By Bob Fromer
The GB Senior Women’s Fastpitch Team flew from the UK to Ireland on Sunday 9 July for the WBSC Women’s World Cup Group A tournament in Balbriggan, north of Dublin, having warmed up with a landmark two-game series at Farnham Park on 6 and 7 July against the US pro team Oklahoma City Spark.
The tournament in Ireland is the most important competition the GB Women have played in since the 2018 Women’s World Cup in Japan, and this week’s tournament is arguably even more important, since there is a progression at stake.
GB’s goal in their six-team World Cup Group Stage tournament is to finish in one of the top two places, which will bring automatic qualification for the WBSC Women’s World Cup Finals, to be played in the Trieste region of Italy in July 2024. But this won’t be easy: GB’s competition in the tournament, which runs from 11-15 July, will be the World #1 USA, plus Chinese Taipei, Australia, Ireland and Botswana.
Two other six-team World Cup groups, Groups B and C, featuring more of the world’s leading national women’s softball teams, will play their tournaments later this month in Spain and Italy, and each group will send another two qualifiers to next year’s Finals.
In addition to the six teams that qualify from Groups A, B, and C, two places in the Finals will be offered to wild card teams, which may include third-place finishers in this summer’s tournaments.
GB qualified for a place in this first-ever Women’s World Cup to be played in stages over two years by winning the silver medal in last year’s European Women’s Championship in Spain.
The road ahead
The Group A Women’s World Cup tournament in Ireland is structured as a full round-robin followed by a modified Page Playoff.
What this means is that the teams finishing first to fourth in the round-robin, which will be played from Tuesday through Friday, will qualify to play in the modified Page Playoff on Saturday, and all four of those teams will still have a chance to finish in the top two places and book their ticket for Italy in 2024.
On Saturday morning, the teams finishing fifth and sixth in the round-robin will play a fifth place game, which has no significance other than world ranking points. Next, the teams finishing third and fourth in the round-robin will play, and the loser will be eliminated from the chance of a World Cup Finals place. Then, the teams that have finished first and second in the round-robin will play and the winner will have guaranteed a place in the 2024 Finals. Finally, the loser of the 1 v 2 game and the winner of the 3 v 4 game will play for the second guaranteed place in the Finals.
The USA, Chinese Taipei and Australia are all above Great Britain in the WBSC world rankings, while Ireland and Botswana are below us, and the GB Women will almost certainly get to play on Saturday if they can achieve round-robin wins over Ireland and Botswana. From a historical point of view, that should certainly be possible, though no opponent can ever be taken for granted, and the GB coaching staff, headed by first-year Head Coach Tara Henry, will not make that mistake.
The GB Women will certainly set their sights higher when, weather permitting, they take on Australia at 11.00 am on Tuesday and Chinese Taipei at 10.00 am on Wednesday (the weather forecast for the Dublin area next week is mixed, at best). But losing those games, or indeed losing to Team USA in a game scheduled to begin at 3.30 pm on Friday, immediately after GB has played Botswana at 12.30 pm, will probably not stop GB being one of the four teams playing in the Page Playoff on Saturday.
GB’s game against the host team, Ireland, which is playing in the tournament by virtue of hosting it, not through qualification, will be at 6.30 pm on Thursday in front of what should be a partisan home crowd.
On Saturday, however, assuming that GB have got through, then we will most likely have to beat two out of the USA, Australia and Chinese Taipei, in some order, to qualify by right for the World Cup Finals.
The GB Women's Team has not beaten either the USA or Australia in two attempts, but they did beat Chinese Taipei by 1-0 at the Women’s World Championship in 2012 on a no-hitter thrown by Stacie Townsend, and they lost to Taipei by a score of 13-11 in the 2018 Women’s World Cup in Japan, a game that GB, which at one point led by four runs, should probably have won.
What’s certain is that the 2023 GB Women’s Team certainly won’t feel overawed by anyone they will face in Balbriggan after putting up competitive performances against the Oklahoma City Spark at Farnham Park last week.
Landmarks
The two-game series at Farnham Park on 6 and 7 July between the GB Women and the Oklahoma City Spark, dubbed the Royal Spark Challenge, was a landmark event in a number of ways.
