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1980 – 2012 in Mishawaka; the tournament continues
The founding: On 12 June 1980, at College Park beside Bethel College in Mishawaka, nineteen-year-old Jim Bottorff laid out a new-look Wiffle Ball field — six-foot home-run fences, copyrighted rules, and a restored rounders rule under which a runner could be retired by being hit with the ball. On 2 August 1980 Bottorff and co-founder Larry Grau, both nineteen, held the first World Wiffle Ball Championship there: eight park teams, double elimination, won by College Park I.
The Mishawaka run: The championship stayed in Mishawaka for thirty-three years, building regional stops as far away as Barcelona while its home remained a park a few miles from Notre Dame, and grew into what the National Baseball Hall of Fame's account calls the game in its most successful competitive form — sixty teams from twelve states by 2019. It remains the oldest consecutively running Wiffle Ball tournament in the nation.
The departure and return: After the 2012 season the tournament left for the Chicago suburbs — Skokie in 2013, then Midlothian — and in 2024 it came back to Indiana, holding its forty-fifth edition at Crown Point on 17–18 August 2024. The city's own encyclopedia article says the tournament was hosted in Mishawaka "from 1980 to 2012 and again in 2020"; the tournament's own history records the thirty-three-year run and the 2013 departure and does not document a 2020 Mishawaka edition, and the two lines stand unreconciled in this section.
Sources:
- World Wiffle Ball Championship (worldwiffleball.org), History — the 1980 founding, the first championship, the thirty-three-year run and departure; the forty-fifth edition at Crown Point, 2024.
- National Baseball Hall of Fame, "No Whiffs Here: The History of the Wiffle Ball" — Bottorff in Mishawaka, 1980; sixty teams from twelve states in 2019.
- Wikipedia, "Mishawaka, Indiana" and "Wiffle ball" — the 1980–2012 hosting line with the 2020 edition, against the tournament's own history.