Jamie McCourt
Bringing Women Into Baseball
By Susan Josephs

Jamie McCourt was the type of girl who played coed street games of baseball and reveled in her image as a neighborhood tomboy. "I always wanted to be the first picked on a team," she says. "I was always highly competitive and I never thought of myself as different from the boys."

A longstanding passion for baseball and confidence in her abilities has paid off for McCourt, who became the top female baseball executive when she and her husband bought the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2004. As president and vice-chair of a major league baseball team, McCourt, 53, oversees all aspects of the business, from leading weekly meetings with senior management to launching strategic development, marketing and outreach initiatives. One of her recent programs, called Dodgers WIN (Women’s Initiative and Network), offers clinics, seminars and other female-friendly events that McCourt hopes will expand the role of women in baseball.

"Forty percent of our fan base is female, but very few women are visible in baseball," she says. "What we want to do is create partnerships, so women can have a relationship with the Dodgers that stretches beyond the game."

McCourt also has little patience for anyone who has a problem with a woman being at the helm of the storied baseball team. "The reality is any woman who’s in business has experienced various kinds of biases," she says. "My personal feeling is that it’s best to focus on your job and do it well and let that define you rather than someone else’s opinion."

Since relocating to Los Angeles from Boston three years ago with their four sons, McCourt and her husband have maintained their involvement in the Jewish community, giving generously to Jewish charities and recently receiving the Scopus Award from the American Friends of Hebrew University. "There’s definitely an awareness in my family of how important it is to have Judaism in our lives," she says. "To me, Judaism is a reflection of values for family life, and I also associate it with my love for learning."

Raised in Baltimore, Md., McCourt grew up as a secular Jew "with a strong connection to Israel." At the age of nine, she told her mother she wanted to own a baseball team. She went on to study French at Georgetown University, receive a law degree from the University of Maryland and earn an MBA from MIT, where she wanted to do her thesis on buying a baseball team or building a ballpark but "not a single professor would sponsor it," she says.

Transforming the Dodgers into a family business is nothing new for McCourt. After 15 years with her own law practice, she spent a decade as vice president and general counsel of The McCourt Company, her husband’s real estate development firm. "We have completely different skill sets," she says of working successfully with her husband. "He’s the visionary and I’m the one who actualizes the vision."

So far, that has included turning around a team that had been losing $50 million a year, spending some $50 million on improvements to Dodger Stadium and reaching out to hundreds of thousands of the L.A. area’s underserved youth through the Dodgers Dream Foundation. "I go to every single home game," she adds. "I’m always in the same seat, so you know where to find me."

An optimist by nature, McCourt believes that five years from now, the Dodgers "will certainly have won the World Series. And in the meantime, I have the most amazing life," she says. "I’m truly living the American dream."