Sports

Saturday, Jun. 27, 2009

Softball's Future: Burkhart’s most important pitch: Return softball to the Olympics

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Katie Burkhart is unquestionably one of the best in the world at her sport.

Unlike Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt or Yao Ming, though, she no longer is able to compete on the grandest of international stages.

Burkhart, a 5-foot-10, left-handed pitcher who graduated from San Luis Obispo High in 2004, was named to the USA Softball Women’s National Team on June 15, reaching the brink of realizing a long-held dream of playing in the Olympics.

But four years ago, the International Olympic Committee abruptly jolted Burkhart and her peers, voting to eliminate softball, as well as baseball, from the 2012 Games in London.

Consequently, when Burkhart and her new teammates compete at the World Cup in Oklahoma City from July 16 to July 20 on ESPN, they’ll be part of a budding movement of players who were forced into convincing the world — and specifically the IOC — that their sport should be back in the Olympics.

On Aug. 13, the IOC executive board will meet in Berlin to vote on whether the sport is worthy of reinstatement for 2016. Six other sports — baseball, rugby, golf, squash, karate and roller sports — are also competing for the two additional-sport vacancies.

“I’ve been asked, ‘Why do we still have a national team put together?’ “ Burkhart said of the post-2005 fallout. “It’s time to start building back a foundation for what younger girls deserve — to be able to go for the gold.”

Softball: Too American for the Olympics?

In 2008, Burkhart was the No. 1 overall draft for the Philadelphia Force in National Pro Fastpitch league. After she went on to post 13 wins and a 1.87 ERA — both league highs — Burkhart embarked on another professional career, this time in Japan, where she played for the Toyota Motor Corporation in the Japan Softball Association’s Women’s Major League Softball.

Overseas, the sport is especially in need of ambassadors like Burkhart.

The IOC’s reasoning in jettisoning softball was that the sport, which joined the Olympics in 1996, was too American in popularity, thus creating an unfair competitive balance across the globe.

Ironically, though, three years after that determination, Japan upset the U.S. 3-1 in the gold-medal game in Beijing — ending the Americans’ 22-game Olympic winning streak, marking the first time they’d failed to win the gold in four tries and perhaps signifying that the rest of the world had finally caught up to the U.S.

“We’re very deserving (of Olympic reinstatement),” Team USA head coach Jay Miller said in light of other countries’ improvements. “It’s a dream hundreds of thousands of players in this country and around the world have.”

A dream 14 years in the making

The 23-year-old Burkhart said this try was her fifth attempt at joining the national team. She was chosen after an early-June selection camp at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista.

“The process is always very tense,” she said. “You could be the best player in the world, and you’ll still always get butterflies. It’s been a dream of mine since I was 9 years old.”

Burkhart got the news that she had made it when her fiancé called her while she was in an airport waiting for a flight back to Allentown, Pa.

“It was overwhelming,” she said. “I actually started crying.”

Miller said he was unsure of exactly where Burkhart, who helped lead the USA University Team to gold in Taiwan at the 2006 World University Games, will fit into this year’s rotation. Iconic right-handed pitcher Jennie Finch is one of just eight holdovers from the 2008 Olympic squad.

Burkhart “brings tremendous experience and a background of competing at the highest level,” Miller said. “Katie can be a dominant force.”

That dominance first came into focus during her high school years, when she won Tribune County Player of the Year honors in her junior and senior campaigns of 2003 and 2004. She was an all-state selection the latter year, when she had a 0.21 ERA and 358 strikeouts.

“You knew she was going to be something special,” said San Luis Obispo head coach Mike Lee, who coached Burkhart for all four seasons she was a Tiger. “She knew she belonged (with older players) at an early age.”

Burkhart then began an illustrious career with Arizona State, becoming the first Sun Devil to be named the Pac-10 Conference Pitcher of the Year, a feat she achieved as a junior and a senior.

In 2008, she led Arizona State to its first Women’s College World Series title, throwing a four-hit shutout in a decisive 11-0 win, claiming the Most Outstanding Player trophy in the process.

‘The clock is ticking’ for Olympic hopefuls

Team USA will reconvene in Chula Vista for a training camp from Monday through Thursday before preparing for the World Cup. In addition to Japan, Miller identified Australia (which claimed the bronze in Beijing), China and Canada as some of the most formidable competition.

Naturally, Burkhart and her teammates hope the event is a prelude to a return to Olympic play.

“For Katie, the clock is ticking,” Lee said. “Last year would’ve been the ideal situation. Definitely, the next Olympics would’ve been a great opportunity.

“When she didn’t make the Olympic team (for 2008), that goal escaped her,” Lee added, “but making the national team now fulfills a lot of what she set out to do.”

Last year, her jerseys as both a Tiger and a Sun Devil were hung at Firestone Grill in her hometown, alongside other uniforms and memorabilia pertaining to fellow local sports heroes. After the ceremony, Burkhart signed autographs for a throng of admirers, and spoke of meeting young girls who idolized her.

That was seven months before March, when she began playing in Japan — the “best experience” of her life — where pro softball is more vastly appreciated, comfortably established and financially stable because its teams are funded by companies.

In a sense, the IOC appears to have placed Burkhart and her teammates in a binding, seemingly no-win situation in current international competition. If they lose, they lose. If they win, and win big, as they did prior to 2008, it would give the committee more ammunition to claim the sport is too American-centric.

But Burkhart has stayed “very hopeful” of the sport returning to the Olympics, and views other international play as an opportunity to continue spreading her pure love of the game, as she already has for years, from San Luis Obispo to Japan.

She’s not alone. As part of its “Back Softball” campaign, the International Softball Federation has given out $3 million in softball equipment across 70 countries, primarily in Africa and the Middle East, over the past three years.

“It’s a slow process,” Lee said of the movement to prove the sport’s increasingly worldwide appeal to the IOC. “But as people like Katie Burkhart and other outstanding players who have a love for the game can really promote it, I just hope it will be reconsidered.”