The present historical past of ladies’s skilled softball might be traced again to the mid-Nineties, when two touring groups referred to as the Blaze and the Storm barnstormed throughout America seeking audiences in addition to alternatives to start out a multi-team league to make the most of the presence of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, a match gained by the US.
The barnstorming passed off in minor-league ballparks, a few of which had been left by their groups as a result of they had been lower than the brand new requirements of the time. The groups performed on a grass infield with the pitcher’s mound in play. The Girls’s Skilled Softball League began in 1997, and had, I feel, an incredible mannequin for publicity. Not like the barnstorming groups of the mid-90s, the WPSL performed their softball on dust infields which had been to a sure normal.
Extra lately, feminine softball gamers had multiple outlet. Girls’s Professional Fastpitch is a four-team league which lately completed its second season beneath a cloud of allegations over subpar working situations.
On the identical time, Athletes Limitless has been taking part in its standard choose-up-sides model of softball, however has additionally deliberate a second softball promotion in 2025, the Athletes Limitless Softball League, which can have 4 groups like AU Professional Softball, however can have designated normal managers, coaches, and rosters which is able to keep the identical all through the season.
Apparently sufficient, within the final week, a bunch of practically 70 professional softball gamers have joined a brand new gamers’ union, the Skilled Girls’s Softball Gamers’ Assocaition. The union seeks honest salaries, equitable therapy, improved working situations, and complete healthcare. It’s not clear, nevertheless, whether or not the unionizing effort is a protest in opposition to WPF, Athletes Limitless, or each.
The union announcement is attention-grabbing. Labor-management dynamics in girls’s sports activities have gone from the “be grateful you might have a league” state to the whole free company loved by gamers within the Nationwide Girls’s Soccer League.
You marvel if there will probably be a catalyzing occasion for this union.
