The origin of softball.

In the circle

It is July in Georgia and 90 degrees. The air is wet and there is no shade on the field. The infield is red clay, dust in the sun and mud after the rain. In the circle, steel cleats have dug a hole in front of the pitching rubber, one pitch at a time. There are holes where the catcher sets up and in the batter’s box where the hitters stand, from the games played before.

A pitcher stands on the rubber with a yellow ball in her hand. The plate is 43 feet away and the bases are 60 feet apart. Eight teammates are set around her, and nothing happens until she lets the ball go.

It comes underhand. The first rules said it had to, with a straight arm and no curve. Hers goes all the way around. At 70 miles an hour the ball is on the hitter in about a third of a second. She has that long to see it, decide and swing.

Almost nothing else in her game was there at the start. The first diamond was 27 feet a side, and the pitcher stood 22 feet from the plate. The ball measured 17 inches around. It was winter, the game was indoors, and the players were all men.

The clay, the distance, the ball, the fences, the leagues and the crowds all came later. So did the girls and women whose names fill most of this story. It starts in Chicago, on a holiday, with grown men throwing a boxing glove around a gymnasium.

The record at a glance

Chicago, November 1887

The frolic

Nobody planned it. Thanksgiving fell on November 24 in 1887, and about 20 members of the Farragut Boat Club had gathered at their clubhouse at 31st Street and Lake Park Avenue, as they did on holidays. It was a rowing club that had lost one boathouse after another to Lake Michigan, to winter storms and once to ice that came ashore, and built again each time. Chicago was a baseball city, and winter was the one thing that stopped the game.

In the gymnasium the members were throwing a boxing glove around the hall, and one of them took a swing at it with a broom. George W. Hancock called out, “Say, boys, let’s play base ball.”

So they did. They hauled a wrestling mat around cornerwise for a diamond and spent the afternoon sliding around the hall. The rules were whatever boys played by on the prairie and whatever the members remembered from the league. Hancock’s own guide calls it a frolic.

Hancock was the one who saw a game in it. When the afternoon was over he told them the thing could be worked into a real game for indoors. If they came back Saturday night he would bring rules, and a ball and a bat that would do no damage to the room.

Hancock went home, hauled out a copy of the league rules and set to work. The room set the problems he had to solve. The hall was small, so the diamond shrank to 27 feet a side. The hall could be damaged, so the bat was thin and the ball was soft, and to the Tribune it looked as big as a toy balloon. Augustus J. White, who worked with Hancock at the Board of Trade, made the ball.

The pitch was underhand, with a straight arm. The bases were canvas bags half filled with sand and left loose on the floor, and a runner who slid into one and took it along was safe as long as he held on. One rule held a runner on his base until the pitch reached the catcher. It has eased since and has never gone away. Hancock’s runner was called back. Today a runner who leaves early can be called out, at every level of the game.

On Saturday night they came back and brought an audience. Two nines were chosen, and the first score on record is 41 to 40. The Tribune later called that game “peculiarly ludicrous” and put the score down to players who were new to it. By the end of the night the game had a name, indoor base ball. It was two days old.

1888 to 1895

Out of the room

The Farragut Boat Club could not keep its game to itself. By the end of that first winter its team was playing other clubs, and by the winter of 1888-89 the clubs had a Midwinter League. On November 24, 1889, two years to the day after the frolic, the Tribune reported the winter season open, with the Farraguts beating the Idlewilds of Evanston 8 to 7. The scores had come a long way down from 41 to 40.

A year later the rules were in a newspaper. A clipping of November 1890 credits Hancock and White together as the inventors and prints 19 of them. Hancock published his own guide in 1891, in a red paper cover at 15 cents, and the Spalding guides went on calling him the game’s inventor for years. The first accounts name Hancock and White and no one else. What each account holds is set out behind this story.

The crowds had not waited for the rules to be printed. By the early 1890s a yearly charity game at the Auditorium was drawing more than 3,500 people. Cycling clubs took the game up, bankers formed a league in 1890, and by the winter of 1891-92 more than 100 teams were playing in the city’s amateur leagues. In December 1895, 10 of the city’s high schools formed a league of their own.

Women had been at the games from the first winters. They came as guests of the members, and on some nights they were most of the crowd. For eight years the record has them in the seats. Then young women on Chicago’s West Side organized a team of their own.

1895 to 1908

The young women of West Division

They were students at West Division High School, and the year was 1895. Theirs is the earliest girls’ team on record. A teacher at the school, Milo S. Walker, sponsored and coached them, by Robert Pruter’s history, and in print he called them young women. For years that was all there was. Nobody tried to coach them to play another school until the winter of 1899, Walker wrote.

Then the games came. By 1901 three West Side high schools had a girls’ league, and West Division took the title. The league did not come back for a second season. The other two schools would not play, and West Division’s own explanation was that its team was too strong for them.

Walker took their case to the country. In the Spalding guide of 1903 he reported that his players used the standard rules, the regulation diamond and the regulation bat and ball. A lighter, softer ball would make a better game, he wrote, and Spalding had sent him one to try. He knew the common opinion that women could not throw a ball. His players had settled it. “There are natural ball players among women,” he wrote.

