Long Time Coming: Sydney McKinney’s AUX Debut Shows Softball Growing Its Own Stars
Top StoriesWith the curtain still rustling after coming down on the college season, former Wichita State All-American Sydney McKinney will make her professional debut Monday (ESPNU, 8:30 p.m. ET). The No. 1 overall pick in the Athletes Unlimited college draft earlier this spring, McKinney will take the field for the opening round of AUX, the first of the league’s two summer competitions in Rosemont, Illinois.
She has demonstrated for quite some time that she is ready for this moment. That says something about the career arc of a a three-time All-American who won back-to-back NCAA Division I batting titles and ranks fifth all time in hits—despite playing fewer games than anyone else in the top five.
“Sydney is interesting because she can kind of do anything,” said Sam Fischer, chairperson of the Athletes Unlimited Players Executive Committee. “She can give hit for power and get on base. Speaking as a hitter, you think about the feel that it takes to make that happen. And it seems when you watch her, she’s got incredible feel at the plate. Both for the pitches that are coming but also for what she’s actually doing with her swing. It’s being able to make something happen on a pitch when somebody else might not be able to make anything happen. She’s really scrappy, and I think that’s really cool.”
That her moment has come says at least as much about the state of the sport. Still five years away from its earliest possible—and far from certain—Olympic return, professional softball is trying to stand on its own two feet. In McKinney, there is reason to hope that self-sustaining future is closer than ever.
She isn’t the No. 1 pick who will revolutionize pro softball. She won’t singlehandedly pack houses or draw the national media to Rosemont. No one is asking her to be. She is instead the embodiment of a revolution unfolding for years—not completed but still in progress. College softball’s increased television ratings and attendance. Youth participation across every region. All those heralds of brighter days that have been talked about for so long? McKinney is the product of those changing demographics.
She’s what it looks like when you give the sport time to grow.
She didn’t grow up in one of the traditional cradles of softball. She isn’t from a big market. There are barely enough people in her hometown of Norborne, Missouri, to ensure the high school softball team has nine players every year. She didn’t play college softball in the Power 5.
Yet most of her Wichita State games streamed on ESPN+, a platform with approximately 25 million subscribers. Social media amplified her feats—a team post announcing her selection in the AU draft garnering more than 130,000 impressions. And before she ever signed a pro contract, NIL allowed her to earn money from that recognition, organizing and running softball camps, endorsing local businesses, even finding commissions for her extensive artwork.
In a different and not-so-distant era, her feats might have gone largely unnoticed. If she was lucky, the local pizza place might have hung a team photo on the wall.
In this era, the Thrive Restaurant Group made her the star of a local advertising campaign for HomeGrown, a chain of restaurants with a Midwestern footprint that includes a Wichita location. One of her first sponsorship deals after the NCAA’s NIL reforms put her on set to film a commercial for the breakfast and lunch spot that she already knew well as a hungry collegian.
“They are just about kindness, being being kind to everyone, helping anybody that you can,” McKinney said. “So that was probably the best experience to start off with, just because they were so nice. This was a time when I was still terrified of the public speaking, and I had to get on the set and remember the lines—well, it was like one line.”
A decade earlier, Fischer was in many ways her generation’s version of McKinney. Although raised in Southern California, she slipped through the Pac-12 recruiting cracks and ended up at Loyola Marymount. Like McKinney, she dazzled on the smaller stage. She won the NCAA batting title in 2012—and did it while slugging 1.156 with 23 home runs. She made it all the way to Team USA.
She would have loved to cut commercials for In-n-Out, the iconic burger chain with a well-known location not far from Loyola Marymount and LAX. Heck, she would have settled for another, less trendy but equally familiar burger chain that got its start in California.
“My first thought was McDonald’s because I can remember all of us all the time going to McDonalds,” Fischer chuckled. “How nice would it have been to just eat for free?”
But there weren’t any endorsement opportunities in those days, or even any free burgers. There wasn’t much of anything. Fischer was part of Team USA’s first post-Olympic era transition. After the veteran stars of the 2008 Olympics and 2010 World Championship moved on, she made the USA roster for the 2012 World Championships. On the road that summer, the team hosted youth clinics. Players who had yet to complete their college eligibility were limited to $10 per hour, or $30 dollars for the typically three-hour clinics. Older players could earn three times as much—not a bank-breaking haul but something.
McKinney, by contrast, was able to not just accept the going rate for participating in clinics or giving lessons but organize and run her own camps as a mini-business in the offseason.
“I worked a lot of camps in my life, but you don’t realize all the work that everybody has put in for you—because it is a lot of work and you don’t realize it until you’re running it,” McKinney said. “But I’m seeing little girls so excited to see me and learn from me. I’ve been playing this game my whole life, and I’ve looked up to people. And now being that person is really cool because you get to see how excited they are just to be there because your name is on it.”
