Tuesday's game between the U.S. Women's Olympic National Softball team and the Black Hills Gold is one of a 48-city Bound 4 Beijing Tour that began in February and will conclude in late July with the team having traveled 43,000 miles and played about 60 games.

One goal is to prepare Team USA for 2008 Olympic competition, which begins Aug. 12. But the tour is physically demanding and financially costly.

"It's not the ultimate situation you'd like to have," Team USA coach Mike Candrea said.

It is difficult to imagine the Olympic Men's Basketball team enduring the grind of a six-month bus tour. But basketball players aren't fighting to save their sport from Olympic extinction.

In July 2005, the International Olympic Committee voted to delete softball and baseball from the Olympic program in 2012. A follow-up vote in 2006 sustained the decision. The committee will review its decision again in October 2009, when it will consider a number of sports for inclusion in the 2016 Olympic program.

Because the committee is of the opinion that the Summer Olympics can effectively handle only 28 sports, only the two spots created by the expulsion of softball and baseball will be filled. The field will be crowded with sports clamoring for Olympic recognition, including golf, squash, karate and roller sports.

In voting down softball, the committee cited limited worldwide participation and appeal and the dominance of the United States, which has won all three gold medals since softball first became an Olympic sport in 1996.

Others suspect political concerns, including negative worldwide reaction to American foreign policy.

Regardless of reasons, the softball community, headed up by the International Softball Federation headquartered in Plant City, Fla., has mounted an impressive campaign to have softball reinstated as an Olympic sport. An official Web site, www.backsoftball.com, has been set up to promote the sport, and another site offers an online petition to support it.

Nice gestures, but not the types of action that will make people normally stand up and take notice. That's where the KFC Bound 4 Beijing Tour comes in. Clearly, the brightest stars in the "save Olympic softball" universe are the very talented players of Team USA. Who better to promote softball to the country and the world?

Fortunately for Rapid City and a number of other smaller markets in the U.S., tour organizers chose to take the game into areas where softball has not had a lot of exposure in the past.

"They didn't pull out a map and look for the softball hotspots in the U.S.," said Black Hills Gold coach Rick DenHerder, also ASA commissioner and organizer of the Rapid City Bound 4 Beijing Tour stop. "They pulled out a map and said, 'Where we do we want to go to promote our game?' And I really do believe that for every single one of the Team USA players and coaching staff, this is as much as about bringing the game to America. Never in my wildest expectations as a coach would I have thought that I would have the opportunity to take the field with the likes of Mike Candrea, who is one of the great ambassadors of the game. And to have the likes of Monica Abbot and Jenny Finch and Crystal Bustos here is a dream come true for me as much as it is for these young ladies on Black Hills Gold. People are really excited that this team is going to be here. This tour generates that kind of excitement everywhere."

Can the tour single-handedly save softball?

Crystal Bustos, a two-time gold medal winner and one of the stars of Team USA, thinks so.

"I think there is a good chance," Bustos said Wednesday night in the midst of a bus ride from Portland, Ore., to Spokane, Wash.

"For us as athletes, if we keep playing the sport as it should be played, it will help to spread the sport around the world and get people involved," Bustos said. "All we hope is that the people on the Olympic selection committee actually come out to the park or see a game on TV and watch the game being played before they vote it out."