FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 30, 2002

GREEK TEAM COMING TOGETHER...
FIGURATIVELY AND LITERALLY
Players Set To Workout Together As A Team For First Time

It has been four months since Head Coach Linda Wells held the North American tryouts for the first-ever Greek Olympic softball team. More than six weeks have passed since she went to Greece looking to select players who might represent their country on her team at the 2004 Olympics. Now, they’re all coming together for the first time as a team, as they train this week in Arizona (United States), preparing for international competitions in 2003.

The site for the Training Camp will be Arizona State University Softball Stadium in Tempe. The attendees will be the 12 selected at the August tryouts in Plant City, Florida (USA) and the seven players selected from the Greek team tryouts held in November in Athens.

The latter group will arrive tomorrow. Coach Wells will be assisted this week by Diane Ninemire, University of California, Berkeley’s coach, who will arrive on Wednesday, along with four players that Wells has invited to tryout (on Thursday), prior to the team working out January 3-8. (The 12 North American team members will be arriving on Thursday.) January 3-8 will consist of practice and training for the 19 team members (12 North Americans plus seven Greeks), plus any of the tryout players invited to stay and train with the team. The last day will also be the departure date.

This is the first step that the actual “team” will take on its trek toward the 2004 Olympics. Everything prior to this has been in the form of a tryout for the team and hasn’t been an actual workout or training session with the entire team. This marks the very first time that the Greek national softball team will be gathered together in the same place to begin training to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games.

The main purpose for this session is to bring the entire Greek national softball team together to train and prepare for the 2003 international competitions: the U.S. Cup (Hawaii), the European Championships (Italy), and the Greek Cup (Athens). It also allows Coach Wells to narrow down the group to the 17 players who will compete for Greece at the U.S. Cup, June 17-22 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The activities in Arizona are a chance to train the players both individually and collectively, in addition to determining which players will make up the team roster for the first international event (U.S. Cup).

The International Softball Federation (ISF) has been working with the Hellenic Amateur Softball Federation to build this program, which for all intents and purposes did not exist prior to 1999.

For more information, please contact ISF Director of Communications Bruce Wawrzyniak at brucew@internationalsoftball.com or (813) 864-0100, ext. 229.