The National Fastpitch Coaches Association is proud to announce a new online relationship withSoftballNews.com as the "Official Search Resource of the NFCA."

SoftballNews.com is owned and operated by NFCA's webmaster, Ray Foster, who has been an NFCA member since 1998. "Ray has done a great job as webmaster of the NFCA's site, 'Home Plate on the World Wide Web' and this new project will provide a wonderful new service for the softball world. Because of his dedication to our site, 'Home Plate" is approaching the 15-million mark for visits in less than three years," said NFCA Executive Director Lacy Lee Baker.

SoftballNews.com's "Links Search" presently has over 4,000 web site links for softball and softball-related web sites. The links represent fast, slow and modified-pitch web sites and every imaginable category of softball from "Associations" to "Umpire-Resources" and everything in between.

In addition to the Alta Vista-style search engine with it's 68,000 indexed pages of searchable material, SoftballNews.com has created the most extensive collection of web site links and amateur tournament schedules in softball history. Travel teams will especially benefit from "The Ultimate Tournament Site," a creation of Scott Maples which is a database of over a thousand upcoming tournaments that can be searched in seconds.

Foster is a former elementary school teacher who was suddenly deafened in 1990. In his search for an occupation that didn't require the ability to hear, he found a natural match in the internet. Completely self-taught, Ray created what is believed to be the first college softball web site in internet history in 1994 for Fresno State. In 1998 when Fresno State won the NCAA championship, the web site had over 500,000 visitors. He also single-handedly produced the first internet-based play-by-play of the Women's College World Series by reporting minute-by-minute details of all 13 games via the Fresno State softball web site.

This year Ray added another "first" to his list of contributions to the game of softball by becoming the softball columnist for USA Today's "Around College Softball," the first softball-only position for a nationally published daily newspaper in the history of the sport.

Foster resides in San Juan Capistrano, California, and he has partnered with Maples, a "softball dad" from Caney, Kansas, to bring true search engine resources to the game of softball - another first for the sport.

Please join the NFCA in welcoming SoftballNews.com as our "Official Search Resource."