He also saw what the game was up against. Women were playing more basketball than indoor base ball, he wrote, and the first reason he gave was the crowd. People understood basketball. Most of those who came to watch women play indoors did not understand base ball.

In 1908 the Spalding guide printed a photograph of a girls’ team from a park on the South Side. Nine players sit and stand around their athletic instructor, and the caption gives last names only. Two of the players are Bells. Under the names it reads Bessemer Park, Chicago, Ill., Girls’ Indoor Base Ball Club.

1895 to 1953

Outdoors, and a name

Indoor was still in the game’s name in 1908, but the game had been leaving the gymnasium for years. In 1895, the year the young women of West Division organized, Lewis Rober Sr., a Minneapolis fire lieutenant, laid out a diamond on a vacant lot beside his firehouse to fill his firemen’s idle hours. His team was the Kittens, and the outdoor game took one of its first names from them, kitten ball. In Chicago players began taking it outside about 1907, and there it was playground ball.

Indoors, Walker had read it right. Winter gymnasiums made three games in eight years. Indoor base ball was the first. Basketball came out of one in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891 and volleyball out of one in Holyoke in 1895. Basketball took the gymnasiums. In 1925 indoor base ball was still the most popular intramural sport in Chicago’s public high schools, with 7,069 girls on 569 teams, and by the end of the decade it was gone.

Girls in Chicago’s high schools could play it only among themselves. When two schools’ teams did meet in 1912, the school authorities allowed no audience. The city’s high school league barred their contests against outside teams in every sport but swimming, golf and tennis, and after the 1926 season the school authorities stopped the games that had gone on anyway. A girl who wanted a game against somebody else now had to look outside her school. For decades afterward girls of high school age found their games on park and playground teams, church teams, clubs and industrial leagues.

The game they found out there went by different names in different cities. It was kitten ball in Minneapolis and playground ball in Chicago. Others called it mushball, pumpkin ball, twilight ball or lightning ball. In 1926 Walter Hakanson, a physical education director in Denver, proposed one name for every version. Softball.

A name was not a rulebook. The game had no unified set of playing rules in 1933. That was the year it came home. Chicago held a World’s Fair, and a sportswriter, Leo Fischer, and a sporting goods salesman, Michael J. Pauley, organized a national tournament to go with it. More than 1,000 Chicago teams of men, women, girls and boys played that summer for a place in it. The tournament had three classes, fastballers, slow pitch and women, and Chicago teams won all three.

The Amateur Softball Association (ASA) came out of that tournament. It is known today as USA Softball, the sport’s national governing body, and under a law Congress passed in 1978 softball can have only one. It picks Team USA, from the 15-and-under girls to the Olympic team. Its youth program is the Junior Olympic program. It runs the park in Oklahoma City where the Women’s College World Series is played.

Softball was a national game within two years of that first tournament. By September 1935 Time counted about 2 million players, more than 60,000 organized teams and about 1,000 lighted parks. The national tournament that month drew 40 men’s teams, 16 women’s teams and crowds put at 150,000 over three days. In 1939 the rules set the pitcher 43 feet from the plate for men and 35 feet for women.

It was more than one game. Slow pitch got a national championship of its own in September 1953, and Chicago kept a game of its own, played with a 16-inch ball and bare hands. This story follows the fast game, the one called fastpitch, a word Merriam-Webster dates to 1939.

Companies put their names on teams. Fred Zollner’s Fort Wayne Pistons played men’s fastpitch starting in 1940 and won the national title in 1945, and the same company’s basketball team is the Detroit Pistons. Caterpillar formed a men’s team and a women’s team in 1936.

1929 to 1976

Company names

For a generation the best women’s teams carried the names of the companies that paid their way, a brewery, a tractor maker and a raisin company among them. The brewery’s team was the New Orleans Jax, who won five national titles between 1942 and 1947. Freda Savona led them, and at one time they won 89 of 90 games.

Caterpillar’s women were the Dieselettes of Peoria, Illinois, and their pitcher was M. Marie Wadlow. She pitched from 1929 to 1950 and won 341 games, and in 1957 she was the first woman named to the National Softball Hall of Fame. She worked for the company too, and retired from Caterpillar in 1977. Her last national tournament was in San Antonio in 1950, and her last game there went 17 innings in the afternoon heat. She lost it 1 to 0 to the Ramblers of Phoenix, whose pitcher, Margie Law, drove in the only run.

Her greatest thrill in softball, she said, was watching what the Ramblers did next. They had about two hours to rest. That evening they beat the undefeated club from Orange, California 1 to 0 in 11 innings, rested half an hour and played Orange again for the title. They lost 3 to 1 in 15. It came to 43 innings in about 11 hours, by Wadlow’s count.

One pitcher threw all 26 innings of those last two games for Orange. A line drive knocked her to the ground in one of them, and she got up and finished the tournament, as Wadlow told it. She was Bertha Ragan Tickey, and she was not close to done. She won 757 games between 1939 and 1968 and threw 162 no-hitters. Orange won the next two national titles as well.

