One of the great things about baseball is the crack of the bat that can be heard when someone hits the ball really hard. At least at the professional level. It’s a bit different at the college level.
Most of the time, whether talking about college baseball or college softball, rather than a crack, fans are going to hear a ping. But does college softball use wooden bats? The long and short of it is that no, college baseball and softball both use aluminum bats rather than wooden ones.
Does college softball use wooden bats?
Some of the reason for this is that it’s just a cost thing. Wooden bats can shatter and in MLB, each player tends to have more than one at every game. It would take something very odd in order to ever breat an aluminum bat.
That doesn’t mean that aluminum bats are outlawed. They simply aren’t encouraged and because players don’t want to be at a disadvantage, players don’t use them.
The NCAA, by and large, switched from wooden to aluminum bats in 1974 in response to rising costs. Today, wooden bats aren’t technically banned for use by the NCAA, and though they rarely are used nowadays in college baseball, they’ve produced great results in the right hands.
Those hands however are fewer and farther between considering that college softball players see the pop that comes with metal bats rather than the wood ones almost all the time.
So does college softball use wooden bats? They certainly don’t require it and most teams don’t bother to even try.