When Katiyana Mauga played softball for the University of Arizona, she always struggled hitting change-ups.
So when Mauga crushed a change-up for her first home run in the new Athletes Unlimited professional league Aug. 31, it felt even sweeter.
It was an emotional swing, too, for Mauga, who hadn’t played competitive softball in more than a year after serving as Mississippi State softball’s volunteer assistant coach for the 2020 season.
“I felt like I was back in it,” Mauga said, “and it felt really good.”
She and current Mississippi State graduate assistant Nicole Pendley are both playing in the unconventional league, which launched Aug. 29. Athletes Unlimited awards fantasy sports-style points, shuffles its rosters via “playground-style” drafts every week and takes owners and coaches out of the equation entirely.
Two weeks in, the league has generated plenty of publicity and seems poised to create a huge national platform for the sport. Athletes Unlimited games air on ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN3 or CBS Sports Network each weekend, giving pro softball a new audience and potentially boosting other women’s sports that are typically underrepresented.
“Women’s sports are here,” Mauga said. “They’re here. You just need to put it out there for people to see.”
Shocking the system
When Mississippi State head coach Samantha Ricketts put an Athletes Unlimited game on for the first time, one simple question sprang to mind: “Who’s coaching third?”
Ricketts wasn’t used to the league’s unusual arrangement, which leaves it up to players to design their teams and plot their strategies. The teams have facilitators for help getting in extra reps, Mauga said, but they’re on their own otherwise.
“We are the coaches,” Mauga said.
Ricketts said that approach actually translates well to the player-led culture she’s worked to install with the Bulldogs — a system that doesn’t allow players to pin mistakes on their coaches and makes them more accountable in the process.
“I want our girls to be just as invested in the program and the decision-making as the coaching staff,” Ricketts said.
The new leadership structure, though, is among the less radical changes Athletes Unlimited has made. The league has a traditional run-based scoring system, but it scores players using a model where players earn points based on individual and team accomplishments. A single is worth 10 points and a double is 20, while a player whose team “wins” an inning earns 10 points per frame. First, second and third MVP awards for each game earn points, too.
Mauga fared well in the first two weeks of play at The Ballpark at Rosemont, home of the National Pro Fastpitch league’s Chicago Bandits. She ranks 10th on the leaderboard out of 56 players. Pendley ranks last, but things can change quickly.
The top four players after each weekend of play are named captains (Pendley earned the distinction for the first week of the season) and draft their new teams each Tuesday. All the players are put in one big Zoom video chat to start, then put in smaller group Zooms to congregate and plan with their new teammates once they’ve been drafted. Mauga said the draft allows her to play with — and against — players she faced in college and wondered about teaming up with.
“When you get picked to your team, you’re just so excited,” she said.
With Olympians Cat Osterman — the current points leader — and Haylie McCleney, as well as former college standouts like Florida stars Aleshia Ocasio and Kelly Barnhill, the league offers that excitement for its players and its fans alike.
Those fans include Mississippi State’s softball players, who have been watching each weekend and messaging in their GroupMe about the new league.
“To see the best athletes in our sport out there on ESPN again has been really exciting for us,” Ricketts said.
Not the end of the road
Part of the reason seeing professional softball on TV is so meaningful for Ricketts and the Bulldogs is because it’s so rare.
Women’s sports, notably softball and women’s basketball, are underrepresented on national television. While college softball often airs on ESPN and the SEC Network, pro softball is much harder to find.
That’s one of the things Athletes Unlimited aims to address, and it made Mauga happy as soon as she heard about the league on social media early in the year.
“Every single woman out there, every athlete — especially softball — we work our tails off to expose our sport even more,” Mauga said.
She said that even though there are a few older players who are part of Athletes Unlimited — Osterman is 37, though she’s effective as ever — no one in the league has lost a beat since their collegiate days. That’s important for college softball players (including several Bulldogs) who have aspirations of pro careers to know.
“There is softball after college,” Mauga said.
That hasn’t been the conventional wisdom in the sport, Ricketts said — especially when compared to its de facto male counterpart, baseball.
“College baseball, they’re working for the next level,” Ricketts said. “They’re all working for, ‘How can I get drafted? How can I continue to have a long career in the MLB?’ For us, (college) was it. This was the elite. This was the end of the road.”
The performances Osterman and other established players have turned in with Athletes Unlimited can help change that narrative, but it goes well beyond that. Ricketts said she often discusses how her players can support and promote women’s sports, including their own.
“Turn on Athletes Unlimited softball,” Ricketts said. “Turn on the WNBA when you see it on TV. It’s all about the viewership and the numbers and just really supporting other female athletes. Promote them on your social media pages just like you would your favorite MLB teams or whatever that might be.”
For the Bulldogs, support often took a simpler form — just going to games. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Ricketts took her team to watch NPF competition at the Hoover Metropolitan Complex in Alabama.
“Just like little girls come to our games: ‘Hey, we’re going to go watch the big girls,'” Ricketts said.
Support from male athletes and the larger audiences they can typically reach goes a long way, too. Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant is on Athletes Unlimited’s advisory board, while late Lakers great Kobe Bryant was one of the first male athletes to promote the WNBA and, according to Ricketts, helped “cement” the league on a national scale.
“It’s all about reciprocating that support from every single athlete out there just so we can get more views on it,” Mauga said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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