Formerly the Amateur Softball Association (ASA)/USA Softball, USA Softball has many important responsibilities as the National Governing Body of softball in the United States, including regulating competition to insure fairness and equal opportunity to the millions of players who play the sport.

When USA Softball entered the picture in 1933, the sport was in a state of confusion with no unified set of playing rules and no National Governing Body to provide guidance and stability. USA Softball changed all that by adopting softball's first universally accepted rules of play and by organizing consistent and fair competition across the nation. From this beginning, USA Softball has become one of the nation's largest and fastest growing sports organizations and now sanctions competition in every state through a network of state/metro associations. USA Softball has grown from a few hundred teams in the early days to over 120,000 teams today, representing a membership of more than 2 million.