Michaela Edenfield Climbs the AUSL All-Star Cup
The All-Star Cup hands out points for winning games, not for filling a stat line. Softball’s best catchers have never had a leaderboard treat them this well.
Michaela Edenfield stands six foot one behind the plate, and she wears rhinestones under her mask and finished 25th in last summer’s All-Star Cup.
Edenfield catches for the Texas Volts of the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, and she arrived in the pros with a résumé that implied a faster start than she got.
She started 239 of 243 games at Florida State across five years. She hit .313 there with 54 home runs, and she left as the second-best slugger in program history.
Three times she was named an All-American. The league took her eighth overall in its first college draft. Then her rookie professional season came out threadbare.
Every August the league sets its regular season aside and brings its best 45 players to Rosemont, Illinois, for the All-Star Cup. There is nothing like it in baseball. For four weeks the Volts and every other club stop existing.
Players earn points as individuals across four series. After each series the top three on the leaderboard become captains and draft brand-new rosters for the next one. Your teammates change every week. Only the leaderboard carries over.
Through the first series, Edenfield had 170 points. That was three weeks ago, and it put her nowhere in particular.
So she had every reason to press. A player swings for the standings when the standings have her name on them. But she has caught for a different staff every weekend since. Three pitching staffs in three weekends, and none of them hers for longer than a few days.
By the end of the third series, the league’s own recap had her fifth overall. That makes her the highest-ranked catcher in the field, ahead of Sharlize Palacios, Reese Atwood, Sydney Stewart and Dejah Mulipola.
Above her sat Baylee Klingler with 890 points, Lexi Kilfoyl with 866, and Hannah Flippen with 750. Those three became the captains for the final series. When Klingler drafted, she took Edenfield.
Here is the part worth slowing down for. Of all the points on Edenfield’s Cup ledger, 690 are win points. Ten come from her own statistics.
Win points go to everybody on the winning side, and she has spent a good share of these weekends watching. So this is not a story about one catcher carrying three rosters. It is a story about what the Cup chose to measure.
The league built its scoring to reward the result instead of the line score. That is a generous thing to do for a position whose best work never reaches a line score at all.
In July Edenfield told a reporter that who she is has to be bigger than what her batting line says. She was describing a belief. Three weeks later the leaderboard was doing the arithmetic for her.
The final series opened Friday night, August 28th, and ends Sunday. Edenfield is on Team Klingler alongside Palacios. Atwood and Stewart went to the other two rosters. Three days decide it, and she will catch them in rhinestones.
A young catcher can go 0-for-4 and drive home certain she had a bad day. She will not count the game she called. She will not count the runner she held, or the pitcher she talked down in the fourth.
Her batting line holds none of it. The result of the game holds all of it. So count that one too, and keep counting it on the nights the other one is unkind.
Try this at your next practice
- The win-column journal. After every game, write down one thing you did that helped your team win and will never show up in the box score — a pitch you called, a runner you held, a pitcher you settled down. Do it for two weeks, then read the whole list back. Nobody else is keeping that list for you.
- Catch a stranger. Ask a pitcher you have never caught to throw you ten pitches, and build a plan for her out of what you see in those ten. Edenfield has caught a different staff every weekend of this Cup. Learning someone fast is a skill, and you can practice it on a Tuesday.
- The fifteen-second reset. After a bad at-bat, run the same fifteen-second routine every time before you put the mask back on — same breath, same walk, same first thing you say to your pitcher. The offense does not get to follow you behind the plate.
Sources: With Series 3 of AUSL All-Star Cup complete, Team Klingler rising (MLB.com) · 2026 All-Star Cup: Series 4 draft results (AUSL) · All-Star Cup leaderboard (AUSL) · All-Star Cup format (AUSL) · Michaela Edenfield player profile (AUSL) · Michaela Edenfield brings representation and glamour to AU Softball (New York Amsterdam News)
