The Sports-India Community

India recently participated in the World Softball Championships and finished at 29 th place out of the 30 participating teams.

[Opening Round - Pool E] Puerto Rico d India 25-0
[Opening Round - Pool E] Ecuador d India 14-0
[Opening Round - Pool E] Chinese Taipei d India 15-0
[Placement round] France d India 9-2
[Placement round] Peru d India 11-0
[Placement round] Ireland l India 2-5
[Placement round] Switzerland d India 5-1

Source: https://www.surrey2016.com/standings/index

Thanks VReddy for starting the thread. Hey, what would we have done if we didn't have Ireland to beat?

haha - my pleasure, Jay. Great to see you back!

Was aware of this event as my colleague was the coach of the Swiss team. Also few of us (Indians, Lankans) play Cricket occasionally on the same ground where the swiss team practices !

Thanks for the information, Vishnu. Good to see that we beat at least one team. With softball being relatively unknown, I am just curious as to how the selection for a national team is done! Quite surprised to see some of the other teams' results...for example, Cuba (with such a strong baseball culture) losing to the likes of Brazil and Netherlands.

- Varma

Additionally given that it is an olympic sport in 2020 Tokyo Olympics (not sure if its only for one edition or reinstated for the future games too) - it might be worthwhile to take it more seriously. There are not that many teams actively involved - so with a bit of focus around this, qualification should hopefully be doable

Pakistan finished ahead of us? Terrible!

No PKB, we did finish ahead of Pakistan. In fact we finished 30 out of 31 teams in the final standings, but some teams didn't even make it into those standings it seems. I didn't understand the format from quickly looking at the website but it seems like they dropped some teams after some rounds. For the record, Kenya (28th) finished ahead of us at 29th in the final 30-tam standings, and Kenya had beaten Pakistan 7-0 in an earlier round. Pakistan seemed to be very consistent, losing all their games by the score of 7-0, as they scored no runs at all. We did beat Ireland in the placement round and scored some 8 runs total. Pakistan is worse than us, and Kenya about as bad as us. Terrific, eh?

Wed got shellacked by the baseball playing places (Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Taiwan), beat the cricket playing country (Ireland) and lost somewhat decently to the countries that really play neither baseball nor cricket (France, Switzerland). Cricket-playing countries like Kenya and India were at the bottom and Pakistan not even in the list. Coincidence? I think not. [BTW, Asutralia and Britain were 10th and 12th, but they are generally okay in most sports]

We should get our hardest hitting cricketers to play softball. When I played a bit of baseball with my grad school colleagues and professors (admittedly a rather unsportsmanlike pool) I dominated, and my profs were sure I'd played baseball for a long time! (In reality it was the first time I'd played, and hitting a full toss seemed rather easy, even if it swerved).

^^^ But I am sure they laughed hard, as you ran with the bat every time after a hit, rather than throw it away and run. Baseball guys just find it very funny when those used to cricket do that.

jayakris wrote:^^^ But I am sure they laughed hard, as you ran with the bat every time after a hit, rather than throw it away and run. Baseball guys just find it very funny when those used to cricket do that.

True . On the contrary, when we play recreational cricket with kids here, pretty much every kid hits the ball, drops the bat, and run .

- Varma

I'm Glad you're doing your bit to popularise Cricket among American kids, Varmaji

PKBasu wrote:I'm Glad you're doing your bit to popularise Cricket among American kids, Varmaji

I was talking about our "Desi" kids, PKB I should have been more specific. Although there were a couple of non-India kids on occasion that played with us.

- Varma

An update on the sport in India, there seems to be structure coming along (from me following the Rafa Nadal academy in Andhra). There are the Jr & Snr National Championships coming up which will be used to pick the teams for the Mens / Womens World Championship in July

Most of the Andhra players will likely be picked from the larger Nadal/Spanish academies based in Chittor

Tournament schedule listed here: http://www.softballindia.com/calendar.php

India participated for the first time in the 16-member Mens World Championship and as expected, we finished in the last position: http://www.wbsc.org/tournaments/2017-me ... standings/