In 1887 softball was
invented as an indoor sport by George Hancock of the Chicago Board of Trade. The
first games took place inside the Farragut Boat Club in Chicago. In 1895 Lewis
Rober, a member of the Minneapolis, Minnesota, fire department, invented outdoor
softball and called it Kitten League Ball, later shortened to Kitten Ball. Rober
invented the game to keep the firemen in shape and busy during the time they
spent at the firehouse. In subsequent years the popularity of Kitten Ball spread
throughout the United States. In 1922 the name Kitten Ball was changed to
Diamond Ball. The name softball was not developed until 1926, when Walter
Hakanson of the Denver, Colorado, Yound Men's Christian Association (YMCA)
conceived of it while attending a meeting in Greeley, Colorado, to form the
Colorado Amateur Softball Association. In 1933 the first national amateur
softball tournament in the United States took place in Chicago, in conjunction
with that year's World's Fair. The softball tournament was staged by two
American sports enthusiasts, Leo Fischer and Michael J. Pauley, and it provided
a basis for a permanent national softball organization in the United States—the
ASA.
Softball's popularity
continued to grow and to spread internationally. By the mid-1990s it was played
in more than 85 countries under the auspices of the International Softball
Federation (ISF), the international governing body of the sport. The ISF was
founded in 1952 and is also located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The first ISF
Women's World Championship was held in 1965 in Melbourne, Australia, and the
first ISF Men's World Championship was held in 1966 in Mexico City, Mexico. Both
were played in the fast-pitch classification. World championships for boys' and
girls' fast-pitch softball were first played in 1981.