Trae Cardwell briefly surveyed the ballroom at Sloan Convention Center on Sunday as hundreds of mostly teenage girls approached, softball bats in hand.

Some carried just one metal club, many two or more as they made their way toward Cardwell and his small group of volunteers stationed behind small barrel compression testing machines. Each and every bat intended for use in this week’s tournament had to pass a compression test Sunday.

Cardwell, tournament director of the USA Softball 14U Class “A” National Championship Tournament that was slated to start Monday morning and run through July 29 at Michael O. Buchanon Park, spent much of his weekend preparing to play host to 90 travel teams representing 27 states.

That’s about 1,000 to 1,500 players, and most typically bring at least two or three bats each to tournaments. Cardwell estimated he and his team would test up to 10,000 bats in all before the day was through. Starting about 8 a.m. Sunday, Cardwell and his fellow testers had worked through about a quarter of those teams’ bats by 1 p.m., with more arriving all the time.

It’s a task that seems preordained to drive a person batty. But Cardwell said it’s a necessary and required step for all USA Softball national events.

“We’re putting them into a machine to test the barrel compression,” Cardwell said. “The barrel compression has to be at least 1,500 psi for safety reasons. If it has too low of a compression, it’s more prone to break. If the bat breaks, it’s unsafe for the girls.”

A lower psi can also impact the bat’s performance, with those bats featuring a lower psi often creating a higher exit speed compared to bats with a higher psi. That’s another safety concern, specifically for the fielders when the ball is coming off the bat at potentially a much higher velocity than intended by the manufacturer.

By halfway through Sunday’s bat testing, Cardwell said his team had rejected about 100 bats. Around 20 of those failed for having orange lettering on the barrel, which runs contrary to USA Softball rules. The remainder had simply worn down to the point that they didn’t adequately hold compressed air, including one extreme case of a bat that tested at 50 psi (a large unseen hole in the barrel was the culprit).

“Over time, bats kind of willow away,” Cardwell said. “It starts to break a little bit, and when you hit it, hit it, hit it … it starts to dim itself out. Eventually it’s going to create a crack somewhere, and once you get that crack it starts losing air and obviously it can’t have compressed air in there so it loses compression.”

Cardwell said intentionally modified “hot” bats aren’t usually a problem for national-level softball events.

“In most USA Softball tournaments, you’re not going to catch an intentionally altered bat,” Cardwell said. “That is something that there is a very severe punishment for – we take that very seriously, so if we find one that was intentionally altered the bat actually gets sent to our national office to be destroyed and that player will be banned from all USA Softball events indefinitely.

“But in my six years of doing this, I’ve never found an intentionally altered bat.”

That doesn’t mean they won’t be checking just to make sure those bats haven’t been tampered with this week.

“The umpires will once again check the bats before the first game to make sure there’s no dents, cuts, scratches, no twists in the bat,” Cardwell said. “They’ll make sure there’s no tennis balls in there, nothing that creates any cheating or more of an advantage to the player.”

Michael Tilley, head coach of the Hanover Hornets of Hanover, Va., said he’s seen bat testing at USA Softball tournaments before but never to the extent of Sunday’s setup.

“This is the first time I’ve seen bat testing to this scale, but all the national tournaments in USA Softball do bat testing and they make sure everybody is on a level playing field,” Tilley said. “The safety for the kids is what they’re looking at.

“The ball compression coming off the bat can injure players if it gets on them too fast, and that’s what it’s all about. It really doesn’t have anything to do with trying to catch anybody cheating.”