Athletes Unlimited Founder: Why We Paused Basketball and Volleyball

On July 26, the Utah Talons won the Athletes Unlimited Softball League championship for the second straight season, ending a year of strong viewership and attendance for the two-year-old AUSL.

Five days later, Athletes Unlimited called off its upcoming seasons for basketball and volleyball, the other two sports left in a portfolio of leagues that previously also included lacrosse.

In an interview with Front Office Sports earlier this week, Athletes Unlimited cofounder and CEO Jon Patricof said that the company was “pleased” with how basketball and volleyball had been going, and the decision to pause those sports was “somewhat independent” of softball. “But I think it’s related in the sense that my role as CEO is to allocate capital, think about where the biggest opportunities are, and make sure we’re pursuing them,” he said.

Patricof said MLB—which made an eight-figure investment in AUSL last year—did not pressure Athletes Unlimited to drop its other sports.

Even with Athletes Unlimited going “heavy investment mode” on softball, he also didn’t rule out basketball and volleyball one day making a comeback.

“We continue to be active in exploring what the next chapter looks like in both of those sports for us,” Patricof said. “Nothing’s off the table. But I think we are rethinking about—if we’re going to go back into those sports and when—it’s probably going to look fairly different than the way it did, and a lot of that’s been formed by our success in softball.”

‘Substantially’ Investing in Softball

AUSL, a larger iteration of the company’s softball operation that began in 2020, played its second season in June and July. It culminated in a championship series that saw 732,000 viewers on ABC for Game 1, a record for pro softball. A portion of those players returned in August for a multi-week All-Star Cup that ends Sunday.

“I think we can go toe-to-toe with almost any property that’s out there as a TV property,” Patricof said. “It’s existed at the college level, and now we’re just proving that that extends to the pro level, and there’s that much demand out there.”

While the first season followed a touring model, AUSL teams stayed in their six home markets this summer. The expansion team in Portland was particularly successful, selling out 11 of 12 home games, and inspiring an investment from Oregon-based sports technology company Rule42 Sports. Former Intel president Renée James, the founder of Rule42 Sports, also got a seat on the league’s board of directors, according to an AUSL announcement. 

When asked about the financial side of the business, Patricof said Athletes Unlimited has been focused on “building a really impressive commercial engine,” and that their investment in softball is “substantially larger than it was two years ago.” He also noted the 2028 Olympics come up in “almost every conversation.”

“So the ’27 season,” Patricof said, “and then of course with ’28, and then of course coming out of it, we’re highly focused on how do we capitalize and invest in it, and make sure that we make the most of that opportunity.”