I am 31 years old, I started playing fastpitch softball for the first time in 2015. Ireland began its first-ever female fastpitch team to represent in the 2015 European Championships in Holland. This was a new and exciting opportunity but also a daunting one. Realising that we were tadpoles in a pond of frogs. We were the babies that had so much to learn, but also we had nothing to lose and everything to gain, which I believe gave us a bit of an edge at our first major tournament.

We trained so hard for 9 months as a team with no pitcher or other fastpitch teams to challenge us or help us develop. We had an American girl who used to pitch when she was at home in the states, but it had been a while. We relied on her for batting practice but needed to be cautious as she was our only pitcher for the tournaments and we could not overwork her or hurt her. We relied on the batting machine and our coaches to toss us their best fastpitch ball from behind a net.

by Laura Hoey
Read the complete blog post at Eva Voortman blog   


-Helena Novotna-