Rise and shine

``Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as crazy, we see them as genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

NASHUA, N.H. -- Sitting in a sparsely decorated office, Robin Wallace turns her chair to glance up at one of the mint-green walls where a dry-erase board displays her handwritten mantra.

``Yeah, I like that," Wallace says of the quote from Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers.

Of course she does. Wallace, the general manager of the Can-Am League's Nashua Pride, has spent her life fighting rules others have tried to apply to her.

The path to the unassuming office overlooking Holman Stadium was a winding one for Wallace, starting in Mobile, Ala., where a young girl, an only child, grew up in a neighborhood of boys.

``When they went to sign up for tee-ball, I went, too," said Wallace, one of only a handful of women currently working in professional baseball management. ``I just fell in love with it. After they had long stopped playing, I was still playing baseball. Every year they'd say, `This is going to be your last year. You're a girl, you have to go play softball with the girls.' "

She tried softball in her freshman year of high school, but it was slow-pitch; Wallace was a junkball pitcher whose curve hit about 70 miles per hour. Her high school had a baseball team, yes, but she wasn't allowed to try out. It wasn't the first time Wallace faced resistance for being a girl in a boys' world, and it wouldn't be the last, but ask the 29-year-old about the harassment, the threats, and she passes it off as no big deal.

But her mother, Linda, who was recently in Nashua for a weeklong visit, remembered her little girl crying after being sent home because she didn't have the right paperwork, even after a tryout with the baseball team had been agreed to.

On this day at Holman Stadium, Wallace isn't thinking about high school troubles. Today, her troubles are electrical. The stadium's Kid's Zone, consisting of four giant inflatable obstacle courses set up outside the fence on the third base side, is the issue. It's the morning of manager Butch Hobson's baseball camp, and little boys in dirty uniforms and stocking feet are filing through the lines and down the slides.

Wallace and Chris Hall, the Pride's director of baseball operations, are huddled in the bottom level of a boarded-up crow's nest. Cords are running around their feet and a safety inspector is explaining the problem: too much power going through cords too small to handle it.

This is Wallace's life on the business side of things, constantly switching hats. After the electrical problems are resolved, she retreats to her office, where the phone on her desk and the one clipped to her belt alternately ring. Also on this day, she will deal with a broken left-field messageboard, discuss uniforms for the North American Women's Baseball League -- of which she is executive director -- lock up former Bruin Brad Park for the Pride's upcoming Hockey Night, and calm a worried mother whose daughter is scheduled to sing on Bode Miller Night.

The Pride signed the Olympic skier to a one-game contract as part of the ongoing effort to boost attendance -- a primary part of Wallace's job. Miller played in front of 2,929 fans, the Pride's third sellout of the season.

When Wallace took over as GM in May, just two weeks before the season began, she was charged with getting fans into the stadium. So far, she has. Opening-night attendance more than doubled from 2005, and the average crowd this season is hovering around 1,600, a marked increased from last year.

For team owner John Stabile, hiring Wallace wasn't about gender. He hired her because she was capable and qualified; Wallace passed the bar exam in February and was working at a law firm in Lawrence, Mass., when she was hired.

For Wallace, there's been just one gender issue in Nashua.

``When I want to go into the locker room, or somebody asks me to go into the locker room, I'm like, `Wait. Is there somebody in there?' " she said. ``If that's my biggest problem, as far as being a woman, then I feel like it's not really a big deal."

Wallace already has a full schedule, but when she took the job and moved to New Hampshire, she was also seeking a home for the NAWBL, which has four teams in its New England Division, one of which she plays for.

Stabile welcomed the NAWBL to Holman; his wife played baseball and he knows women have few opportunities in the sport. It was also clear to him how serious Wallace is about the league.

It was after her sophomore year of high school that Wallace first realized people didn't want her playing baseball. But she was young and undaunted. She decided to transfer after a former coach took a job at a neighboring high school and invited her there. After months of resistance that required a civil rights lawyer to overcome, Wallace made the switch in time to play varsity baseball her senior year.

That season, that fight, was enough, Wallace thought. She had a bad shoulder that required surgery, she was going to be a freshman at Tulane, and she wanted to be a lawyer. No more baseball, she said. Time to move on.

But after having the surgery, Wallace changed her mind. She wanted to play but knew Division 1 was out of the question. So she transferred to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., a Division 3 school. She made the baseball team (and the equestrian team) but soon realized she wasn't welcome.

``It was a really tough experience," Wallace said. ``It was a very conservative environment. At South, guys wear coat and tie to class, girls wear Sunday dress. It's a neat place, but they did not want a girl on their baseball team. They made that perfectly clear."

Her teammates sent subtle messages to that effect. They refused to partner with her for warmup drills and ignored her on the bench during games. The subtlety turned blatant, and scary, when one teammate threatened Wallace.

``They told her, `You better watch your back,' " Linda Wallace recalled with tears in her eyes. ``They said they were out to get her, that they were going to throw at her head. That was when I took her out. Enough."

So Wallace went back to Tulane and played club baseball, unaware that there were other women out there who were playing the game at higher levels. After college, Wallace heard about the New England Women's Baseball League, which was based in Boston. She packed her car, moved to Boston, and joined. The league folded in 2002, but in 2003, Nick Lopardo, owner of the Can-Am League's North Shore Spirit, agreed to fund the NAWBL.

After the league's first year, Lopardo asked Wallace to be its director, a job she took without hesitation. That led to an assistant GM spot with the Spirit in 2005. When she left the Spirit earlier this year to take the bar exam, she thought, finally, she was done with baseball. But some habits, Wallace said, are tough to shake.

``My whole life, I thought I was the only one who had encountered these difficulties," Wallace said, ``that I was the only girl that wanted to play baseball. After I found women's baseball I realized there's so many young girls who have the same dream, who are still encountering these same difficulties, and today, 10 years later, are still fighting.

``When I'm in the women's league now, and see a young girl who's trying to play high school baseball, and she wins the battle, it's so rewarding. It's the best feeling in the world. It was worth everything I went through if I made even one step easier for her."