The Oklahoma City Spark are one of two teams that have been added to the Athletes Unlimited Softball League.
Another new team, the Cascade, will join the defending champion Talons, Bandits, Blaze and Volts to round out the six-team league for the 2026 season, the league announced Wednesday.
Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt said the move for the Spark further establishes Oklahoma City as a softball hotbed. The city hosts the annual Women’s College World Series and will be the site for the sport during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“The AUSL is putting the right pieces in place to represent the next evolution of professional softball, and the Spark have worked hard to build that foundation in OKC,” Holt said in a statement. “It makes sense for OKC, this team and this league to come together to take professional softball to the next level. I commend everyone involved for getting us to this day, and I’m excited to see where it leads.”
The Spark are the only team attached to a city so far. The league used a touring model in its first season this year, but will be city based next year.
Spark leadership will remain with the team. Founder Tina Floyd will be the team’s executive director. Destinee McElroy will be the chief operating officer. Amber Flores will remain head coach and former Oregon State head coach and UCLA assistant Kirk Walker will be the general manager. Walker was associate coach for the Talons last season.
The Spark, who operated independently last season, have existed for three years. Floyd said she’s been looking for this kind of fit since she started the team.
“We both align,” she said. “Our mission, our core values and what we want for these athletes is in complete alignment, and that’s something that I’ve been searching for these three years that we have played — to make sure that our ladies are playing a professional game with people that are in it for the right reasons.”
Floyd said the Spark likely will draw heavily from nearby college programs. The powerhouse Oklahoma and Oklahoma State college programs play within roughly an hour of downtown Oklahoma City.
While the Spark name will not change, the contracts of those who played for the team last season will expire, so there will be a new roster. Current players will be eligible for the AUSL’s allocation draft on Dec. 1. The expansion draft will be the same day.
AUSL commissioner Kim Ng, who took on that role in April of this year, believes the expansion is another step towards the goal of helping Team USA bring home Olympic gold.
“These players, not only will they be playing against just incredible quality, but now they’ll be getting all of these repetitions prior to ’28, and Team USA will be able to build off of that,” she said. “So we’re incredibly excited.”
In March, Major League Baseball made a “strategic investment” north of 20% in Athletes Unlimited. “This is something we’re really excited about,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told The Associated Press. “We studied the space hard. We think it’s a real opportunity and we’re excited to be involved.”
Manfred stated that MLB’s “goal is to get a softball league into the same position of stability that the WNBA has found,” per The Athletic. Expansion of the league would seemingly play a key role in achieving that goal.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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