Questions are being raised about the future of men's softball in New Zealand after the Black Sox's disappointing pool stage at this year's World Cup on home soil.
Last night's 1-0 tiebreaker loss to Cuba ended any chance of silverware for the seven-time champions as they were dumped into the placement round of the final stage of the competition, competing to finish seventh at best.
It's a hard pill to swallow for the side lauded in proud history with the result set to be their worst in history – a low previously reserved for their fifth-place finish in 1968.
But Softball NZ board chairman Hoani Lambert said people need to remember how tightly-contested this year's World Cup has been with 2019 runners-up and current World No.2 Japan also eliminated from the competition.
"I think we have to be clear for one swing of the bat in that game against Cuba it would be a totally different conversation we'd be having right now," Lambert told 1News.
"I don't want us to overreact to what has happened here but we do need to look at ourselves internally and think about how we avoid this happening again."
The campaign has been a frustrating one for the Black Sox with a complete performance difficult to come by; some nights the bats would be hot but the pitching was shaky and others – like last night with Daniel Chapman's incredible performance on the mound – the pitching was dominant but the Kiwis weren't scoring runs.
It leaves them with three games left to play for pride – and prove they have such a performance in them.
Men's softball was allocated $200,000 in the last round of High Performance Sport New Zealand funding – a figure that was reduced in 2020 from $350,000 after their fourth-place finish at the 2019 World Cup.
Questions will now be asked just what sort of funding may be available for their next campaign but Lambert hopes HPSNZ looks at the big picture.
"Our sport is an amateur sport here in New Zealand, we don't have the resources of some of the big professional codes," he said.
"We would hope that the nature of our sport more broadly is taken into account when those decisions are made."
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