The Topeka ScareCrows played in the second iteration of the Central Hockey League (CHL) from 1998-2001. After the team folded, a junior team was organized under the same name. They skated until 2003.
The San Antonio Wings were a new franchise in the second and final season of the World Football League (WFL) in 1975. The WFL was an attempt to directly challenge the supremacy of the National Football League, as the American Football League had done successfully a decade earlier. The Wings only managed to play 13 games before the entire league went belly up in October of 1975. This Jekyll-and-Hyde squad was unbeatable at home at Alamo Stadium (7-0) but hapless everywhere else, dropping all six of their road games.
The Homestead Grays are one of the best known teams to have played in the Negro Leagues, though they were an independent team for much of their existence.
This was a good 1970’s NHL expansion team! No, really. The Atlanta Flames had a winning record in five of their eight seasons as the NHL’s only Deep South outpost. They made the playoffs six out of those eight years. They had a core of outstanding young players and a future Hall-of-Fame executive in the GM chair. But the collective memory of the Atlanta Flames is that they weren’t very good because they were God-awful in the playoffs (objectively true) and Southerners hate ice hockey (possibly true, definitely a well-worn trope).
The Denver Zephyrs were formerly known as the Denver Bears from 1955 until 1983. In 1984, they adopted the Zephyrs nickname, which they kept when they moved to New Orleans in 1993 as the Major League Colorado Rockies set up shop in the Mile High City.
For a remarkable three-year period between 2004 and 2006 this amateur women’s soccer club that played in a 1,500-seat community college field in the Trenton suburbs managed to sign up a jaw-dropping roster of top players from all over the world. The Wildcats ran roughshod over the USL’s W-League during these years with only one North American women’s club – the Vancouver Whitecaps – able to stay on the field with them.
This short-lived indoor football team played a single season at Cross Insurance Arena in downtown Portland during the summer of 2018. The Mammoths leading receiver was the delightfully-named Edgar Allan Poe, Jr.
In the spring of 1982, the Canadian Football League’s venerable Montreal Alouettes franchise collapsed under a mountain of debt. Seeking a clean slate for new ownership, league officials folded the Alouettes on May 13, 1982 and awarded a new Montreal expansion club to Seagram’s liquor baron and Montreal Expos founder Charles Bronfman the next day. The club embarked on a star-crossed four year voyage under the new name “Concordes”, drawing inspiration from the iconic supersonic transatlantic jets of the era.
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