None of this truly redresses the fundamental imbalance in compensation between athletes in men’s and women’s sports. Reigning AUX champion Danielle O’Toole, who retired after last summer, has a pinned tweet sardonically noting the reality that she would be living in a multi-million dollar beach house if she was simply a male athlete, given her athletic ability relative to the general population against which she competed.
McKinney isn’t eyeing beachfront property based on softball camps or local commercial appearances. But she is part of a generation for whom a first professional paycheck will not be the first time they are compensated for the value of their work. That is something.
“Most of it is just nice for like day-to-day bills—like groceries and maybe maybe it pays for it for the month or two months or three months,” McKinney said of her NIL earnings at Wichita State. “So that’s been really cool, but it’s been nice to have that extra money and be able to save for future things.”
Think again about the camps she runs. Those used to be the provenance of the established stars—countless players in McKinney’s generation or earlier generations grew up with stories of going to a Monica Abbott or Natasha Watley camp. Over time, opportunity diffuses. Not only did college softball grow big enough for someone from Wichita State to have national name recognition, but the world changed at least enough that she already enters her post-college life with entrepreneurial experience capitalizing on that recognition.
McKinney, too, credits NIL opportunities with helping her hone the time management skills she one day hopes to use as an attorney specializing in family advocacy or Title IX issues. More to the point, in interacting the local business community, contracts and the like, she’s made connections with people in the legal community—and not just those who frequent HomeGrown.
So, what does that have to do with the world now awaiting her in professional softball? After all, athletes in the professional ranks have always been free to pursue commercial opportunities. It’s convincing companies to invest in women’s professional sports—either institutionally or in the individuals—that has long been the issue. Top-down change is coming. More slowly in softball than basketball or soccer, but coming. Companies view women’s sports as an opportunity. But as that change continues at what can feel a maddeningly slow pace, bottom-up change is no less important. McKinney’s generation is taking the baton and running the next leg as increasingly seasoned entrepreneurs before they even turn pro.
“NIL has really shown fans and people in the sports world that women in sports are really cool,” McKinney said. “I know that a lot of men get these huge brand deals, but so are some women now. I hate to compare them, but it’s funny to look at some of the men’s NIL posts and then some of the women’s—and just seeing how much more genuine women are and how much more personable they are.
“I think that we knew coming in that a lot of women weren’t going to make millions of dollars. So we really grasped on to the fact of showing who we are and just being genuine and making those connections with others.”
Sam Fischer has been part of every AU competition, with a lifetime .282 BA and .494 SLG (photo Jade Hewitt/Athletes Unlimited).
A decade earlier, Fischer had to navigate all of this on the fly. She played in relative anonymity at LMU, at a time when few of her games were even streamed and only ardent college softball fans were familiar with her name when she was named a second-team All-American (that qualifier in and of itself suggestive of a relative lack of appreciation for her feats).
She had to figure out from scratch how to make the connections and create the financial pathways to make a post-college career viable. With softball still in its first post-Olympic wilderness (almost literally, given that the 2012 World Championship was held in Canada’s far northern Yukon), even being part of Team USA was far from a golden ticket.
She made it work, by dint of talent and perhaps sheer dogged optimism from one of the most good-natured and positive souls you’re likely to encounter in or out of the sports world. She persevered through successes and disappointments in the international game, from pro venture to pro venture and now as one of the AU originals (she worked for the organization through the softball offseason, helping with its volleyball league and other ventures).
“Any girl, any athlete who comes up to me asking for advice, I’ll tell them ‘Know your worth and ask for it. The worst they could say is no,’” Fischer said. “But then when it comes to me, I’m like, ‘Well, if you ask for too much, they might drop you, and then you won’t have any bats.’
“I’ve definitely gotten better at it the more I’ve learned and the older I’ve gotten. I want to make sure that I’m able to set a standard or help the athletes coming in behind me with how to handle these conversations, what to ask and what to look for in contracts and all of those things.”
Who knows if McKinney will match Fischer’s longevity, if she’ll be able to pause and reflect on her path a decade from now on the eve of yet another summer on the diamond. Part of Team USA during last summer’s Japan Series, she would like to make a run at 2028, if softball finds its way back into the program for the Los Angeles Olympics. But she also has other interests beyond the field. She’ll return to Wichita State next season as a graduate assistant while pursuing a master’s in criminal justice, a stepping stone to law school and her aforementioned career aims.
Like so many before her, she may find that making even a brief career out of professional softball is too onerous and demands too many sacrifices. That the math just doesn’t work. Whether in AU, WPF or abroad, it is still a difficult path for even the most talented—too difficult for a sport with so much commercial appeal at the college level. But if not yet paved, that path is better marked these days.