Then Fresno took the title in 1953 and 1954, beating Orange 2 to 0 each time, and took it again in 1957. Bernie Amaral managed the Rockets, the first woman to lead a team at that level by the Fresno hall’s account. The team had started as the San Joaquin Maids, named for a raisin company.

Its players held full-time jobs and drove across the country to tournaments in two or three station wagons with no air conditioning. One of them was Kay Rich of Los Angeles, who played every position but pitcher. When the women’s pitching distance went from 35 feet to 38 in 1952, she batted .400 in the national tournament.

A company name could also leave. Orange lost its sponsor, and in 1956 Tickey crossed the country to Stratford, Connecticut, where a manufacturer had put its name on the Raybestos Brakettes. Two years later another Brakettes pitcher, Joan Joyce, relieved her and pitched four and two-thirds innings without a hit, and the Brakettes won their first national championship.

In August 1961 Joyce pitched to Ted Williams at a fundraiser in Waterbury, Connecticut, in front of 17,000 people. He fouled off three pitches and never put one in fair territory. Then he threw his bat down and said he could not hit it, by the account of softball’s world confederation.

Tickey retired after the national championship of 1967. The Brakettes still had three pitchers, Joyce and Donna Lopiano among them. Then Lopiano left for graduate school and another had shoulder surgery, and Tickey came back for one more season. She went 25 and 1, and the Brakettes won the title again. Lopiano had played in the first world championship in 1965. She went on to run women’s athletics at the University of Texas from 1975 to 1992, and then the Women’s Sports Foundation until 2007.

All of that was the amateur game. Some women were paid to play. A wartime professional league, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, opened in 1943 playing softball’s game under baseball’s rules. It moved toward baseball year by year and was throwing overhand by 1948.

Chicago had a professional league of its own from 1944 to 1954. It began as the National Girls Softball League, took the name National Girls Baseball League for the 1946 season and pitched underhand to the end. Its players, in the record kept at the University of Notre Dame, included Gwen Wong, a Chinese American pitcher with the Bloomer Girls in 1947, and Nancy Ito, a Japanese American shortstop with the Bloomer Girls in 1953.

The record of Black women in the game is scattered. On August 28, 1938 the Owls Club of Seattle, a team of Black women, won the Washington state championship 21 to 1 with Lillian Brown pitching, by CNN’s account of the team and the writer Shaun Scott’s. Betty Chapman, an outfielder, made her debut in Chicago’s league with the Music Maids on July 18, 1951, the first African American professional softball player by the account of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL).

Billie Harris of Phoenix started with the Sunshine Girls in 1948 and joined the Ramblers. She was three times a first-team All-American and the MVP of the national tournament in 1969, when she won four games and batted .400. In 1982 she became the first African American woman in the Hall of Fame.

Joyce tried the paid game as well. She pitched for the Brakettes through 1975, and in 1976 she helped found a professional league of 10 teams. By then the colleges had a tournament of their own.

From 1969

The college game

The colleges came to the game late. Women who taught in them had been writing it down since before its name was settled. In 1929 Gladys Palmer, a professor of physical education at Ohio State, published Baseball for Girls and Women, and women physical educators kept publishing their own softball rules and guides for girls and women into the 1980s. The college game itself had no national tournament until 1969.

It began with a check. Omaha was known then as the softball capital of America, and the city’s softball association asked Connie Claussen, who chaired women’s physical education at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, to help start a college tournament. The check she was handed was for about $5,000. That was three years before Title IX. She was a co-director of the first tournament and stayed with it through its first decade. John F. Kennedy College of Wahoo, Nebraska won the first three titles and closed in 1975, so the first dynasty in college softball belongs to a school that is gone.

Then the law changed. Title IX passed in 1972. Fewer than 10,000 girls had played high school softball the year before. By 2018-19 the count was 362,038. Illinois, where the young women of West Division had played in 1895, held its first state softball tournament for girls in 1976.

In 1975, three years after the law passed, a tornado hit Omaha a week before the tournament and left the bleachers in the trees. “We could only play on two diamonds,” Claussen told ESPN in 2024. The team she coached won the title, and a few days later its players were told to turn in their uniforms. The volleyball team needed them. The tournament is the Women’s College World Series, and it is played each spring in Oklahoma City.

The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) governed women’s college sports in those years. In the spring of 1982 two tournaments carried the name, the association’s in Norman, Oklahoma and the first held by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), in Omaha. The association closed that summer.

Women top the NCAA’s coaching records. Among coaches with at least 10 years in Division I, the two highest winning percentages belong to Sue Enquist, at .835, and Sharron Backus, at .831. Both coached the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and their years there overlapped. The most wins belong to Carol Hutchins, with 1,709 at Ferris State and Michigan. Mike Candrea of Arizona is next, then Patty Gasso of Oklahoma, who is still coaching, then Margie Wright of Illinois State and Fresno State.

In 2024 Marissa Young of Duke became the first Black head coach to take a team to the Women’s College World Series, by the count of the coaches’ association and her university. “I hope that it continues to open up doors for others,” she told the Associated Press that year. Veronica Wiggins won 726 games and 13 conference titles at Florida A&M from 1990 to 2020, and in 2005 Bethune-Cookman became the first team from a historically Black university in any sport to reach a Super Regional.

