Athletes Unlimited was already on Kim Ng’s radar when she arrived at then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence in March 2024 for a Women’s History Month celebration.
In fact, as the senior vice president of baseball operations for MLB — a position she held for nine years before becoming the first woman to serve as a general manager in any of North America’s Big Four men’s professional sports leagues — Ng had taken a meeting in December 2019 with co-founders Jon Patricof and Jonathan Soros.
She came away so impressed that she encouraged MLB to keep tabs on Athletes Unlimited’s softball ventures.
More than four years later, Ng met Hilary Meyer, Athletes Unlimited’s senior vice president of impact, at Harris’ residence. Their conversation drew in Ng all over again.
‘‘The timing of me and Athletes Unlimited and taking on this role [as softball commissioner] in a really 150% way, that wasn’t necessarily part of the plan,’’ Ng said in a conversation with the Sun-Times. ‘‘And it took me a long time to decide what I wanted to do. But when it really came right down to it, what made me come to Athletes Unlimited was that we don’t always get to choose our timing in life. And when you see the opportunities, you just have to grab them.’’
On Saturday, the Athletes Unlimited Softball League opens its inaugural season with a clash between the Talons and Bandits at 2 p.m. at the Stadium at the Parkway Bank Sports Complex in Rosemont. The other two teams in the league, the Volts and Blaze, will face each other in Wichita, Kansas, to round out the first-day action of the barnstorming season.
Each of the four teams has a 24-game schedule, with at least 10 cities hosting games. Rosemont is the site for 11 games across four series in June and July, as well as for 18 AUSL All-Star Cup games in August — after the season ends.
League leadership is charged with star power. Its advisers include softball legends Jennie Finch, Jessica Mendoza, Cat Osterman and Natasha Watley. Osterman is also a GM, along with Lisa Fernandez, Jenny Dalton-Hill and Dana Sorensen.
The talent on the field includes Odicci Alexander, the lights-out pitcher who had Women’s College World Series viewers across the country rooting for underdog James Madison in 2021; Montana Fouts, a perennial terror on the mound for Alabama in 2019-23 and the author of three solo perfect games; Bri Ellis, the 2025 Division I Softball Player of the Year at Arkansas and one of the greatest hitters in NCAA history; and many more.
MLB last week announced a partnership with AUSL that includes a financial investment, game distribution on MLB Network and MLB.com and promotional support. ESPN is also a broadcast partner.
‘‘The ability for anybody to watch our games — if you’re watching on linear and you’re just clicking through channels and you see softball during a time that’s not the College World Series — that, in and of itself, is tremendous,’’ Ng said. ‘‘And then all of the fans of MLB who are now able to access softball through MLB TV, that is just mind-boggling in Year 1.’’
If Athletes Unlimited sounds familiar, that’s because it made a splash with its format when it launched in 2020. Featuring women’s professional softball, volleyball, basketball and (later) lacrosse, the Athletes Unlimited model uses a points system and frequent redrafting of teams to crown an individual champion.
Even as AUSL moves to a more traditional team format, aiming for each team to claim a city after its inaugural barnstorming season, it isn’t abandoning its roots. The All-Star Cup will use the original format.
When Ng reconnected with Athletes Unlimited in 2024, she was open to a new challenge. She had declined the mutual 2024 option in her contract with the Marlins, citing a misalignment in vision with ownership, after helping to build them into a playoff team. She just hadn’t anticipated her next move to be developing a professional softball league.
Ng formally joined Athletes Unlimited as a senior adviser in June 2024, bringing her expertise from more than three decades in MLB, including front-office positions with the White Sox, Yankees, Dodgers and Marlins.
‘‘Even my friends who are completely in tune with me and understand who I am and what I’ve fought for and who are very much girl dads and grow opportunity for women, I don’t think that even they quite understood what this whole league meant,’’ she said.
Ng, who played and coached softball at the University of Chicago, recounted a recent conversation with a friend who is the father of two girls. The impact of the league didn’t click for him until he saw how excited his daughters were, ready to jump on a plane to watch AUSL action in person.
‘‘If Jennie Finch had had a pro career for 15 or 20 years, how much bigger would this sport have been?’’ Ng said. ‘‘As opposed to once every four years [in the Olympics]. That’s the difference: You can watch Aaron Judge for 20 years, Derek Jeter for 20 years, but you saw Lisa Fernandez once every four.’’
Ng will be in Rosemont this weekend, where she said she’s most looking forward to watching the women on the field embrace their roles as founding members. That’s a theme she emphasized in her first address to the players during orientation last week.
‘‘You might think that AU is a place for you to play,’’ she remembers saying, ‘‘but I challenge you to think about it as a place that you should build.’’