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There’s a moment softball fans keep having lately, and it usually goes something like this: someone pulls up the Chicago Bandits’ 2026 roster, admires the lineup, then types “how much do these players actually make?” into a search bar — half expecting an MLB-style shrug of a number, half bracing for something depressingly small.
The honest answer sits in between those two expectations, and it’s a more interesting story than a single dollar figure.
Chicago Bandits Are, Right Now
The Bandits aren’t a scrappy startup team anymore. They’re one of six franchises in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL), based out of Rosemont, Illinois, and coming off a runner-up finish in the league’s inaugural 2025 championship. For 2026, the league shifted from a traveling, city-hopping format to permanent home markets — which means the Bandits now play a full home-and-away schedule out of Parkway Bank Sports Complex instead of touring the country.
General Manager Jenny Dalton-Hill, a three-time Women’s College World Series champion herself, built this roster around a mix of proven AUSL talent and a strong rookie class. Head Coach Shonda Stanton, previously of Indiana University, runs the dugout.
None of that is background noise — it matters for the salary conversation, because the Bandits’ payroll isn’t a private, opaque MLB-style contract system. It’s governed by league-wide compensation rules that apply to every AUSL team, Bandits included.
The Bandits’ 2026 Roster, Position by Position
Here’s the shape of the current roster heading into the season:
| Position | Players |
|---|---|
| Catchers | Mary Iakopo, Jocelyn Erickson |
| Infielders | Erin Coffel, Ailana Agbayani, Taryn Kern, Kyleigh Sand, Sami Williams, Skylar Wallace (temporary inactive) |
| Outfielders | Morgan Zerkle, Bella Dayton, Jessica Clements, Elon Butler |
| Pitchers | Odicci Alexander-Bennett, Taylor McQuillin, Amber Fiser, Bri Copeland, Mariah Lopez, Lexi Kilfoyl (temporary inactive), Kat Sandercock (temporary inactive) |
Erin Coffel, the league’s inaugural MVP and Hitter of the Year, anchors the lineup. Morgan Zerkle, a nearly decade-long veteran of pro softball, led the AUSL in hits, doubles, and home runs last season. On the mound, Taylor McQuillin tied for the league lead in saves in 2025, and rookie draft pick Jocelyn Erickson — the fifth overall selection out of Florida and Oklahoma — arrives with one of the most productive college careers in recent memory.
It’s a roster with real earning power behind it, which is exactly why the salary question gets interesting.
So, How Does AUSL Salary Actually Work?
This is the part that surprises people. AUSL doesn’t hand out individual, negotiated, multi-year contracts the way MLB or even the WNBA does. Instead, it runs on a league-wide compensation structure:
- Base salary: Every rostered player earns a base salary in the $40,000–$45,000 range for the season.
- Performance bonuses: On top of that base, players can earn additional money tied to individual and team performance — extra-base hits, wins, strikeouts, saves, and other statistical categories all feed into bonus pools.
- Ceiling: With bonuses included, top performers can push total season earnings up to roughly $75,000.
- Rookie floor: Newer players and reserve-pool additions typically start closer to the league minimum, around $35,000, before bonuses.
None of this is Bandits-specific — it’s the same framework Talons, Spark, Blaze, Volts, and Cascade players operate under. What changes team to team isn’t the pay scale, it’s how many players on a given roster are positioned to hit those upper bonus tiers.
And on the Bandits, that number is unusually high. An MVP-caliber hitter (Coffel), a stat-leading veteran (Zerkle), a save-tying closer (McQuillin), and a top-five draft pick (Erickson) all sitting on the same roster means a larger share of this team is realistically chasing that $75,000 ceiling than most rosters in the league.
Chicago Bandits Salary Landscape: 2021–2026
This is where the story gets genuinely strange, and it’s worth walking through year by year — because “Chicago Bandits salary” hasn’t meant the same thing twice in this stretch. The team, the league, and even the format have all shifted underneath the name.
| Year | League / Format | Chicago Bandits Status | Typical Player Pay | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | National Pro Fastpitch (NPF) | Season cancelled (COVID-19); league suspended operations in August 2021 | N/A — no games played | NPF’s last active seasons had paid players roughly $3,000–$6,250, with team salary caps around $150,000–$175,000 split across a full roster |
| 2022 | No NPF; Athletes Unlimited ran its individual-competition softball series | Bandits name inactive; no city-based team existed | N/A (individual AU format, not team payroll) | AU’s rotating-team model paid based on weekly performance points rather than fixed team contracts |
| 2023 | Athletes Unlimited continues; Women’s Pro Fastpitch (WPF) launches separately | Bandits name inactive | N/A | WPF struggled financially and would fold after the 2024 season |
| 2024 | Athletes Unlimited softball (individual format), AUSL announced June 2024 | Bandits brand confirmed as a future AUSL franchise | N/A (pre-season) | AUSL announcement set base pay expectations at roughly $40,000–$45,000, a preview of the coming shift |
| 2025 | AUSL inaugural season (touring format, four teams) | Bandits play as one of four traveling franchises; finish as league runner-up | ~$40,000 average base, up to $75,000–$80,000 with bonuses | First season players earned a genuine full-time softball salary in the U.S. |
| 2026 | AUSL city-based season (six teams) | Bandits become a permanent Rosemont-based franchise with a full home schedule | $40,000–$45,000 average base, up to $75,000 with bonuses | Same league-wide pay scale applies to all six teams; Bandits’ MVP-heavy roster gives them strong odds of hitting the top of that range |
Why This Number Matters More Than It Looks
Here’s the context that turns a modest-sounding salary figure into a genuinely notable story: AUSL’s predecessor league, National Pro Fastpitch (NPF), paid its players between $3,000 and $6,250 per season, with a team salary cap around $20,000 total. That’s not a typo — an entire NPF roster used to earn, combined, close to what a single strong AUSL player can earn alone today.