Title IX reached the field itself. In 1997 two softball players at a Florida high school and their father sued over a baseball field with lights, a scoreboard and a batting cage beside a softball field with none of them. In Daniels v. School Board of Brevard County a federal judge found they were likely to win under Title IX and gave the district until January 26, 1998 to light the softball field or stop using the lights on the baseball field.

Georgia’s high schools played slow pitch for state titles starting in 1981, and on April 23, 2026 they played what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called the sport’s likely last slow-pitch final. Their association sanctioned fastpitch in 1994. Two years later the Olympic Games came to Georgia.

1921 to 2023

The Games

The best players in the world came to Columbus, Georgia in July 1996. Softball’s first Olympic tournament was played there, as part of the Atlanta Games, with eight nations.

The gold medal game on July 30 was scoreless in the third inning when Dot Richardson, the American shortstop, hit a two-run home run down the right field line. Richardson was 34 and on a year’s leave from her residency in orthopedic surgery. China’s coach argued through an interpreter for nine minutes that the ball was foul. “It definitely was fair,” Richardson said. The United States won 3 to 1. Michele Granger was the winning pitcher, and Lisa Fernandez got the last four outs. That chapter is on Born in Georgia, and every Olympic game is on the record at fastpitch.dev.

The game had been abroad for 75 years by then. It reached Japan in 1921, brought home by Buichi Ohtani, a professor at the Tokyo Higher Normal School who had been sent abroad to study. In 1965 five nations played the first world championship, the women’s, in Melbourne, and Australia beat the United States 1 to 0 for the title. Japan won the second, at Osaka in 1970.

The United States won the first three gold medals. Fernandez, who had won 42 games in a row at UCLA, pitched the finals of 2000 and 2004. Then the sport lost its place on a tie. In July 2005 the International Olympic Committee set the program for 2012, and softball’s vote ended 52 to 52 with one member abstaining, short of the majority it needed.

It had one Games left. At Beijing in 2008 Yukiko Ueno of Japan threw 413 pitches in two days, 28 innings across three games, and Japan beat the United States 3 to 1 for the gold. Softball missed the next two Games. When it came back at Tokyo in 2021, 13 years later, Ueno was 39 and still the winning pitcher, 2 to 0 over the United States, and Canada won its first Olympic medal in the sport.

It missed Paris, and on October 16, 2023 it was added for the Los Angeles Games of 2028. In five tournaments 14 nations have played. A sixth is set for 2028, and nothing past it is promised.

The game abroad

The world

The Games have had room for 14 nations. At the end of 2025 the women’s world ranking listed 70 national programs, led by Japan, the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada and Chinese Taipei. Softball’s own federation merged with baseball’s in 2013 to form the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC). The confederation’s secretary general since 2014 is Low Beng Choo, a former Malaysia player.

The countries at the top build players in different ways. Japan’s top league, the JD.League, began in 2022 with 16 teams, most carrying company names, as the best American teams once did. Australia’s federation runs its own ladder of age-group squads, camps and tours. A softball league for women opened in Mexico in 2024 with six teams, backed by the country’s professional baseball league, and had eight a year later. Players cross the borders too. Before the Tokyo Games, 17 of the 19 players on Mexico’s roster were listed as living in the United States.

For an American girl a road to the national team now starts in her own region. USA Softball opened its High Performance Program in 2020, with identifier events in 10 regions for age groups from U-13 to U-18. Its senior teams are chosen from its own tournaments and the college game.

Wherever they come from, the women of that game pitch from 43 feet. The international rulebook moved there on January 1, 2002. The American colleges had been there for 15 years.

From 1987

The modern game

The 43 feet she pitches from reached the college game for the 1987 season. Before it, the college game belonged to pitchers. The first NCAA final, in 1982, ended 2 to 0. Debbie Doom of UCLA threw 102 scoreless innings in a row in 1984. Her teammate Tracy Compton had an ERA of 0.04 the year before. Both are still the records in the NCAA’s book. In 1986 the hitters of Division I batted .223. Then the pitcher moved back 3 feet. In a single year the batting average rose to .247 and strikeouts fell by almost a fifth.

In 1993 championship play took up the ball she holds, optic yellow with raised red seams. In its first season the batting average rose from .251 to .265. Two years later Laura Espinoza of Arizona hit 37 home runs, when the record 10 years before had been 18. Hers is still the season record in the NCAA’s book. The Division I final of 1996 produced 10 runs.

Until 1996 college softball had no rulebook of its own. It played by the amateur association’s rules with changes, and that June the NCAA’s softball rules committee met for the first time, in Kansas City, to write one. Sharon J. Drysdale, the head coach at Northwestern, was its chair. The high schools moved to 43 feet for the 2010-11 school year. A 10U pitcher still throws from 35 feet and a 12U pitcher from 40.

