There were national championships for women's college softball prior to the NCAA deciding it was OK for women to play sports? The high school game is over 35 years old in some states? The NCAA didn't develop a "good softball program" it was already there. Don't give the NCAA credit for popularizing or improving any women's sport when they excluded women athletes for years.

In 1966, my wife played in a local softball league that had over 400 girls in it.

The evolution of women's college sports

Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women at Wikipedia

AIAW Champions

The Brakettes have been in existence for over 60 years.

There was a pro softball league in 1976.

Some Softball History scroll down for the women's listings.

My point is that the women's/girl's fastpitch game is older and has a much broader history than you can see on ESPN during the NCAA championships. Softball players have been "stepping into the pitchl" both literally and figuratively for much longer than most people are aware of and with a whole lot more athletic ability and talent than they receive credit for. The people who were involved in the women's/girls game 40 (or more) years ago were pretty serious about the game.

I wasn't giving the NCAA credit for developing the game, just their part of it. The coaches that were involved in the game were great and never really given the credit they were due. The kicker is that until people were sucked into the almighty scholarship scam, much of the coaching was provided by unwilling PhysEd teachers, baseball coaches or the father of a player. At the HS level, the baseball folk considered softball not much more than afterschool babysitting for the girls. Many still believed a ball field was no place for a female.

In the mid-60's around here, high schools declared softball as a very unladylike game and removed it from the extracurricular/sports calendar. They replaced it with lacrosse!!! Yeah, some real intelligent people there.

Marvin, if you noticed this sentence "Usually, it was only at the higher levels of play that you saw players attack the ball", it was my way of acknowledging the teams and players of which you speak. Maybe I wasn't clear enough to that point. Those to whom I was trying to refer were the HS players and the few local leagues out there.

I am familiar with softball in the past and those women deserve a lot of credit, but unfortunately, it usually only comes from inside the softball community.

Oh, so that's what that strike is called in slow pitch when the pitcher finally gets it across the plate and the batter is nice enough not to swat the dang thing out of the park. I always wondered what that was called. :D