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With a World Championship coming up this summer for the GB Women’s Fastpitch Team, and a European Championship for the GB Under-19 Women, most of the players selected for these two squads have been announced.
Both teams, however, will make final selections later in April.
GB Women​
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The GB Women’s Team has a whole new feel this year, as Head Coach Rachael Watkeys and the rest of her staff, who have looked after the GB Juniors so successfully for the past three years, have moved up to the senior team. And they’ll be faced with a daunting tournament to start with – the 15th WBSC Women’s World Championships, to be played from 15-24 July at Softball City, usually the home of the Canadian Open Tournament, in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.
The GB Team will also have something to prove. This will be their fifth straight World Championship, and in their first three tries, in 2006, 2010 and 2012, the team finished 10th, 11th and 11th, a very respectable outcome for a country with our small player pool and no public funding. But in 2014 in Haarlem, in the first Women’s World Championships ever to be held in Europe, the GB Team failed to win a game and finished last out of 16 teams.
As a programme with serious designs on Olympic qualification if softball gets back on the programme for Tokyo 2020, we need to do better in Canada.
Selection for the tournament was not an easy process, as there were more than 50 applications from players making themselves eligible for selection, the largest number in the history of GB Softball. On the one hand, of course, this is good – it means the programme is growing and there are real choices to be made. But those choices aren’t always easy.
At this point, 15 players have been selected and a 16th selection will be announced shortly. Eleven of the 15 played for the GB Women at European Championships last summer in the Netherlands, where the team finished fifth, or have played for the team previously, while two have come up from the GB Under-19 programme and only two are completely new to GB Softball.
The 15 players who will attempt to get the GB Women back on the right track this summer, with one more selection to come, are:
Brianna Cook
Georgina Corrick
Sarah Craig
Chelsea D’Avilar
Lauren Evans
Carling Hare
Kirsten Mack
Amy Moore
Stephanie Pearce
Nicole Ratel
Kendyl Scott
Keeli Waugh
Kori Waugh
Amy Wells
Chloe Wigington
GB Under-19 Women​
The GB Junior Women also have a new coaching and management team this year, with Amanda Murphy taking over as the Head Coach and James Hirai as the Team Manager, along with Assistant Coaches Sarah Pike and Greg Seeley.
The Juniors will be playing a little closer to home than the Senior Women, travelling to European Championships from 1-6 August in Sant Boi and Gava, not far from Barcelona in Spain. The team is coming off a very successful three years, with a ninth place finish at their first-ever Junior World Championships in Canada in 2013, a fourth place finish – their highest ever – at European Championships in 2014, and then a 13th place finish at Junior World Championships last year in Oklahoma, but with performances that should have seen them ranked higher.
With two players who will also be playing for the GB Women in Canada this year, and a number of others who will be hoping to crack the senior squad in time for Olympic Qualifiers in 2019, the team will be looking for a medal in Spain.
At this point, 12 players have been selected, and another three selections will be announced shortly. Of the 12 selected, seven played for the team in Junior World Championships last summer, one player has come up from the GB Under-16s and four are completely new to the programme.
The 12 players selected so far are:
Hannah Burge
Georgina Corrick
Chelsea D'Avilar
Ella Henson
Laura Hirai
Amie Hutchison
Olivia Lee
Theo Longboy
Casey Moritz
Chelsie Robison
Kyra Watson
Sian Wigington
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Good times
Fastpitch softball is definitely on the up in the UK.
This year has already seen new BSUK Fastpitch Development Officer Johanna Malisani take up her post – the first BSUK position ever dedicated to fastpitch – and the start of a new youth fastpitch league in London. For the first time since 2006, GB Fastpitch athletes can be awarded bursaries through the national SportsAid programme. Attendance at the Academy and High Performance Academy has been the highest ever over the winter. The Great Britain Fastpitch League will feature separate men’s and women’s divisions this season for the first time in several years. Four GB Fastpitch teams (out of six) have new coaching and management teams this year, bringing new and different people into the sport in these positions. Two more GB-based GB players will be playing college softball in the United States this year. And male as well as female fastpitch in Britain is growing.
Of course, fastpitch still faces many obstacles. Player numbers remain relatively low, there is no public funding for national team programmes and both the quantity and quality of coaching needs to be improved. Fastpitch is still based primarily in the South East – though pockets are developing in other parts of the country. And there are not enough competition opportunities for GB players based in the UK, making it hard for them to develop as impact players on an international stage.
But things are moving in the right direction, and both the GB Women and the GB Juniors are looking forward to exciting adventures over the summer.