The numbers kept moving after the distance settled. A Division I team in 2015 hit home runs at more than six times the rate of a team in 1987. Scoring reached its record the same year, and strikeouts climbed back with the power. The NCAA’s table does not say why.

The players of those years rewrote the record book. Jennie Finch of Arizona won 60 games in a row from April 2000 to April 2002. Cat Osterman of Texas struck out 14.34 batters per seven innings over her career. Monica Abbott of Tennessee won 189 games. She struck out 2,440 batters. Jocelyn Alo of Oklahoma hit 122 home runs. Each is the record in the NCAA’s book.

2012 to 2025

Faster

In 1987 the colleges moved the pitcher back 3 feet, from 40 to 43. The pitchers answered. Strikeouts had fallen with the move, and by 2010 they stood at a record. And the pitchers kept getting faster. Monica Abbott threw 77 miles an hour in a professional game in 2012. On May 24, 2025 Karlyn Pickens of Tennessee threw 79.4, the fastest pitch recorded in the sport by her university’s account.

Speed is half of it. In 2005 Jennie Finch pitched to major league hitters for a television show, and most of them could not put the ball in play. Her pitch reached the plate in about the time of a big league fastball in the mid-90s, by Sports Illustrated’s account, and reaction alone is too slow for either. A hitter reads the pitcher before the ball is gone, and those hitters had never learned to read an underhand delivery.

The delivery changed too. Hancock’s rulebook banned the curve, and curves were legal by 1904. For most of the modern game a pitcher had to drag her back foot through the dirt. USA Softball made the leap legal for women and girls, the colleges followed for the 2024 season and the high schools the same year. One thing is still illegal in every rulebook. A pitcher may not land and push off a second time. That is the crow hop. It moves the pitcher closer, and the distance belongs to the hitter too.

Everything on her field is close. The pitcher stands 43 feet from the plate and the bases are 60 feet apart, where baseball has 60 feet 6 inches and 90. A Division I shortstop is expected to run home to first in 2.8 seconds or less, by one recruiting service’s guidelines, and the fastest runners do it in under 2.6. Every throw on a runner has to beat her there.

Fastpitch is the word for it. The coaches took it in 1996, when the National Softball Coaches Association, founded in 1983 with Connie Claussen among its first officers, became the National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA). The national club circuits formed in 2010 and 2020 carry it in their names, and the industry that makes her bat counts her under it. Her school and her governing body still say softball. One of this game’s first names was kitten ball.

What it asks of her

The battery

The windmill costs the arm something. When 24 pitchers from the 1996 Olympic Games were filmed for a study published in 2006, the pull on the shoulder averaged about 80 percent of body weight. In a study of weekend softball tournaments, pitchers ages 14 to 18 averaged 82 pitches a day, and by the last day their arms were weaker on eight of nine strength tests.

A 2025 review reported one study that tied more than 85 pitches a game to higher injury risk over a season, and its authors wrote that a safe workload has not been established. Most fastpitch leagues set no pitch count.

Softball has an injury record of its own now. The NCAA’s injury program counted 1,511 injuries in women’s softball from 2014-15 through 2018-19, 3.92 for every 1,000 times a player took part in a practice or a game. Infielders had 31 percent of them, outfielders 24, pitchers 16 and catchers 12. Concussion was the most common single injury, and 59 percent of concussions came from contact with equipment. The 12 percent counts every kind of injury. The study does not sort concussions by position, so it cannot say how many of those were a catcher’s.

Corner infielders often play 15 feet or more in front of the bag. A face guard on the batting helmet is required in high school softball and optional in college, and a fielder’s mask is left to the player in both, the pitcher included. In one laboratory study softballs were fired at infield masks on a test head, at the average batted ball speed of a high school girl. The ball bent the plastic masks until it touched the face, and the metal masks did better.

What is measured

The science

The equipment answers to a laboratory. USA Softball certifies a bat only if the ball comes off it at 98 miles an hour or less in the test. Batting helmets, catchers’ helmets and face guards are built to published standards. Since August 2025 the standard for catchers’ helmets has had a softball-only class. Its cage is tested against softballs alone, and a softball is bigger than a baseball, so the cage can open wider at the catcher’s eyes. USA Softball and the high schools require throat protection that is built into her mask or attached to it.

The first chest protector standard written against commotio cordis, the heart rhythm failure a blow to the chest can cause, was finished in 2017 for baseball and lacrosse. USA Softball’s Junior Olympic rules and the colleges’ rule book both require a body protector on the catcher, and neither names that standard.

The signs are changing too. High school catchers have been allowed a one-way earpiece since 2025, and pitchers join them in 2027. The college game has used one-way devices since the 2024 season. The coach talks and the player listens.

From 1974

Travel ball

Her school team is one of two she plays for. Almost every player on a college roster came through both, school ball and what families call travel ball. In the NCAA’s 2025 survey of its own athletes, 93 percent of softball players said they had played for both a high school and a club. Six percent had played for a high school alone.

The national association’s youth program and Little League Softball both began in 1974. The association now counts more than 120,000 teams of every kind. New national circuits for club teams formed in 2010 and again in 2020, and by an industry count 2.5 million people played fastpitch in 2024.

