How it All Began
On a cold January day in 2004, Fastpitch Nation founder and owner, David Rocha, walked into a local baseball training facility with his little 9-year-old daughter looking for pitching lessons. He found an awful lot for boys and almost nothing for girls. That night when he got home, he told his wife what he had seen and that there needed to be a place like that for girls. So began the journey of education and research that went around the country and back to decide what to build. Fast forward to 2008 when Fastpitch Nation in Bloomfield, CT opened. The 24,000 sq ft facility not only had batting cages and pitching lanes, but a real field with a natural clay infield. Over the past 14 years the facility, now called Fastpitch Nation Indoor, has hosted more than 5,000 games, 3,000 team practices and 200 tournaments and leagues. However, after more than 14 years, Fastpitch Nation has sold and closed its indoor facility.
The Move Outdoors
In 2010 USSSA reached out to Fastpitch Nation about leading the effort to bring USSSA fastpitch tournaments to New England. Fastpitch Nation took on the challenge and signed an 8-year contract with the Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Club in East Hartford, CT to use their slowpitch facility for fastpitch. Fastpitch Nation did many renovations at the park to make it playable for fastpitch softball and so began that journey that started from zero to becoming the largest and most respected fastpitch tournament provider in New England.
Creating Fastpitch Nation Park
In 2015 after hosting the first USSSA Nationals ever held in New England, we knew to grow and serve the teams to the level we wanted, we would need to build a park of our own. After an exhaustive search and countless negotiations with many municipalities, it was a private landowner in Windsor, CT, Mark Greenberg, who truly understood what we wanted to do and welcomed us to lease his land to build our park.
In 2019 Fastpitch Nation Park opened its gates with 11 fields, boasting the largest and finest dedicated fastpitch facility in the Northeast United States. Since 2019, we have hosted more than 4,000 teams and played more than 12,000 games. We led all youth sports back to playing in the 2020 pandemic and set the tone for how it could be done safely with many places around the country emulating our process to get back to playing softball.
At end of the 2020 season we ended our 11-season relationship with USSSA and formed the PlayFPN Tournament Network, instantly becoming one of the largest independent fastpitch tournament providers in the country. Since then, other independent tournament hosts have joined the network in CT and neighboring states.
The Future
After closing our original indoor facility, we had planned to move our Winter leagues and tournaments to the new 95,000 sq/ft Day Hill Dome under construction next to our Fastpitch Nation Park in Windsor, CT. Unfortunately, the new dome project has been impacted by the world-wide supply chain crisis, like so many other construction projects. This means the new dome will not be open in time for this winter season and, unfortunately, we will not have our traditional winter leagues and tournaments for the 2022-23 winter season but they will resume for 2023-24 winter season.
Since we plan to move our indoor leagues and tournaments to the new dome, when completed, we have decided to open a new, smaller Fastpitch Nation Indoor facility. This new 5,000 sq/ft facility will be focused primarily on our fastpitch instruction programs and we will also offer limited batting cage and pitching lane rentals. The new instruction facility will incorporate the latest high-tech instructional aids and will be conveniently located, less than 5 minutes from Fastpitch Nation Park. Tentatively we hope to open the new indoor facility in Dec. 2022. As the plans and timeline firm up we will send out a more detailed announcement and update this website. We appreciate all the support of our loyal customers over the past 14 years and we are excited about the future and look forward to sharing it all with you.