Run your softball club
from one app.
Softball is the sport where the most useful thing we can tell you is that nobody is required to tell you. The federation that runs high school sport mandates a pitching workload policy for baseball and requires nothing of the kind for softball, so the answer to how much your pitcher may throw depends on whether your state decided to have one.
What a softball season asks you to keep track of
Three things that each sit in a different place. An age class, which is decided by a date rather than by a judgment. A bat list, which changes and which the club rather than the family owns. And a pitching workload, which may or may not be governed where you live. None of the three is the kind of thing a coach can work out from the game in front of them, and all three decide whether what happened on Saturday counts.
Nobody has to set a pitching limit, which is the difference from baseball
The federation that runs high school sport requires every state association to write a pitching restriction policy for baseball, counted in pitches thrown, and 44 states have done it. For softball it requires nothing. Its softball rules govern how a pitcher delivers, the pivot foot, the replant, which drying agents are allowed, and say nothing about how much a pitcher throws. So a baseball coach can be told with confidence that their state has a policy and to go and find it. A softball coach cannot, because there may not be one. Ask your association rather than assuming either way, and if the answer is that no limit exists, that is an answer rather than a gap in your research.
The bats are the club’s problem, and the list moves
A bat is non-approved if it fails the specification or if it appears on the current published non-approved list, and a batter using one is out. That makes equipment eligibility a thing somebody has to keep track of, which is unusual: everywhere else in youth sport the eligibility questions are about people. It lands on the club because the club owns the bats, and it moves because the list is republished. The practical version is that somebody checks the list before the season and again when the club buys anything.
The age class is decided by a date, and decided by exclusion
Age classes run in two-year steps, 10U through 18U at the older end, under a national program whose playing season runs from 1 September to 31 August, and each class is defined by who is shut out of it rather than by who belongs: a player whose thirteenth birthday falls before 1 September is ineligible for 12U. Playing up is allowed and playing down never is. Worth knowing that this is one national program’s answer, and a club under a different body may be working to a different date, so the one to trust is the one your league registers under.
On an adult team, a junior player plays by adult rules
The rule set follows the team rather than the player. A junior player on an adult roster is playing under adult rules for that game, and the rule book attaches an explicit injury warning to the choice rather than leaving it as an administrative footnote. It is the clearest example in this sport of a decision that looks like paperwork and is actually about a fourteen year old standing in a batter’s box.
What a roster can say about a softball player, and what it cannot
Softball has the longest position list of any sport we support, eleven, because it carries both the designated player and the flex. We hold one of them per athlete, which is the usual honest limit. What a roster cannot carry at all is the two things this page is actually about: whether a bat in the bag is still legal this season, and what your state allows a pitcher to throw. Neither is a property of a player, and neither lives with us.
Rostered does not hold a bat list, does not count pitches and does not know whether your state association has a softball workload policy, because whether one exists is your association’s answer to give rather than ours. We also do not score a softball game. Those answers come from your association and from the published equipment list, both of which change on their own schedule rather than ours.
What we hold is the season those questions get asked inside. One schedule for the program with every game and practice attached to the teams it concerns, so a family with a 12U player and a 16U sibling sees their own week. Who has answered for Saturday. And age divisions built once, in the 14U form the sport uses, so a player moving up a class is a change to one record rather than a re-entry. The date that decides which class they are in is your league’s, not ours.
What softball clubs get
- Positions
- Pitcher, Catcher, First Base, Second Base, Third Base, Shortstop, Left Field, Center Field, Right Field, Designated Player, Flex
- Youth ages
- 4 to 18
- Governing bodies
- USA Softball, USSSA, NFHS
- Also included
- Polls, volunteer jobs, release forms, in-app club email, translation, locations with the forecast.
- Cost to families
- Free. No ads.