Recruiting had moved early. In the NCAA’s survey of Division I athletes in October 2017, 43 percent of softball players said their first recruiting contact with a college coach, direct or indirect, came in ninth grade or earlier. That December, 80 percent of the coaches surveyed by the NFCA favored a limit. On April 18, 2018 the NCAA adopted softball’s own proposal, which held calls received from a recruit and off-campus contact until September 1 of her junior year.

The gate is narrow. By the NCAA’s count about 6.5 percent of high school players go on to an NCAA roster and about 2.1 percent to Division I.

1944 to 2026

Making a living

The players who reach the college game have an audience now. On June 4, 2026 the deciding game of the Women’s College World Series drew 2.48 million viewers, the most-watched college softball game on record by ESPN’s count.

The pay has taken longer. Playing softball for a living has been tried in this country since 1944, when Chicago’s league began. The Women’s Pro Softball League played from 1997 to 2001 and National Pro Fastpitch from 2004 to 2019, by the AUSL’s account. Women’s Professional Fastpitch played from 2023 to 2025, and the Smoke won all three of its titles.

Two leagues played in 2026. Major League Baseball had made an eight-figure investment in the AUSL the year before, when the league played its first season with four touring teams, and ESPN had signed on for 50 games a year. In 2026 the league put six teams in six cities and opened its championship series on network television, the first professional softball game shown there by the league’s account. The Utah Talons won the title for the second time.

The Professional Softball League played its first season that summer with separately owned teams. The Atlanta Smoke won the league’s first title on August 8, 8 to 7 over the Kansas City Diamonds.

The college game pays now as well. Since July 1, 2025 Division I schools that opted into a court settlement have been allowed to pay their players directly. In June 2026 Division I adopted an age-based model of eligibility that gives a player up to five years.

Name, image and likeness deals are separate. NiJaree Canady of Texas Tech signed her second in June 2025 with the collective that backs the school’s athletes, reported at no less than $1.2 million. Georgia’s high schools have allowed their athletes deals of their own since October 2023, under a rule that bars pay for how they play.

The AUSL’s commissioner since April 2025 is Kim Ng, the first woman to serve as general manager of a Major League Baseball team, who played four years of softball at the University of Chicago. Lisa Fernandez was the Talons’ general manager. Players in the league average $35,000 a season and can reach $80,000, by its own site. On October 13, 2026 they announced a union and asked the league to recognize it.

2026

Who decides

On the field the outcome is hers. The pitcher holds the ball, and nothing happens until she lets it go. In the 2024-25 school year 338,315 girls and 130 boys played high school fastpitch in the United States.

In the dugout it mostly is. Women held 62 of the 79 head coaching jobs in the seven major college conferences surveyed for 2025-26.

In the front office it is beginning to be. The AUSL’s commissioner and five of its six general managers in 2026 were women, and its players have asked for a say in the rest.

2027 and after

Still being written

Three dates are on the calendar. From April 5 to 11, 2027 eight nations play the World Cup Finals at Redcliffe, in Queensland, and the highest finisher other than the United States, which is in as host, takes the first place in the Olympic field. In the same month the International Olympic Committee is due to settle the program for the Brisbane Games of 2032, where softball has to win its place. From July 23 to 29, 2028 the Olympic tournament is played in Oklahoma City, in the park that holds the Women’s College World Series.

A girl born in 2014 turns 14 in the year of that Olympic final and 18 in the year Brisbane opens. The year she turned 12, her game had two professional leagues in her own country, one in Japan and one in Mexico, a players’ union, a professional championship on network television and a pitcher who had touched 79. Before 2026 no girl could say all of it at once.

It began with about 20 men trying to get through a Chicago winter. Nobody in that gymnasium knew what the game would become.

It’s her game.

On the record

What the first accounts say

The dates. Thanksgiving in 1887 fell on Thursday, November 24. The Saturday Hancock named was November 26, and the 1904 Spalding guide has the first game under rules played on that night.

The score. The first score on record, 41 to 40, belongs to the first game between two nines, the one played under Hancock’s rules. No score survives from Thursday.

The football game. Yale beat Harvard 17 to 8 in New York that afternoon, and later tellings have the members waiting on that score by telegraph. The accounts printed in 1891, 1896, 1903 and 1904 put no football score, no college men and no telegraph in the room.

The glove. In Hancock’s guide the members were throwing the glove around the hall.

The diamond. On Thursday it was a wrestling mat hauled around cornerwise. Chalk arrives with the written rules, for marking the pitcher’s box.

The ball. Thursday’s ball was a boxing glove. Saturday’s was the one White made. The rulebook of 1891 sets it at 17 inches around.

The rules in print. A newspaper clipping of November 8, 1890 credits Hancock and White together as the inventors and prints 19 rules, a year before Hancock’s own guide. The guide prints the dates on which three Chicago leagues adopted its rules, December 3, 4 and 13, 1890. USA Softball’s history has a Chicago league adopting the rules in 1889.

The name. Accounts place Walter Hakanson’s 1926 proposal at different meetings. They agree on the man and the year.

