Correction to my original post, below is what I am actually looking for

I am trying to come up with a formula that will look at a column for a word
or set of words, look at a 2nd column and if and give me a running total in
another column as long as none of the values in the 2nd column match. For
example, use the following worksheet
A B C D
1 Ball 1 Ball 2
2 Bat 2 Bat 1
3 Ball 3 Glove 1
4 Ball 3
5 Glove 4
for Cell D1 I want the countif function to look at column A for Ball give me
a running total as long as the numbers in column B match, so in this case you
can see that cell B3 and B4 both have 3, so I only need that counted once for
cell d1 therefore my running total would be 2. I hope I explained what I
need clearly