The jump happened fast. Major League Baseball’s 2025 strategic investment in AUSL didn’t just add credibility and broadcast reach (ESPN, ABC, MLB Network); it helped stabilize a pay structure that, for the first time in American softball history, lets players treat the sport as a real primary income rather than a stipend they supplement by working overseas in Japan or Italy during the offseason.
That’s really the story underneath “Chicago Bandits roster salary” — it’s less about any one player’s paycheck and more about what it says that a Bandits roster spot is, for the first time in the sport’s history, a viable full-time job.
Where Bandits Salaries Sit Compared to the Rest of the League
Every AUSL team operates under the identical $40K–$45K base / $75K ceiling structure, so there’s no built-in payroll advantage for Chicago over, say, Oklahoma City or Utah. The real differentiator is roster construction:
- Teams with more all-star-caliber, bonus-eligible players will see a higher average realized salary, even though the pay scale is identical.
- The Bandits, carrying last season’s MVP and a stat-leading power hitter, likely skew toward the higher end of that range in practice — even if the official numbers are the same across the league on paper.
- Expansion teams (Spark, Cascade) built largely through the 2025 expansion and college drafts are still developing that same depth of bonus-tier talent.
In other words: same pay scale, different odds of actually reaching the top of it — and the Bandits’ roster gives them better odds than most.
A few things stand out looking at this stretched across six years. First, there’s a nearly four-year gap — 2021 to 2024 — where “Chicago Bandits salary” simply didn’t exist as a concept, because the team and the format it used to play in both disappeared. Second, the jump from NPF’s final active pay scale (low thousands) to AUSL’s current scale (tens of thousands) happened almost overnight once MLB got involved, rather than through the gradual, incremental raises the sport saw throughout the 2010s. And third, since every AUSL team — Bandits, Talons, Spark, Blaze, Volts, Cascade — operates under the identical base-and-bonus structure, the real team-to-team variable isn’t the pay scale itself; it’s how many players on a given roster are talented enough to consistently hit the bonus tiers. On that measure, the Bandits’ 2026 roster — anchored by a reigning MVP, a stat-leading veteran, and a top-five draft pick — is built to outperform the league average, even though the salary ceiling is the same for everyone.
The Bottom Line
Nobody on the Chicago Bandits is getting a $10 million contract. But the more accurate way to read “Chicago Bandits roster salary” isn’t against MLB money — it’s against where this sport was three years ago, when players were making less in a season than many part-time jobs pay in a summer. A $40,000–$75,000 season, with a roster stacked with MVP and veteran talent likely to land near the top of that range, is the clearest sign yet that professional softball in the U.S. finally has a compensation model that can hold onto its best players instead of exporting them overseas.
FAQs
1. How much do Chicago Bandits players make in 2026?
Bandits players earn a base salary in the $40,000–$45,000 range, with performance bonuses that can push total season earnings up to roughly $75,000 — the same structure that applies league-wide.
2. Is there a “highest-paid” Chicago Bandits player?
The AUSL doesn’t publish individual player salaries, so there’s no official highest-paid figure. But based on 2025 performance, Erin Coffel (MVP, Hitter of the Year) and Morgan Zerkle (league leader in hits, doubles, and home runs) are the players best positioned to hit the top of the bonus scale.
3. Do rookies on the Bandits get paid the same as veterans?
No. Rookies and reserve-pool additions typically start closer to the league minimum, around $35,000, before bonuses, while established players operate from the standard $40,000–$45,000 base and have a better shot at bonus-tier earnings.
4. Why did Chicago Bandits salaries jump so much compared to a few years ago?
Because the league itself changed. The Bandits’ old league, NPF, folded in 2021 while paying players $3,000–$6,250 a season. The Bandits didn’t exist as an active team again until the AUSL launched in 2025 with MLB backing and a dramatically higher pay scale.
5. Does MLB directly pay Chicago Bandits players?
Not directly. MLB made a strategic investment in the AUSL as a league in 2025, which helped stabilize and fund the compensation structure, but individual player pay comes from the AUSL/team side, not from MLB payroll.
6. How does Chicago Bandits pay compare to Oklahoma City Spark, Utah Talons, or other AUSL teams?
Every AUSL team uses the identical base-and-bonus pay scale. The Bandits don’t have a bigger payroll on paper — they just carry more players (an MVP, a stat-leading veteran, a top draft pick) who are realistically able to reach the top of that shared scale.
7. What happens to a Bandits player’s pay if they’re on the temporary inactive list?
The AUSL doesn’t publicly detail pay treatment for inactive-list players, so this isn’t something we can confirm with certainty — it’s a fair follow-up question to ask directly to the league or team.
8. Is playing for the Chicago Bandits a full-time job now?
For most rostered players, yes — it’s the first time in the sport’s U.S. history that a team salary alone (without needing an offseason job or overseas play) can function as a primary income.
9. How does Chicago Bandits salary compare to playing softball in Japan?
Japan’s corporate-backed softball leagues have historically paid more than any U.S. league, including current AUSL figures, which is part of why many top American players used to head overseas. AUSL’s growth is narrowing — but hasn’t closed — that gap.
10. Where can I find the most current, official Chicago Bandits salary numbers?
The AUSL’s own FAQ page and official team communications are the most reliable sources, since individual player contracts aren’t publicly itemized anywhere else.