The early names. USA Softball’s history lists indoor ball, kitten ball, playground ball, diamond ball, pumpkin ball, recreation ball, twilight ball, army ball, lightning ball, mushball, big ball and night ball. It has a fire captain, George Kehoe, naming Rober’s game Kitten League Ball in the summer of 1900, and the Minneapolis Park Board changing the name to diamond ball in 1925. The Hall of Fame’s page for Rober has the park board adopting the game in 1913 under the name diamond ball.

Fastpitch, the word. Merriam-Webster prints it as fast-pitch and dates it to 1939, and its definition turns on two things, the speed of the pitch and the stolen base. USA Softball’s history calls the fast class of the 1933 tournament fastballers. The coaches voted for their new name in December 1995, and it took effect on September 1, 1996. The national club circuits of 2010 and 2020 both carry the word in their names, and the sporting goods industry counts the game’s players as fastpitch players.

On the record

The club and the men in the room

The club. The Farragut Boat Club was a rowing club on Chicago’s South Side. It began in the early 1870s with 10 members and an old barge. Lake Michigan kept taking its boathouses. Winter storms wrecked some of them, and on St. Patrick’s Day in 1883 ice came ashore and wrecked a brick one. Each time the club built again. In the fall of 1887 it stood at 31st Street and Lake Park Avenue, in its sixth home in 15 years.

The clubhouse. It had a gymnasium, a bowling alley and a theater for the months when the lake was closed to rowing.

Its own story in print. Patrick Mallory’s history cites a Chicago Tribune account of the club from June 1, 1887, headed Success Through Grit. That page has not been read for this story.

George W. Hancock. A Board of Trade man. In 1896 the Tribune placed him with F. G. Logan & Co., commission brokers, and wrote that few men on the Board were better known. He served as an officer of the boat club, published the first guide to the game under his own name in 1891 and sold its bats and balls as Hancock & Co. The Spalding guides still carried his byline in 1908 and still called him the game’s inventor.

Augustus J. White. He made the ball. He worked at the Board of Trade too.

The man with the broom. The first accounts do not name him.

The club’s end. By 1896 the Tribune wrote of the club in the past tense. By then its game was played in every part of the city.

On the record

More from the record books

M. Marie Wadlow. Her 341 wins came against 52 losses, seven of her seasons with the Caterpillar Dieselettes.

Bertha Ragan Tickey. She played on 11 national championship teams, four with Orange and seven with the Brakettes.

Enquist and Backus. Sue Enquist’s .835 came over 18 seasons and Sharron Backus’s .831 over 22.

Before 43 feet. In 1984 the ERA across Division I was 1.35, the lowest in the NCAA’s records. Strikeouts fell from 3.33 per seven innings in 1986 to 2.70 in 1987.

Home runs. A Division I team hit 0.12 home runs a game in 1987, 0.31 in 1999 and a record 0.77 in 2015.

Scoring and strikeouts. Scoring went from 3.02 runs a game in 1986 to a record 4.82 in 2015. Strikeouts reached a record 5.48 per seven innings in 2010.

Cat Osterman. Her 15.42 strikeouts per seven innings in 2006 is the season record.

The runner’s rule. Hancock held a runner on his base until the pitch had reached or passed the catcher, and called him back if he left early. Little League’s Minor division still holds her until the pitch reaches the batter. USA Softball, the high schools and the colleges hold her until the pitcher releases the ball. Since January 1, 2026 the international rulebook lets her go when the pitcher’s stride foot touches the ground.

Chicago’s schools, 1925. Robert Pruter gives 569 teams and 7,069 participants for indoor base ball as an intramural sport that year, and his next sentence speaks of the girls on those teams.

San Antonio, 1950. The Hall of Fame’s page gives Wadlow’s account in her own words, and it prints we for the two games against Orange. The same account puts her team third after the loss to Phoenix, and the tournament’s final standings have Orange first, the Ramblers second and the Dieselettes third. Amy Peralta May pitched the Ramblers’ 1 to 0 win over Orange in 11 innings. One history of the tournament counts 44 innings where Wadlow counted 43.

Donna Lopiano. She was an All-American nine times in a playing career of 10 years, and as a pitcher she won 183 games and lost 18.

The most wins. Hutchins won 1,709 games. Candrea won 1,674, Gasso had 1,619 through 2026 and Wright won 1,457.

The ball of 1993. Jo Evans, the former Utah coach, told The NCAA News in 1997 how lively the new ball was.

Ball-contact injuries. An earlier NCAA study counted 8.82 ball-contact injuries in women’s softball for every 10,000 times a player took part, more than a third of them to the head or face.

Infield masks. The study fired softballs from a pitching machine at 24.6 meters a second, about 55 miles an hour, at a test head wearing each of nine masks, six metal and three plastic, and struck two spots on the face. Its authors wrote that the masks are rarely worn, and that the best results came from metal masks that stood at least 35 millimeters off the upper jaw and 25 off the cheekbone. They tested one speed and straight-on hits only.

The rules committee. In 1934 the joint committee that wrote softball’s rules took the new association in.

The Fort Wayne Pistons. Their record in the title year of 1945 was 72 and 4.

