A new era of softball has arrived in Oklahoma City.
On Wednesday, the Athletes Unlimited Softball League announced that the Oklahoma City Spark will join the league in 2026 as a new team alongside expansion side, the Cascade.
The move pairs the Spark, who are entering their fourth season as one of the nation’s flagship professional softball organizations, with one of the fastest-growing professional leagues in the nation in AUSL.
“This has been a journey,” Oklahoma City Spark founder Tina Floyd said on the Franchise Morning Show. “We’ve been negotiating and talking for almost a year now with them, just knowing that it was the right place for us to be with who we are as a team and our mission and our values and all those things. And it just aligned. Yesterday was a great day.”
Spark Softball will shift team ownership and some operational responsibilities to AUSL, but a core of the Spark operation will stay in place.
Floyd will remain a key member of the franchise as the Spark’s Executive Director, and Destineee McElroy will remain in place as the Chief Operating Officer of Spark Softball.
Head coach Amber Flores will also remain in the same role with the team, and the Spark will welcome Kirk Walker as their new General Manager.
Walker served as an assistant coach in the AUSL last year with the Talons, who won the league title, and he previously spent 18 years as the head coach at Oregon State and 23 years on staff at UCLA.
“We’re not just going to join the league. We’re coming in to win,” Floyd said. “I’m not here to just play around. Between me and Coach Flores, we have that mentality of we’re going to come in and do this. So adding Kirk to the mix is just amazing.”
The roster will look different next summer.
Contracts for every Spark player will expire before the end of 2025, though players currently on the roster will have the opportunity to enter AUSL’s Allocation Draft.
There will be a number of ways for the Spark to build their 2026 roster.
First, the Spark and the Cascade will participate in the AUSL Expansion Draft on Dec. 1.
The four charter AUSL teams, the Blaze, the Volts, the Talons and the Blaze, will be able to protect five players from their roster who will be exempt from the Expansion Draft.
The draft, which will air on ESPNU, will allow Oklahoma City and the Cascade to select players who were left unprotected.
Both the Spark and the Cascade will be able to select up to eight players in the Expansion Draft.
Then the AUSL will hold the Allocation Draft, which will allow all six teams to select players who opt for AUSL consideration, including athletes from the 2024 AUSL Reserve Pool and professional players from other independent teams and leagues around the world.
This group of players will include the Spark players who will see their contracts expire at the end of the year.
Additionally, all six teams will be able to select players in the AUSL College Draft in the spring.
“What our fans need to realize is we are actually joining a real, functioning league,” Floyd said. “The commissioner of the league is Kim Ng, who was the first-ever female (general) manager for the Marlins in the MLB. So Kim has the mind to make this work.
“… We will be able to go in and pick some of our old Spark players up and re-sign them. So you’ll be able to see familiar faces, just not the exact same squad. It’s just not possible.”
By joining AUSL, the Spark will compete in a professional league with stability and the backing of Major League Baseball.
The league recently signed a major media rights deal with ESPN, which will guarentee continued exposure for both the Spark and for AUSL.
“With us joining AUSL, now AUSL has over 90 percent of the national team playing in that league,” Floyd said. “That’s a pretty good reflection of the strength of this league, so we’re pretty excited for that.
“… AUSL just signed a three-year agreement with ESPN, too. So our fans will get to see us on ESPN this summer. Whatever’s not covered on ESPN or ESPN2 goes to MLB Network, and then the champ series is actually on ABC. So we are thrust into that national spotlight now, and that’s huge for us and the game.”
With Ng leading the way for the AUSL, the Spark are well-positioned to grow and immediately compete to be the face of professional softball in the United States.
“We feel so confident with Kim leading the way,” Floyd said. “… There is no one better to lead the way… But it is going to look different for our fans.
“… We’ll be in a league where there’s trades, there’s deadlines, there’s all of those things. We don’t just get to load up with the powerhouses that we’ve always had. We’ve got to be strategic and really build a roster. So it’s going to look different, but on the grand scheme of things, this is what this sport needs to grow, so we’re excited for that.”
