever the event is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams also is a former director of Women\u2019s Studies at Marshall and hopes that she\u2019s left both men and women who took her classes with the message that women are an important part of the narrative, just as men are.<\/p>\n

\n\t“It\u2019s OK to be loud. It\u2019s OK to take up space and have a different opinion and be whatever you want to be.”<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t- Dr. Kat Williams<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n

\u201cI hope I have left, certainly, young women with even a tiny bit of inspiration,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s OK to be loud. It\u2019s OK to take up space and have a different opinion and be whatever you want to be. I feel that if I\u2019ve done that for even a few students, my career has been successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly what she plans to do in her new role leading the IWBC, an organization which she helped found in 2014 and for which she has been board president. \u00a0Its mission is to preserve and protect the history of girls and women in all aspects of baseball internationally. It runs the historic field where the Rockford Peaches played in the 1940s and 50s, and the organization is in a capital campaign to raise funds for a new building to house a museum, a hall of fame and also location for clinics and other activities.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s baseball has long been an area of interest for her, beginning when she was a girl playing baseball in the street or the fields around her house.<\/p>\n

\u201cI played competitive fast pitch softball, also pre-Title IX,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She has authored two books about women in baseball: \u201c<\/strong>The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives\u201d and \u201cIsabel \u2018Lefty\u2019 Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star.\u201d She\u2019s writing a third book about baseball player Maybelle Blair.<\/p>\n

In her years teaching at Marshall, the Department of History supported Williams as her interest in sports grew, she said.<\/p>\n

\"Headshot<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was hired as a women\u2019s history professor at Marshall, I was very fortunate to enter into a history department that supported me and allowed me to morph and change as my interests changed,\u201d she said. \u201cI brought in women\u2019s history and women\u2019s sport history classes and regular sport history classes as we began, outside, to create the International Women\u2019s Baseball Center. \u00a0My department and the College of Liberal Arts supported that growth and my efforts, and I would not have been able to change and grow as an academic and as a professional had it not been for their support.\u201d<\/p>\n

This new chapter is already busy and exciting, she said, adding that along with leading fundraising, she serves as the face of the IWBC, which involves speaking publicly, doing podcasts and getting involved in awareness opportunities. Women\u2019s baseball is huge internationally, she said, with the United States not even close to leading the 37 countries that have women who play.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt may be 2024, but the reality is that many people say, \u2018Why does this matter? Girls just play softball.\u2019 Yeah, they don\u2019t,\u201d she said. \u201cWomen have always been part of baseball. It didn\u2019t start in 1943 with the All Americans and it didn\u2019t stop in the 1954 when the All Americans ended.\u201d<\/p>\n

An educator to the core, she\u2019s just educating in a new way, Williams said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am living my dream,\u201d she said. \u201cThe IWBC and what we\u2019re doing, that is why I\u2019m on the planet. I\u2019m very confident in that and very fortunate.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Kat Williams looks at her career and sees herself as fortunate. Not every professor has gotten to work in a place that allows you to morph and grow, she says, and not everyone gets to have a job that that makes you excited about getting out of bed each morning. Williams has had both. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":973,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions\/973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}