My daughter is now 16 and moving away from playing softball. But she has played since she was about 8 years old. So this is recent history for me. Thankfully she didn't pitch, but I got to watch everything, including pitchers (parents of pitchers are usually Prima Donnas), for many years.

There's "little league" and there's serious softball. The pinnacle of little league is winding up in the Little League Softball World Series, played in suburban Portland Oregon. [1] My daughter was able to play in the preliminary rounds because we're local and one local team always gets to go as the "host". It's for 12 year olds, after that age little league pretty much disappears.

But Little League softball teams are usually weak because the competition is weak. They never will get to the World Series unless the kids also play by what goes by a variety of terms. We call it "ASA" here, but "NSA" is also popular in other areas. It's also called "club" softball. ASA and NSA are sanctioning bodies that provide umpires to tournaments that are held practically year round.

As opposed to little league, which is organized by town, ASA teams can draw from an entire metro area or even from across the state. Anybody who wants to can organize a team. Pay an entry fee and your team can play in a tournament.

And teams play and play and play. There are competing tournaments every weekend for much of the spring and summer. After a short break, "fall ball" starts up for preparation for the next spring. Even 10 y/o and 12 y/o girls travel out of state to go to tournaments.

And once you're in a tournament, the play can be very tiresome. Usually they are double-elimination brackets. Lose an early game and you may need to play 4 games on Saturday and 4 more on Sunday in order to win the tournament.

That's right. Weekend tournaments would routinely have 6 or 8 games (as long as you kept winning, of course).

A team might have 2 good pitchers. And a light weekend schedule would be 6 games. So a girl could expect to pitch 3 full games in two days. Probably more than that if the other pitcher(s) aren't pitching well that day.

After little league, the natural progression is high school softball. But every good high school player is also on an ASA team. During grade school there are ASA tournaments all spring, but not usually during high school. Instead, when the high school year ends, ASA begins in earnest. The serious ASA teams travel around the country to "exposure" tournaments, hoping that the kids will will be noticed by college coaches. Just this year my daughter traveled around Oregon and to Colorado, Washington, and California.

Why do parents do it? Some (like me) do it because the girls are having fun. It also occupies the girls' time (keeps them out of trouble!). Teams stay together for years, and the girls become good friends. Other parents are delusional about their child's abilities. They think their precious will get a "full ride" to a "D1" school. But I read recently that only 3% of the girls playing "18 gold" (the top) will get scholarships to D1 schools. Other girls might be offered partial scholarships to smaller schools. Is that worth it? Not to me, because even at smaller schools the sport will require an immense amount of time. Do you want your kids' focus in college to be softball? Not me. IMO that doesn't make sense for 99% of the girls.

YMMV.

[1] http://www.alpenrose.com/little-league-world-series/