Disclaimer: This student plays for the Franklin softball team.
On January 13, the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) announced the Portland Cascade as their newest team. Their season will begin in June and have 25 games throughout the summer.
League Commissioner Kim Ng told Fox 12 Oregon that Portland was the right place to expand the league: “Portland has shown up and supported women’s sports on a large scale. Just to be quite simple, showing up. It’s in their culture.” This past July, Portland hosted the “Epicenter: Women’s Global Sports Summit” at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton. Portland continues to support women’s sports through its love for the Portland Thorns and upcoming Portland Fire basketball team. Fans of these teams gather at the well-known “Sports Bra,” a sports bar that exclusively plays and celebrates women’s sports.
The AUSL was founded in 2024, and saw its first game in 2025. “We launched with four teams as a touring model,” says Sarah Padove, the senior director of public affairs for the AUSL. Touring teams aren’t tied to a single city, for example, the now Carolina Blaze were just the Blaze, untethered to a single city. “We now have six teams [total], all of which are now anchored to home markets.” Now that these teams are settled, they can grow a community and fanbase where they are home to.
The AUSL aims to foster a “mission-driven [team and league], focusing on the values of innovation, inclusion, and excellence, while empowering athletes as leaders.” The Cascade has 16 women on their roster, led by General Manager Jami Lobpries. She has played for several softball teams in the National Pro Fastpitch league, a women’s professional softball league, which was unfortunately shut down due to missed seasons during the pandemic. Lobpries also played at Texas A&M University and coached for Monmouth University, on top of being the CEO of the Alliance Fastpitch. The Cascade will be playing at the Hillsboro Ballpark inside the Gordon Faber Recreation Complex, which is also home to the Hillsboro Hops baseball team.
The Cascade will bring new attention and opportunity to women’s sports, especially in Portland. Sports can create community, self-respect, confidence, and ambition. It’s about “[b]eing able to go somewhere like that’s in your backyard, where you can go and watch these women play a game you love,” says Gina Aman, Franklin’s head softball coach and business operations manager in the athletic department of Portland Public Schools.
Though Portland hasn’t had a professional team since the 1960s, it has a rich history of softball. It began in 1935 with Charlie Walker, a Portland Parks & Recreation employee, who supervised softball games and organized the first industrial and commercial softball games. Walker was named first sports director for the City of Portland. Walker Stadium in Lents Park, home of the Portland Pickles baseball team, is named after him. Walker made a significant impact on softball throughout the United States which is still seen in softball today.
Although the Cascade will play in Hillsboro, the Erv Lind Stadium, which sits inside Normandale Park in the Rose City Park neighborhood, holds years of softball history. It was specifically built for the national softball championship tournament in 1948. The park was once home to the softball team, the Erv Lind Florists, from 1937 to 1964. According to The Oregonian, “in 29 years they never lost a league, state or regional title and they twice topped the world.”
A special thing about Erv Lind Stadium is that it’s part of the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) by the National Park Service specifically inside the LGBTQ+ Historic Sites Project category. This means locations that are a part of the NRHP are deemed significant in American history. As explained by Brandon Spencer-Hartle, the historic resources program manager and a senior city planner for the City of Portland, being part of the NRHP allows for a location to have regulations on things like demolition or reconstruction as well as possible grants available to NRHP locations. According to the City of Portland, Erv Lind is included in the LGBTQ+ section due to it “foster[ing] a safe space for LGBTQ+ women to connect over sports between the late 1940s and early 1960s when limited venues existed for LGBTQ+ women to gather.” Today, Erv Lind is an inclusive and busy park home to much softball.
Aman has been playing softball since she was 12. “Being able to give back to the community in which I grew up in and also teach young women just about the game that I love, and hopefully the impact not just on the field but off the field,” she says. Aman is very passionate about softball, having competed in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division One. She wants her players to learn and grow every season, but also enjoy the game. She believes that the Cascade is a “significant step forward for softball in our region. It shows there’s growth in the sport … and the communities’ passion for women’s athletics and new opportunities for players to work towards if that’s the avenue they want to take.” Seeing a team like the Cascade play right in our backyards gives a goal for young softball players in the area who may aspire to play beyond high school or college.
