There has been one champion in Athletes Unlimited Softball League history. On Sunday at Davis Diamond, that champion stayed the same.
The Utah Talons beat the Chicago Bandits 6-1 in Game 2, swept the best-of-three for the second straight summer, and left College Station as back-to-back AUSL champions — the only franchise to lift this trophy, ever.
Jadelyn Allchin hit a two-run homer in the first, finished with three RBI, and Montana Fouts threw a complete game. Bri Ellis and Sahvanna Jaquish went deep later. Utah put up 10 hits and three home runs — the first multi-homer game in AUSL postseason history — in front of a sellout, the third sellout in league postseason history and the second in as many days.
Utah is 4-0 all-time in the AUSL postseason. Chicago is 0-4 against the Talons in championship games.
“The first time I met all of them on a call in March, I asked them what their mission was, and they said to repeat,” Talons coach Cindy Ball-Malone said. “All I’m gonna say is, job well done.”
The game that ended the series
Game 1 had been inches and sacrifice flies — Corrick, Jaquish, 2-1. Game 2 was different on purpose.
Jayda Coleman singled down the third-base line to open the first. Allchin turned on an 0-2 pitch from Kat Sandercock and drove it 233 feet to right for a two-run homer — the first extra-base hit of the 2026 Championship after Saturday’s nine-single duel, and the first postseason homer of Allchin’s AUSL career.
Utah added two unearned runs in the fourth after a throwing error by third baseman Sami Williams: Hannah Flippen scored, and Aliyah Andrews came around on Allchin’s RBI double. Ellis led off the fifth with a 254-foot solo shot to left off Taylor McQuillin. Jaquish closed the Utah scoring with a 253-foot solo homer to left off Lexi Kilfoyl in the seventh — two outs, 2-2 count — for 6-0.
Chicago finally scored in the seventh. Keirstin Roose walked as a pinch-runner, Bella Dayton singled, and Skylar Wallace singled home the Bandits’ only run. Fouts finished it: seven innings, eight hits, one run, four strikeouts, 112 pitches.
Sandercock took the loss (3.2 IP, four runs, two earned). Wallace, Morgan Zerkle, and Dayton each had two hits. Chicago went 1-for-9 with runners in scoring position.
“We came out and we hit today,” Flippen said. “That’s the difference between this year and last year. … How many games did you have us on your back? And it’s about time for us to pick up and show up for her.”
Heart in the circle
Fouts, the 2026 AUSL Pitcher of the Year, now owns a 0.50 career postseason ERA — one earned run in 14.0 innings across two title clinchers. She has 11 postseason strikeouts.
She was hard on herself anyway. She walked the leadoff batter in the seventh and said she was “very mad” about it. What steadied her was not the scoreboard. It was the green shirts behind her.
“The very first thing I think of is how tough each inning was in between when I was in the dugout trying to basically hype myself up, because it did not feel great today,” Fouts said. “All I could do is turn around and think about everybody in the infield. … Today, I just looked at each one of them, and it was for them.”
Ball-Malone made sure the room heard the other half of that story: Fouts had dominated Chicago in a prior outing and Utah still lost. Sunday she threw fewer of her best pitch and more of a fourth option — and the defense made fly balls in the sun look like art.
“What she did was absolutely incredible,” Ball-Malone said. “It was art, really.”
In the late innings, Fouts leaned on Flippen the way a pitcher leans on a shortstop who never clocks out.
“Hey, Hannah, like, I need you to pick me up a little bit, and I need you in my ear,” Fouts said. “I’ve never heard anybody more clear in my whole life than the infield.”
Flippen answered the Salt Lake question by pointing at everyone else. Fouts answered by pointing at Flippen.
“Every single day, the same giving Hannah,” Fouts said. “That is leadership above all to me — it’s not about me, it’s about you, how can I help you? … I love playing with Hannah Flippen, but I love even more as a person.”
Belief, from reserve to first-inning thunder
Allchin’s journey is the kind of championship subplot that does not fit in a box score line. She was on last year’s title team as a reserve. This year she finished the series 3-for-6 with three runs and three RBI, and left Davis Diamond with Championship Series MVP hardware.
“I don’t think I ever left the Talons, which is my favorite feeling,” Allchin said. “Even though I was reserved last year, coming back, I was able to celebrate with them on the field, but being on the other side this year … they still had the same belief in me.”
That belief had a name in the press room: general manager Lisa Fernandez.
“She believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself,” Allchin said. “She still saw worth in me, and that at the end of the day meant more than everything else. … People can say what they want about me, and they will, and they did. But it’s like, I don’t care about y’all — I care about what she thinks.”
Ellis felt the other end of the same chain — little girls from Houston in the stands, sweating through a sellout because their hometown hero was in cream and green.
“They came for me, I’m here for them,” Ellis said. “That makes me so happy.”
What it means that Utah keeps winning
Two seasons. Two titles. Same opponent in the final. Same sweep. A league still young enough that “history” fits in a paragraph — and Utah owns every line of it.
“As much as it is about the individuals that are staples on our team, it was about the reserves that came in and helped us win some games this year,” Flippen said. “It was never the same person getting the job done.”
Ball-Malone, in her first AUSL summer after a one-day turnaround from UCF’s season, called the group another family.
“It’s everything,” she said. “They just invited me in. … To just let me come in and be me and do my thing … I’m excited to share everything that we learned here and bring it back there.”
For the sport itself, Flippen — a 10-year pro — pointed past Davis Diamond to a Portland extra-inning night so loud she had never heard a stadium like it, and to a championship weekend with no local AUSL club that still sold out twice.
“We’re needing bigger stadiums to fill the seats,” Flippen said. “How cool is that?”
The other dugout
Shonda Stanton congratulated Utah, credited Fouts for extending the top of the zone, and then refused to let a 6-1 score rewrite a season in which Chicago battled back into this series.
“When you lose like that, it’s easy to focus on the things that didn’t go well,” Stanton said. “There’s a great quote about a woman of strength — she thinks she has strength for the journey. But it’s in the journey that she becomes strong.”
She gathered them after the last out — not for a strategy lecture, for affirmation.
“I’m a third-base coach. I’m here to wave people on in life,” Stanton said. “We get to play a game, but they’re people first.”
The night before, the Bandits had walked the Bonfire Memorial together and talked about perspective. On Sunday they finished with eight hits and one run — a Bandits offense that led the league in almost every category during the year, held in check against Fouts and Utah’s outfield.
“You tell me we have eight hits, I’m gonna tell you we’re gonna have 10 or 12 runs,” Stanton said. “But that’s just how good she is, and that’s how good their defense was.”
Her closing identity for the roster was not an MVP name. It was a word on the jersey.
“The MVP is being a Bandit,” Stanton said. “Once a Bandit, always a Bandit.”
Final
Utah 6, Chicago 1. Series 2-0. Champions again.
Fouts said the whole series started with waking up ready. Allchin said heart. Ellis said little things. Flippen said anybody, any day. Ball-Malone said repeat.
Somewhere between a two-run homer in the first and a shortstop’s voice in a pitcher’s ear in the seventh, that mission stopped being a March Zoom answer and became AUSL history — again.
Anthony Rivera, Davis Diamond. Stats from the official AUSL box score and postgame notes; Stanton, Ball-Malone, Fouts, Allchin, Ellis, and Flippen quotes from the July 26 AUSL postgame press conferences.