Alexia Jorge has spent her entire career arriving somewhere first. This month, the Lyndhurst native and Saint Elizabeth University alumna added the biggest line yet to that résumé, taking the field as a catcher for the San Francisco Firebells during the inaugural season of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, the first professional pathway for elite female baseball players ever established in the United States.

A Historic League, and a Direct Line Back to New Jersey

The WPBL’s launch this month marks the first American women’s professional baseball league since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League folded in 1954, closing a gap of more than seventy years since women last had a genuine professional pathway in the sport. Jorge was selected 20th overall in the second round of the league’s inaugural draft by San Francisco, and has already made an immediate impact both behind the plate and at it, helping the Firebells open their first WPBL season undefeated.

A Career Built on Firsts

Jorge’s path to professional baseball reads like a running list of barriers that had simply never been tested before she showed up to test them. A catcher out of Lyndhurst High School, she joined Saint Elizabeth University’s baseball program in 2021 as the first female student athlete in the program’s history, and went on to become the first woman to start for the team outright.

In 2024, that trajectory reached a genuinely rare milestone even within the broader, decades long history of women in college baseball. Jorge became just the second woman in NCAA history to start a game at catcher, a position widely considered the sport’s most physically demanding and strategically central role, and is recognized as the first American born woman to start and play a full NCAA baseball game. The following year, she extended that barrier breaking run outside of college baseball entirely, becoming the first woman ever to play in the Coastal Plain League, a highly competitive summer collegiate circuit, suiting up for the Holly Springs Salamanders alongside top Division I men’s baseball talent from across the country.

Jorge’s baseball résumé stretches back even further than her time at Saint Elizabeth. She joined Team USA at just 15 years old, becoming the program’s youngest player at the time, and helped the national team capture a Pan American Games gold medal. That international pedigree carried directly into this summer, when Jorge represented the United States at the 2026 Women’s Baseball World Cup Group Stage just weeks before her professional debut, delivering three hits, three runs, and three RBIs during a lopsided 34 to 0 win over Hong Kong that saw four American pitchers combine on a no hitter.

Building the Next Generation Behind the Plate

Jorge’s impact has not stayed confined to her own playing career. Off the field, she runs a local catching academy specifically built for young girls looking to develop the same specialized skill set that carried her from Lyndhurst to the professional ranks, and hosts a sports mindset podcast called Beyond Limits aimed at helping the next generation of female baseball players build the mental approach the sport demands at its highest levels. For a player whose entire career has been defined by walking into spaces where a woman had never competed before, that mentorship work reads less like a side project than a continuation of the same mission that has carried her career from a New Jersey youth field all the way to a professional roster in San Francisco.

For Saint Elizabeth University, a small Morristown institution founded more than 125 years ago on the specific premise of expanding opportunity for women, Jorge’s professional debut carries a weight that extends well beyond athletics. Her career has become a direct, current day expression of the university’s own founding mission, proof that the barriers she broke on SEU’s own baseball field were never really about baseball at all, but about whether a woman would be allowed to compete on the same terms as anyone else, and then simply be judged on what she could actually do once she got the chance.