In Her Cleats

A granddaughter retraces her grandmother’s unlikely rise into the All‑American Girls Professional Baseball League, questioning how a southern woman’s leap of courage shaped generations of women in her family and beyond.

Sydney is a southern misfit, performing local theater in her hometown, downtown Greenville, a couple blocks from the same mill villages, ballfields, and backroads her grandmother once knew. But only now, at 31 and between jobs, is she beginning to unravel the story of her grandmother, Viola Thompson — a 22‑year‑old mill worker who boarded her first train alone in 1943 to chase a chance at professional baseball. This documentary follows Sydney on a cross‑country road trip as she retraces Viola’s footsteps from Greenville to the Midwest, gathering tape from archives, ballparks, family members, and the women carrying the sport forward today. Along the way, she confronts her own questions about courage, ambition, and what it means for a Southern woman to leave everything familiar behind. The project becomes both a historical excavation and a personal reckoning with the ways women’s stories are inherited, reshaped, or forgotten across generations.

Director | Sydney Farthing