The Farragut Boat Club, Chicago, IL on a winter’s day in November, 1887, saw the inadvertent start of softball. A group of Yale and Harvard students were waiting for the results of the Harvard versus Yale football game. When the news finally arrived, Yale had defeated Harvard, 17-8, one overjoyed Yale supporter, picked up an old boxing glove and threw it at a nearby Harvard student, who tried to hit it back with a stick. George Hancock, a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, suggested a game of indoor baseball. He tied together the laces of the boxing glove for a ball and with a piece of chalk, Hancock marked off a home plate, three bases and a pitcher's box inside the Farragut Boat Club gym, and divided the students into two teams. The final score of the game was 41-40, but more importantly Hancock and his friends had invented a major new sport that would grow in popularity, today more than 40 million people play the game, softball is the number one team participant sport in the United States Come springtime, Hancock took the game outside to fields not large enough for baseball. It was called indoor-outdoor and Hancock was recognised as the authority for the game.

Hancock's game gradually spread throughout the country but particularly flourished in Minneapolis, due to Lewis Rober, a Minneapolis Fire Department lieutenant, he wanted something to keep his firemen fit during their stand-by time. Using some unused space next to the fire station, Rober laid out bases with a pitching distance of 35 feet. He used a small medicine ball with a bat two inches in diameter. The game quickly caught on in other fire companies and when in 1895, Rober transferred to another fire company he organized a team there that he called the Kittens. The game then became known as ‘kitten ball’ until 1925, when the Minneapolis Park Board changed it to Diamond Ball; various names had been used around the states but in 1926 the name softball was suggested to the International Joint Rules Committee by Walter Hakanson, a Denver YMCA official.

The formation of the Amateur Softball Association of America (ASA) in 1933 helped to encourage women into the game and from then on gradually spread to the rest of the world, many countries being influenced by American servicemen during the Second World War. In 1965 the International Softball Federation (ISF) was formed and the first Softball World Championships was held in Melbourne, Australia. The women’s softball was won by the hosts Australia with America second. America was again second (this time to Japan) in 1970 and apart from 1982 when New Zealand won it the women’s softball world title has become almost an American title.

Women’s Softball was accepted as an Olympic sport in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games and the gold medal has been won by America in all three games held so far.