FILE – In this offered picture, University of Florida coach Tim Walton, left, joins Korbe Otis, heart, and Athletes Unlimited Softball League commissioner Kim Ng on April 19, 2025, on the sector at Katie Seashole Pressly Softball Stadium in Gainesville, Fla. the place Otis was enjoying for the University of Florida. Otis was drafted to the AUSL instantly following the sport.
Nicole Scharff / Courtesy of Nicole Scharff/FL/UAA Communications
Outfielder Korbe Otis was unfamiliar with Oregon’s repute as a women’s sports hub when she was drafted to the state’s new skilled softball staff.
She had by no means been to Oregon earlier than, the previous softball standout on the University of Florida instructed OPB.
“I had no idea what kind of women’s sports presence was in Portland,” Otis stated.
It took mere minutes for that to change. Quickly following her choice in December’s expansion draft by the Portland Cascade, an Athletes Unlimited Softball League staff beginning play in Hillsboro on June 18, Otis bought a crash course in Portland’s historic help for feminine athletes.
Texts got here in from school teammates, plus calls from pals, after which she took to Google.
Otis rapidly realized she’d be half of a neighborhood that revels in women’s sports – as evidenced not solely by excessive attendance at school and professional games, however by the success of companies just like the Sports Bra, the Northeast Portland pub that completely reveals women’s sports on its TVs and is now franchising.
“Playing for a city that contributes so much to the advancement of women’s sports,” Otis stated, “I think that’s a super special thing.”
The Portland Cascade joins Oregon’s rising quantity of women’s sports groups spanning from leisure to pre-professional to skilled. In addition to the Cascade, this summer time Oregonians welcomed again the Portland Fire WNBA staff and launched a pre-professional women’s soccer staff known as the Cherry Bombs. The state’s NWSL staff, the Portland Thorns, is enjoying its 14th season, leads the league in common attendance and is on observe to make the playoffs as soon as once more.
Related: RELATED: Oregon’s economy is struggling, but its women’s sports industry could be a lifeline
“Special” is a phrase Otis used so much to describe the Portland Cascade and the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, or AUSL. Post-collegiate alternatives for softball gamers have been inconsistent through the decades, with a pro league working from 1997 to 2001 after which one other from 2004 to 2019. Despite softball’s greater than 125-year historical past, it has solely been included within the Olympics 5 occasions.
However, funding and media time for women’s sports have grown exponentially lately. Attendance and viewership are climbing.
For softball, Athletes Unlimited has emerged because the premier skilled league thanks to a sustainable slate of investors and partners, together with different main sports leagues and main media networks like ESPN. Excitement over enlargement of skilled play within the U.S. is buoyed by softball’s return to the Olympics in 2028 after being unnoticed of the 2024 video games.
The New Hillsboro Hops stadium on March 21, 2026, in Hillsboro, Ore.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
Athletes Unlimited’s method to skilled sports
Athletes Unlimited runs skilled women’s sports leagues for softball, basketball and volleyball, however the Cascade is the group’s first staff of any form in Oregon. In May 2025, officers with Major League Baseball introduced they have been investing and partnering with AUSL, which incorporates distributing softball video games on MLB platforms.
Jon Patricof, former president of New York City’s skilled males’s soccer staff, alongside with Jonathan Soros, investor and liberal political donor, based Athletes Unlimited in 2020. Their concept was to begin leagues with a give attention to particular person gamers, slightly than on the groups they play for.
These player-focused leagues have athletes rack up factors as people, whereas they rotate between groups. Fans may observe their favourite gamers, and the sports have been typically performed at just some places with a give attention to the tv product.
That’s nonetheless how the basketball and volleyball leagues work, and the way Athletes Unlimited softball began. However, in 2025, softball shifted to a touring mannequin. Four groups with static participant rosters performed in 10 cities.
This season is the primary time Athletes Unlimited can have a city-based mannequin. Its six groups with secure rosters of 16 gamers will journey to play one another over the following month and half. The common participant wage is $35,000 with bonus alternatives to earn up to $80,000, in accordance to the AUSL website. A championship recreation is scheduled for July 25 in College Station, Texas.
“This is a major step for the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, moving from a touring model to now a city-based model,” Kim Ng, AUSL commissioner and former common supervisor for MLB’s Miami Marlins, stated at a January press convention in Hillsboro.
Ng stated when the place to place the six AUSL groups, the league wished to see three issues: 1.) a powerful softball custom, 2.) confirmed fan engagement, and three.) amenities prepared to host skilled softball.
“This market, Portland-Hillsboro, a market that embraces innovation, inclusion, and high high-level competition, was a natural fit for the AUSL and its athletes,” Ng stated. “This market has shown it will support women’s sports on a large scale basis and quite simply, you all show up.”
New staff provides to pleasure in Hillsboro
The Cascade will play on the Gordon Faber Recreation Complex in Hillsboro, a not too long ago renovated stadium that’s additionally house to the Hillsboro Hops, a minor league males’s staff affiliated with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
The new Hillsboro Hops stadium on March 26, 2026, in Hillsboro, Ore.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
“The Cascade is joining an elite family of athletes and athletic organizations that brings talent, fans, fun and excitement to Hillsboro,” Beach Pace, mayor of Hillsboro, stated in the course of the January occasion.
Pace, the primary brazenly homosexual individual and solely the second girl to function mayor of the town, instructed the group she was “shaking a little bit” with pleasure.
“In all the years of softball,” Pace stated, knowledgeable staff “gets to come here now — I’m really shaking right now — and then we have the Thorns and the Fire. We are truly, Hillsboro, the Portland metro area, truly the epicenter of women’s sports.”
Hillsboro can be house to a brand new sports coaching facility that RAJ Sports — house owners of the Fire and Thorns — is constructing to give attention to feminine athletes.
For Otis, a beginning outfielder within the Cascades’ first away recreation, she’s wanting ahead to studying extra about Portland and Hillsboro — like the place one of the best meals vans are and what neighborhood outreach alternatives exist. Otis stated followers can count on her to be an intensely aggressive participant throughout video games, however “goofy” off the sector.
FILE – In this offered picture, present Portland Cascade outfielder Korbe Otis, #33 heart, with her school staff on April 19, 2025. Otis was drafted to the Athletes Unlimited Softball League following the sport at Katie Seashole Pressly Softball Stadium in Gainesville, FL.
Nicole Scharff / Courtesy of Nicole Scharff/FL/UAA Communications
Otis stated enjoying for a brand new staff means the Cascade gamers and coaches get to construct the tradition and magnificence of play “from the ground up.” Otis can be clear-eyed in regards to the challenges of scaling up skilled women’s softball so alternatives exist for the following era.
There’s nonetheless a monumental hole between the extent of funding and media time — which may also help construct robust fan bases — when evaluating males’s baseball and women’s softball.
Otis sees her teammates, and all AU athletes, as working collectively to shut that hole.
“Even though we’re competing against each other, and everybody loves their team and everybody wants to win, there’s always this undertone that we’re playing for something more,” Otis stated. “We’re playing for the purpose to continue this league, to continue creating a platform for softball where hopefully, at some point, we can make a living wage and we can live out our softball dreams as long as we want to.”
The Portland Cascade host the Oklahoma City Sparks Thursday, June 18, at Hillsboro Ballpark. First pitch is at 6 p.m.