High schools pick up Windy City's traditional sport

~ Fifty Illinois schools offered the sport this fall.

CHICAGO -- In this city where the history of softball begins, there is growing concern that Chicago's unique brand of the game -- played with 16-inch balls and without mitts -- may be following the steel mills into the history books.

Leagues have dwindled, the players that carried the sport for decades are growing old and dying, and players who might otherwise have filled the void are being siphoned off by everything from soccer to video games.

Now, though, enthusiasts are trying to bring back the sport played with a ball about the size of a cantaloupe. And they're hoping to do it with, of all people, teenagers -- a group that typically is about as interested in playing a game from the good old days as they are hearing their parents talk about the good old days.

Six years ago, 16-inch softball was introduced as a varsity sport in the Chicago Public Schools. Played in the fall, so as not to compete with baseball teams, it allows players on those teams to learn a game that, unlike hardball, they can keep playing for years to come. The number of teams has more than doubled from 25 to 50. And at least five more schools plan to join next year.

"The growth is slow but it's coming around," said Mike North, a Chicago radio sports personality who helped launch the school league in the hope the players will fall in love with the game the way their parents and grandparents did and want to keep playing after they graduate."

Whether he's right remains to be seen. Those who track the adult leagues say they're starting to see a few new faces. But it will take a few years before it becomes clear if high schoolers who now enjoy the game will want to keep playing it as adults.

If they do, they will be keeping alive a sport that, in its way, was as much a part of Chicago as deep-dish pizza.

The way the story goes, softball was born in November 1887 inside Chicago's Farragut Boat Club. A Yale alumnus -- excited that his school had beaten Harvard in a football game -- threw an old boxing glove at a Harvard alum, who tried to hit it with a stick.

The exchange caused George Hancock, a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, to envision a version of indoor baseball. He spent years promoting the game, eventually adapting it for outdoors play.

Over the years, there were different variations of the game in different parts of the country. Some played with a smaller ball and some used gloves. In Chicago, the game was played with a 16-inch ball and without gloves.

"The 16-inch game came out of Chicago and they stayed with it," said Bill Plummer III, the manager of the National Softball Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

The game became an integral part of life in Chicago. Talk to Chicagoans in their 50s, 60s and 70s and you will hear stories about games on every block, "money games" between powerful neighborhood and league teams.

"When you used to go to picnics everybody had a 16-inch ball and a bat in the car," said Dave Novak, director of the park district in nearby Forest Park.

Valerie Gemskie, the 31-year-old coach of Walter Payton College Prep, last year's city champs, compares her childhood when every kid "on my block ... got 16-inch softballs for their birthday" with her high school players, many of whom never played the game at all before joining the team.