Scoreboards

Each sport varies slightly from the next while maintaining similarities. There are similarities between football, baseball and basketball, speaking strictly from generalities such as competition between two teams. Football and basketball share a bit more with alternative methods of scoring and also having a secondary time clock to speed up a game. Baseball has a more closely related sport in Softball, where the rules remain very similar as do the methods of play. The biggest differences in softball are in the pitching, equipment and field dimensions. Even though the differences are relatively minor compared to say the differences in basketball and soccer, they are enough to force someone to pay attention to them when designing a facility to accomodate softball teams.

Aside from building an appropriate facility with dimensions that meet softball standards, there is a bit of detail in picking electronic scoreboards that must be kept in mind. As with most sports scoreboards, there are plenty of options to pick from and each board has certain benefits and limitations. Softball scoreboards can display innings, strikes, scores for each team, number of outs and a variety of other bits of information that may be pertinent. Softball has some variation in game length between levels of play and different leagues. Some leagues play only play 6 innings, while others play 9, but most fall in between at 7 innings. This information can have a huge effect on the decision of which softball scoreboards can be most appropriate for a facility.

Spectrum Scoreboards is an example of a sports scoreboard manufacturer that makes a variety of boards for different softball set ups, offering boards with 7 inning tracking or using single digit designation. The issue with these boards is their lack of overall statistic display. Baseball scoreboards track runs, hits and errors, as well as runs by the inning, outs and more. Spectrum doesn't offer much in the ways of complete versatility in board use or even anything that displays the entire spectrum of statistics.

Varsity Scoreboards does a bit of a better job, offering modified baseball scoreboards for softball that track anywhere up to 10 innings, but also has spaces dedicated to tracking the data as a normal baseball game would, in runs, hits and errors. With Varsity's sports scoreboards, there is the flexibility of allowing other leagues and levels of play to participate in the facility without having the equipment incompatible. If a game does go to extra innings, or is not played to the full 9 innings, the electronic scoreboards are fully capable of handling the lesser workload. It is always better to be able to do everything in case it is needed rather than not being able to do enough.

Another option is using baseball scoreboards to track the game. The similarities between the scoring methods of both games allow for many baseball scoreboards also serve as softball scoreboards. If a softball and baseball team share the same facility, it may prove to be the most cost effective way of serving both.