Karen Weekly spent some time this week on the West Coast in Oregon – she grew up in Washington – to watch three former Lady Vols softball players in person.

The game at Hillsboro Ballpark, located about 20 miles from downtown Portland, featured the Carolina Blaze with Karlyn Pickens and Aubrey Leach-Gartner, and the Portland Cascade with Payton Gottshall.

Pickens, the No. 1 pick in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) draft this year, also is No. 1 in jersey sales. Leach-Gartner is a former player who is now an assistant coach for Tennessee and plays with the AUSL in the summer. Gottshall played two seasons for the Lady Vols after transferring from Bowling Green and was one-half of the country’s top pitching duo with Pickens in 2024. In her final college season, Gottshall went 20-5 with a 1.37 ERA.

Weekly also handled the in-game interview during the national broadcast on July 7 and applauded the AUSL.

“It’s truly professional,” Weekly said. “With Kim Ng as the commissioner now, and just the way they’re running the teams. I mean, the teams have all the resources that they need, and that wasn’t always the case. I have watched a lot of the attempts over the years, over 30 years in this business, try and not succeed, and this one is succeeding, and I’m a big AUSL person.”

Ng came to the AUSL with a background in Major League Baseball (MLB) after serving as general manager of the Miami Marlins, along with stints in the front offices of MLB and Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers.

In 2025, the AUSL and MLB formed a strategic partnership with MLB investing in the league.

“This is a watershed moment for women’s sports and especially for softball,” Ng said a year ago. “The MLB’s investment will supercharge our efforts to build the sustainable professional league this sport has long deserved, and sends a powerful message about the value of female athletes and the importance of creating professional opportunities for them.

“Together, we’re going to reach new fans and inspire the next generation of softball players.”

AUSL players also will take part in several events at the 2026 MLB All-Star festivities in Philadelphia on July 13-16 at Citizens Bank Park and the All-Star Village.

With the backing of MLB, the AUSL is well-positioned to thrive in the professional softball space.

“There’s one league for me, and it’s AUSL,” Weekly said. “I think the best thing we can do in softball is everybody get behind one league. Because that’s been a lot of the problem is dividing our loyalties, dividing our resources, dividing our efforts. And this one’s got it going like none ever has, and I think it’s only going to get better.”

LADY VOLS

Tennessee revealed the new adidas uniforms for athletes this week, and the fan reception to the ones for Lady Vols have been overwhelmingly positive. The logo is prominent for all sports in multiple variations, and the overall uniform has a sleeker more sophisticated look that is true to the Lady Vols brand.

Speaking of the logo, I also freelance for 247Sports Tennessee and wrote a 3,500-word historical account of how the logo came into existence as it reaches its 50th anniversary in the upcoming 2026-27 season. That article can be read HERE.

One quote that didn’t make the cut there came from Joy Scruggs, who played for Pat Summitt for one season as a senior in 1974-75 – Summitt’s first year as the head coach of Lady Vols Basketball. Summitt coached for 38 seasons, retired in 2012 because of Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2016.

Scruggs completed her master’s degree at Tennessee and went on to become the women’s basketball coach for Emory & Henry University in 1981. She retired in 2014, was inducted in 2016 into the Emory & Henry Sports Hall of Fame and still holds the title of emeritus.

“Her intensity came ready-made,” Scruggs said. “It wasn’t like she got more and more intense as her career progressed. She was that way from the beginning, very demanding, very focused, very competitive.

“Anytime I saw her, I was sitting at a table at the Final Four coaches’ convention at some giant banquet, and she’s getting something or speaking for something, and she comes out from the back where our table is and she looks at me and says, ‘Hi, Joy.’ Up until the next-to-the-last time I saw her, she always knew who I was.”

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Maria M. Cornelius, a senior writer/editor at MoxCar Marketing + Communications since 2013, started her journalism career at the Knoxville News Sentinel and began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press and a 10th anniversary edition was released June 16, 2026. A third book, “The Legacy of Pat Summitt” will be released Nov. 17, 2026.