The Bessemer Park plate. The caption reads 1, Hill; 2, Ferguson, Ath. Instructor; 3, Bell; 4, Dowling; 5, Kraemer; 6, Lyman; 7, Millard; 8, Golden; 9, Bell; 10, Loughran. The first letter of the fifth name is broken in the print. The photograph is the lower of two on its page.

Milo S. Walker. He signed the article of 1903 as Milo S. Walker, Ph.D., of West Division High School, and wrote that the young women of the West Division and Joseph Medill high schools had played the game in their gymnasiums for five years.

USA Softball today. The United States Olympic Committee named it softball’s national governing body in 1978, under the Amateur Sports Act of that year, and the law lets the committee certify only one body for a sport. The committee is chartered by Congress and, by its own account, is privately funded and takes no government money. USA Softball’s own page counts six national team programs, more than 25,000 umpires certified a year, more than 100 national championships a year and competition in all 50 states. Its headquarters stand in Oklahoma City beside the National Softball Hall of Fame and Devon Park. The city owns the park, and USA Softball runs it under a lease. The park was built in 1987 and has four fields.

The High Performance Program. Local coaches run the identifier events, and national team players and alumni do the evaluating. About 400 players reach a national selection event, where 18 in each age group are named top performers and can be called to a national team trial or pool.

The World Cup field of 2027. Canada and Chinese Taipei qualified through Prague, Japan and Puerto Rico through Lima, and the United States and Mexico through Oklahoma City. Australia is in as host and China as the last wild card.

Base to base. One recruiting service’s guidelines for Division I put a middle infielder or a center fielder at 2.8 seconds or less from home to first, a third baseman, a catcher or a corner outfielder at 2.9 and a first baseman at 3.0. A coaching article the NFCA provided in 2019 puts a fast runner at the higher levels under 2.6 and has such times taken with a stopwatch, and in January 2023 the Miami Herald reported that a Division I shortstop had run it in 2.54. A study of 2018 timed 13 Division II players starting from a base, and they averaged 3.04 seconds over the 60 feet with the fastest of three starts. Division I teams stole 0.94 bases a game in 1990 and 1.03 in 2025, by the NCAA’s record book.

The catcher’s helmet. The softball-only class took effect on August 1, 2025, and a helmet in it carries a permanent label that reads softball only. On the throat, USA Softball’s rule book asks a fast pitch catcher for a mask with a throat protector and lets an extended wire protector stand in for an attached one. It approves the hockey goalie style mask and asks for an added protector only if an umpire judges the protection built into the mask inadequate. The high schools’ rule takes a throat protector that is part of the mask or attached to it. The colleges require a helmet and face mask that carry the standard’s mark, in the traditional style or the hockey goalie style, and their rule names no throat protector.

The All-American league’s first rules. In 1943 the ball was 12 inches around and thrown underhand from 40 feet, the base paths were 65 feet, and runners could lead off.

The championship fences. Fences for the championship rounds were set at 190 feet down the lines and 220 to center. The account of 1997 gives no year for the change.

Division I teams. The number of teams reporting to the NCAA’s table went from 91 in 1982 to 309 in 2025.

The recruiting rules of 2018. A wider package covered unofficial visits that involve the athletics department and recruiting conversations at camps.

Australia, China and Chinese Taipei. Australia took a medal at each of the first four Olympic tournaments and is not in the first five of the world ranking now. China was second in the first tournament, in 1996, and hosted the fourth, in 2008. Chinese Taipei reached the final of the World Games in 2025.

Men’s fastpitch. Men play the fast game too. Their world championship dates to 1966. The United States won five of the first seven, one of them shared, and has not won since 1988. New Zealand has won seven. Venezuela won its first in July 2025, 3 to 0 over New Zealand at Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and the United States finished third. In North America the International Softball Congress, which dates to 1947, holds a men’s club tournament each August. A 2019 article in The Sport Journal describes 30 years of decline in the men’s game in the United States, and two in three of the people it surveyed agreed that a shortage of pitchers is the main cause. The Olympic tournament has been a women’s tournament every time it has been played.

The Professional Softball League in 2027. The league lists six teams and 40 games.

High school NIL in Georgia. The association added by-law 1.97 in October 2023 and set the terms in Appendix N of its constitution. The pay may not depend on athletic performance, and the school’s name, uniform and facilities stay out of it. By-law 1.92-c still ends the amateur status of an athlete who takes money for athletic performance. The association’s executive director said in 2024 that fewer than 100 Georgia athletes, in all sports, had reported a deal in the past school year.

The age-based model. It keeps no count of seasons and has no redshirt and no waiver, and it applies in full to players who first enroll in the fall of 2027 or later.

The finals of 2000 and 2004. The United States won 2 to 1 over Japan in eight innings in 2000 and 5 to 1 over Australia in 2004. Fernandez struck out eight and allowed three hits in the first, and she pitched all of the second.

The series of 2026. The stadium set an attendance record during the tournament, 12,605 for one session.

Checked against the sources under each section, November 2026.

First published November 11, 2026. Last updated November 11, 2026.