When the Great Britain Women's Fastpitch Softball Team travelled to Valencia in August 2009 to play in the European A Pool Championships, we had a great week. We finished second (our highest-ever placing in Europe) and qualified for the first time for the Women's World Championships. For the most part, we were on a tremendous high.

But what was depressing for both players and staff – many of whom had paid close to £700 to compete for their country – was to learn that we were the only one of the ten national teams at the tournament that did not have public funding support.

You may not know much about softball, because minority women's sports don't get much coverage in UK media. But we are the fourth largest country in Europe in terms of softball participation, and there were teams in Valencia from countries with far fewer players than we have, and national teams with far less international success. But even those teams had governments and sporting agencies at least willing to pay for flights and accommodation for Europe's most important softball competition. We had nothing.

We used to have something – in fact, quite a lot of something by our standards. Women's fastpitch softball was on the Olympic programme from Atlanta through Beijing, and by 2004, our results had convinced UK Sport that we had at least a chance of winning Europe's one place (out of eight) in the Olympic softball competition. Accordingly, for the 2005-2008 Olympic cycle, UK Sport awarded softball £528,000. To us, it seemed like millions.

Then, during the IOC meeting in 2005 in Singapore, where London won its Olympic bid, softball was dropped from the Olympic programme for 2012 on a tied vote (50% plus one was needed).

To talk about dreams being shattered is an understatement.

And as soon as we failed to qualify for the Beijing Games at the Euro/Africa Olympic Qualifying Tournament in 2007, UK Sport clawed back our allocation for 2008 and cast us into the outer darkness.

The following year, I went to see UK Sport's then Director of Elite Sport. It was while she was explaining to me why softball could never get any more money from the agency despite the fact that "Softball has achieved much more than some of the Olympic sports we fund," that I first heard that magic phrase "No Compromise".

But we've heard it a lot ever since. We heard it a couple of years ago when UK Sport announced that eight of Britain's 26 Olympic sports -- almost a third of the total -- were having their funding cut rather than increased in the run-up to the Games. This has obviously handicapped those sports in terms of preparation, and in some cases has led to sports or athletes failing to qualify for the London Olympics at all.

We heard it again last December when the Daily Telegraph reported that: "The Olympic dreams of hundreds of sportsmen and women are all but shattered after they were booted off a funding programme [designed] to meet their training costs in the run-up to the London Games... Up to 1,800 would-be participants are trying to pull in private sponsorship to keep their hopes alive..."

UK Sport's "No Compromise" policy, where funding is increasingly restricted to Olympic sports and athletes with medal prospects, is designed to "ensure that investment is targeted where it has the greatest chance of success".

But I feel that UK Sport and the government have lost sight of what the Olympic Games are supposed to be about and what sport can achieve in social terms.

As far as the Olympics are concerned, a country, if it's lucky, gets to host the Games once in a generation and it should then be a celebration of sport in the host country -- a celebration in which all sports, or at least all Olympic sports, can share.

This should mean that all Olympic sports get their funding increased so they have the best possible chance of doing themselves proud in front of their home supporters. By all means give more money to sports that have shown they can deliver medals -- but make sure all your Olympic sports and athletes can take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

To my mind, "No Compromise" runs counter to the Olympic spirit, and it certainly runs counter to some of the legacy aims that got London the Games in the first place.

Away from the Olympic issue, why is it a virtue (as "No Compromise" is generally portrayed) to deny funding to successful national team programmes like the Great Britain Women's Softball Team just because we are not (any longer) an Olympic sport?

Yes, we are a small sport in Britain – though no smaller than some Olympic sports – and worldwide, softball is played in 130 countries. And we are a sport where the main international competition is for women, an inspirational sport for millions of women and girls around the world. Moreover, in Britain, there is a national objective to increase women's participation in sport.

Our programme is now precariously balanced between achievement and destruction. Since we did so well in Valencia in 2009, we have gone from strength to strength in terms of performance. We have played in one World Championship, qualified for another and played on almost even terms last summer with the top four teams in the sport (the US, Japan, Canada and Australia) at the World Cup of Softball. All of this is an amazing achievement for a programme with no money and a tiny player pool.

But we came within a whisker early this year of having to decline our place at the 2012 Women's World Championships in Canada for lack of funds. We are only able to go because 90% of the players in our pool committed to pay up to £2200 in order to play. Many are students and they and their families will struggle to find the money, but they are tremendously committed to GB Softball and each other.

Once again, when we get to Canada, we will find that most of the 15 other countries that contest the Women's Softball World Championships will do so with public funding support.

What this means is that other countries, including countries considerably less wealthy than the UK, fund sport in general and elite sport in particular differently than we do. They fund a wider range of sports so that people have real choices for access and success that go beyond football and a few other sports. They provide chances for less successful sports to improve and succeed. They set targets and demand success, just like we do, but with more flexibility and greater attention to context. And I think they reap greater social benefits from sport as a result.

But then, "No Compromise", if nothing else, is a policy in tune with the times – times in which those that have get more and those that have not find themselves at the sharp end of "tough decisions".

Bob Fromer (author of this article) was one of the founders of organised softball in the UK, and was the sport's first paid administrator. He was the founding CEO of BaseballSoftballUK, which works as a development agency for both sports, still works for the agency as a Communications Consultant and has been General Manager of the Great Britain Women's Fastpitch Team since 2000. He represented softball for several years on the BOA Committee.