Kim Ng grew up taking part in softball, was adequate to captain the College of Chicago softball crew, then moved on along with her life.
Perhaps if a sustainable skilled league for softball existed, her life would have unfolded in another way.
“It is rather private,” Ng mentioned Thursday from the MLB headquarters in Midtown, the place Main League Baseball introduced a strategic funding within the Athletes Limitless Softball League, for which she serves as commissioner.
MLB has bought a stake within the AUSL, its first partnership with a ladies’s professional sports activities league to assist “develop the AUSL as a sustainable group,” MLB mentioned in a press release.
As reputation spikes for the WNBA and NWSL, MLB is taking an opportunity on a league that may debut June 7 with 4 groups and a barnstorming schedule.
They’ll tour via 12 cities (none within the Northeast) and construct to a best-of-three sequence held July 26-28 on the College of Alabama’s Rhoads Stadium.
The AUSL plans to change into a city-based league starting in 2026.
MLB will work to boost the visibility of the AUSL via a wide range of platforms, together with advertising and marketing and social, and choose video games will air on MLB Community and MLB.com.
“Main League Baseball’s funding within the AUSL represents a chance to assist softball’s long-term progress and broaden our engagement with these excellent athletes and their followers,” commissioner Rob Manfred mentioned in a press release.
Manfred once more can be working with Ng, who, after stints with the White Sox, Yankees and Dodgers, was the senior vp of baseball operations for MLB from 2011-20.
In that function — which preceded her time with the Marlins as the primary feminine GM in MLB — she supervised MLB’s initiatives for women and girls and served on MLB’s Variety Pipeline Advisory Committee.
“For me, numerous my profession has been about serving to ladies and paving the trail for girls,” Ng mentioned. “And making an attempt to mentor ladies once I might. So I believe this falls proper in step with that. And [the goal] was to make use of my platform to assist out and create extra alternatives.”
