It is Monday April 10th, we are almost halfway April. In the softball world in the Netherlands everyone knows what that means….: The softball season is about to start. The past two weekends all teams played in tournaments and separate games in preparation for the season. Not only Dutch teams participated, some European national teams had a practice weekend and also some European club teams came to the Netherlands for their season preparations. Both weekends turned out to have beautiful spring weather on the final day which makes the softball season ready to start.
What will the Dutch Golden League look like this year? Roef! has found it’s way to the Golden League by kicking out Twins, so Roef! now represents the southern part of the Netherlands. Tex Town Tigers is still there and will represent the eastern part. And then unfortunately there are 4 teams from Haarlem with girls from all over the country but still playing in one city. The four teams are DSS, Olympia, Sparks and Terrasvogels. Minor details, these four teams will all represent Haarlem, ahem, the Netherlands during the European cups.
The competition starts upcoming Saturday, April 15th. Every Saturday 3 double headers will be played and in addition to that the 7th team of the Golden League will play against one of the other six on the Sundays. The 7th team is the U19 National Selection who are preparing for the World Championships in July.
Talking about Championships. All Dutch National Team players will be playing in the Golden League in addition to the full time training/game program that will lead up to the European Championships by the end of June.
So what does the first weekend look like?
Saturday @ 14.00 en 16.10u
DSS will visit Olympia Haarlem
Tex Town Tigers will visit Sparks Haarlem
Terrasvogels will visit Roef!
Sunday @ 14.00 en 16.10u
The U19 National Team will visit Olympia Haarlem
Would you like to follow some games? There is a live play-by-play for every game at www.knbsbstats.nl
Of course not only the Dutch competitions will be going on, good luck to all the teams who start or just started their competition of 2017. Keep having fun, it might just become your year!
Eva