Tokyo 2020: Mexican Olympic Softball players are training daily, submitting workout reports online

With the announcement of the new Olympic schedule, the Mexican Women’s National Softball Team now has a more clear path towards the country’s most important softball event in history: the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Despite the pandemic, the Mexican softball players keep training individually to get in shape ahead of Mexico’s debut in the Olympic Games softball competition against Canada, on 21 July at Fukushima.

"We cannot join to train as a team, softball is a team sport, but each player is working individually...we give them homework every day,” explained Mexican Softball Federation President Rolando Cruz Guerrero to ESTO, one of the Mexico’s top sports newspaper. “The hitters are swinging, they must do 500 swings per week; right now we lowered the number to 250 a week for the vacation period, so they are doing 50 a day. And they must submit their reports electronically, they also send us videos of all their activities. They are doing strengthening weight exercises, since we are a year away, and they are getting stronger, trying to maintain their physical condition. Some of them are going out to workout, our pitchers are pitching, all the others are maintaining their physical condition.”

The Mexican National Women’s Softball Team, fifth in the WBSC Rankings, aims to be back on the field in November, if the pandemic situation allows it, with activities every month until next July, when the team would travel to Hiroshima, Japan, to play some friendlies against professional teams and the Japanese national team, ahead of the first Olympic match.

It will be Mexico’s softball debut in the Olympics. Mexico locked up their Olympic berth at the WBSC Softball Americas Olympic Qualifier held in Surrey, Canada, in August 2019. The team managed by Carlos Bernaldez went 8-0 in the 10-team tournament.

Currently, 26 players are training under the program, competing for 15 spots in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic roster.