Softball's Popularity
The average fastpitch pitch speed is 65 mph. One pitch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games was clocked at 73.3 mph. Considering the pitcher stands 43’ feet from the batter, and the hardest-throwing baseball pitchers throw 99.4 mph from 60 feet, fastpitch batters have essentially the same time to react as their baseball counterparts.
Women’s fastpitch was admitted to the Olympic Games during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The United States won the gold medal in those Games and continued to dominate on the diamond with a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and again at the 2004 games in Greece.
NPF has a distinct working partner relationship with the Amateur Softball Association affording players the ability to play on their national team while pursuing professional opportunities in NPF. This allows Olympic and national team members to play for NPF teams as well as USA Softball.
In 2003, University of Arizona record-setting pitcher Jennie Finch became the first female correspondent for Major League Baseball’s television show, This Week in Baseball.
There are over 900 teams with 16,000 fastpitch softball players competing at the Division I, II, or III levels. (NCAA)
The Amateur Softball Association (ASA) registers over 245,000 softball teams comprising over 3.5 million players; 1.2 million are girls.
There are over 16 million softball players (both slowpitch and fastpitch) in the United States (SGMA’s 2005 Sports Participation in America)
In the 6-to-17 age group, girls comprise nearly 50% of all slowpitch and more than 79% of all fastpitch players in the country. (SGMA’s 2005 Topline Report)
Over 66% of fastpitch participants are female. (SGMA’s 2005 Sports Participation in America)
Fastpitch softball is the third most popular high school girls sport with over 14,400 schools and more than 364,000 participants. Basketball and track and field rank number one and two. (Nat’l Federation of State High School Associations)
(Sources: Super Study of Sports Participation by American Sports Data, Inc.,
National Federation of State High School Associations, NCAA) |
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