It was the first time a professional women’s softball team has ever played in the UK, and the game certainly presented the highest level of women’s fastpitch ever seen on these shores. It was also the first time since the Opening Ceremony for Farnham Park in 2013 that significant efforts had been made by BaseballSoftballUK to draw crowds to an event there, with a proper grandstand in place and refreshments and merchandise provided at Pitch 3, where the games were played. These efforts were successful: the grandstand was almost entirely full on both evenings, and on Friday, when the second game was played, spectators stretched down both foul lines.
The OKC Spark, playing in their first season in a new professional league in the United States called Women’s Professional Fastpitch (WPF), could be one of the better teams in world softball, and would be favoured to beat most national teams in the world.
They have some legendary players who have played in the College World Series, for Team USA, and now in professional softball, including the NCAA Division 1 all-time home run leader Jocelyn Alo, outfielder Michelle Moultrie, pitcher Keilani Ricketts and former first-team All-American infielder Sami Williams.
Pitcher Donnie Gobourne, who pitched the first three innings against the GB Women on Thursday, giving up three hits but striking out nine, regularly throws between 70 and 75 mph.
A young GB Women’s Team, which was only selected in June at a try-out camp in Oklahoma, and had had just over two days of training at Bisham Abbey National Sports Centre before playing the Spark, coped well with their high-level opposition, though the Spark won by 6-1 on Thursday and 9-1 on Friday.
Despite the score, the GB Women played better on Friday, looking more cohesive in the field and more assured at bat, and making some fine defensive plays, including centre fielder Kendyl Scott throwing out a Spark runner at third and right fielder Alana Snow throwing out a runner at home. Between them, GB catchers Amy Moore on Thursday and Imogen Gie on Friday cut down three Spark runners attempting to steal bases.
The GB defense had just one error over the course of the two games, though there were some communication issues at times on Thursday that seemed to have been ironed out on Friday.
More training time and more warm-up games before Ireland would certainly have been desirable, but the players and coaches have tried to maximise the time they have had in the UK.
Kendyl Scott was GB’s offensive star over the two games, going 4-for-7, and giving the GB Women the best possible start in Game 1 on Thursday when she led off in the bottom of the first inning and lined one of those 70+ mph pitches from Donnie Gobourne over the fence in left centre field.
Both Georgina Corrick, who pitched the full seven innings against the Spark on Thursday, and Rebecca Faulkner, who pitched 5.2 innings on Friday, pitched well, with Georgina giving up seven hits and Rebecca eight.
But the Spark were better at GB in cashing in their scoring opportunities, and GB hitters had something of a wake-up call in the game on Thursday, striking out 16 times against Donnie Gobourne, Chenise Delce and Emily Watson.
On Friday, GB batters had made some adjustments, and only had six strikeouts against Spark pitchers Alex Storako, Keely Rochard and Keilani Ricketts. The team also had seven hits on Friday as opposed to five on Thursday.
In short, the GB Women’s Team could not have had more testing opposition to prepare them for what they will face in Ireland this week, and they stood up to it well.
Looking ahead
While the GB Women’s Team will set themselves the goal of finishing first or second in Ireland to qualify for the Women’s World Cup Finals, there is also a longer game in play.
With all of softball hoping that the IOC will announce later this year that baseball and softball will be on the programme at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the GB Women’s programme, led by Performance Director Gary Anderson, is nurturing a team that can reach its peak, not in 2023 but in 2028.
GB will probably have the youngest team in the Group A tournament by average age, as we did in the European Women’s Championship last year, but by the time 2028 comes around, the team will have an age profile very similar to teams that have won Olympic medals in the past. Meanwhile, at the tournament to come in Dublin this week, and at upcoming European Women’s Championships and during the next WBSC World Cup cycle, the expectation is that this GB Team will retain an important core of players and continue to get stronger, hopefully with the support of continued and additional funding from UK Sport. Funding that was available to the GB Women in 2019, and again since the pandemic, has been instrumental in helping the team and the programme get better.
This is the background against which results in Dublin should be seen.
An exciting week lies ahead for the GB Women and GB Softball as a whole, and a great many members of the British softball community will either be in Dublin to watch the games in person or watch them streamed through the WBSC’s GameTime platform.