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 14 years, the facility hosted more than 5,000 games, 3,000 team practices, and 200 tournaments and leagues. The pandemic put a terrible strain on the company, and in 2022, the facility closed, and the building was sold.
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 that 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 dedicated fastpitch facility in the country. Since 2019, we have hosted more than 9,000 teams and played more than 22,000 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. In 2024, we added our 12th and final Field.
At the end of the 2020 season, we ended our 11-year relationship with USSSA and formed the PlayFPN Tournament Network, instantly becoming the largest independent fastpitch tournament provider in the region. Since then, other independent tournament hosts have joined the network in CT and neighboring states, and it continues to grow with many regional hosts running PlayFPN events.
Creating the PlayFPN Tournament Network
Many coaches and we had long felt that the sanctioning bodies had become a bit bloated with processes, bureaucracy, paperwork, and costs that frustrate teams and tournament directors. After the pandemic, the sanctioning bodies were struggling to find their relevance and value proposition to their customers. When we initially considered leaving USSSA, we assumed we'd go it alone in the marketplace with Fastpitch Nation. However, during the pandemic, we realized that among teams, there had been a level of dissatisfaction with all sanctioning bodies that we knew we could help to alleviate.
We spent months researching and, ultimately, creating the PlayFPN Tournament Network, which, along with Fastpitch Nation Park, is a network of like-minded, quality tournaments around the region. We created an exciting new opportunity for the best fastpitch tournament hosts in the region, and Fastpitch Nation utilized its well-established brand and marketing reach to help promote not only our own events, but all the PlayFPN-member events too. Like Fastpitch Nation, all the events are entirely independent, but simply share Fastpitch Nation's marketing and technology platform, giving tournament hosts a common place to register teams, free of charge, manage rosters, provide scheduling, scoring, and the results infrastructure that all tournament hosts need.
In 2022, we started with 5 hosts in CT. In 2026, we have nearly 30 in CT, RI, MA, NH, ME, and NY. Combined, we are providing more than 150 fastpitch tournaments in the region, and we continue to grow.
