We continue our list of the Top 15 Softball Stories of 2019, which will run through December 31st when we’ll present our No. 1 story of the year.
Here are the previous stories (clink on link to read):
- #15… Team USA Dominates Summer Competition… with One Exception
- #14… USA Softball’s 2020 Stand Beside Her Tour… Taking the Brand Nationwide
- #13… Sam Show’s Bat Flips – & Clutch Performances – Light Up the 2019 Season
- #12… National High School Player of the Year Sydney Supple Spearheads Hometown Field of Dreams
We’ve surveyed the softball community and talked internally as well to come up with what were the most impactful and relevant stories of the year pertaining to the world of fastpitch softball.
Where applicable, we are providing links to the original articles and/or references when the story first happened.
Today’s story… #11: NPF’s Busy Year… the National Pro Fastpitch (NPF) league went through a busy year of changes that saw a team win its championship in August—and then leave within a month —as well as new team being added in the West for the first time in over a decade. Along with its annual draft and a new scheduling format announced in August, it was quite the busy year for the pro league…
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The National Pro Fastpich league played its 2019 season with six teams and nearly 150 games with teams based in the United States like the Chicago Bandits, Cleveland Comets and USSSA Pride (Florida) along with squads heavily populated with international players such as the Aussie Spirit (now the Aussie Peppers of Minnesota), Beijing Eagles and Canadian Wild.
Many of the top players in the world competed in the league and are now populating one of the six teams that will compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics including American stars Amanda Chidester, Ally Carda and Katie Reed.
But it was also a year of transition that saw teams come and go and questions to how the league will continue: will it continue to bring in more foreign players? Will the loss of the USSA Pride and its strong lineup of stars severely hurt the strength and popularity of the league? How will the new team in California do in increasing league interest in the West? And certainly, how will the new tournament-style scheduling format work in increasing interest in the NPF?
It was the second time in as many years that there had been impactful team changes and the reigning Cowles Cup winner had left the NPF: in January of 2018, the Scrap Yard Dawgs left the NFP and the then-Akron Racers morphed into what would become the Beijing team.
It will be interesting to see how the changes affect the NPF in 2020 and how the pro league stands by the end of next year.
Here’s a look back on our many stories involving the action on… and off… the pro league’s fields…
*** Scroll down to read many of our stories covering Sydney’s remarkable softball career so far!