Shortstop Maya Brady agreed to join the Athletes Unlimited Softball League on Tuesday, adding a significant presence to the burgeoning league that will hold its inaugural draft Wednesday night, sources told ESPN.
The 23-year-old Brady, a left-handed slugger who also plays outfield, is a two-time first-team All-American and Pac-12 Player of the Year who ranks second all-time in home runs at UCLA, a preeminent college softball program.
The AUSL, being run by former Miami Marlins general manager Kim Ng, will have four teams playing a 30-game schedule in six to eight cities — including suburban Chicago and Wichita — this summer before a planned transition to a fixed-city format in 2026. Each of the four teams — the Bandits, Blaze, Talons and Volts, who will choose in that order in the first round — will draft a dozen players and fill out their 16-woman roster with one free agent and three players from the college Class of 2025.
The draft, which will be broadcast live on the ESPN app at 8 p.m. ET, will include two-way player Rachel Garcia, outfielder Amanda Lorenz, right-hander Megan Faraimo, right-hander Georgina Corrick, infielder Tiare Jennings and right-hander Montana Fouts in addition to Brady.
While a number of top softball players opt to play in the top-tier Japan Diamond Softball League, Brady chose the new league that includes all-time stars Lisa Fernandez (Talons) and Cat Osterman (Volts) as general managers. Other advisers to the league include Jennie Finch and Jessica Mendoza, also an ESPN analyst.
Brady, the niece of Tom Brady and former Major League Baseball All-Star Kevin Youkilis, finished her career at UCLA hitting .384/.464/.757 with 71 home runs and 246 RBIs in 249 games.
Athletes Unlimited previously has run four-week events and crowned individual champions based on a scoring system that awards players for on-field production. With an expected 30 games this summer broadcast on ESPN networks, the league is hoping to find more success than National Pro Fastpitch, which disbanded in 2021, and two other four-team leagues, Women’s Professional Fastpitch and Association of Fastpitch Professionals, which played in the summer of 2024.
“Softball is poised for tremendous growth at the professional level, and the AUSL is meeting the moment by creating the action-packed, world-class softball league that this sport has deserved for so long,” Ng said. “The caliber of players vying to be drafted tomorrow — Olympians, Team USA veterans, All-Americans and NCAA champions — further exemplifies that the world’s best players are here together as a unit of founding members who will make the AUSL the next big thing in women’s sports.”
