The Las Vegas Thunder were a six-year entry in the International Hockey League during that organization’s gold rush era of nationwide expansion in the mid-1990’s. Minor league baseball investors Hank Stickney and his son Ken paid a $2.0 million expansion fee for the Thunder in 1993. The Stickneys also owned the Las Vegas Stars Class AAA baseball team.
The Virginia Sailors were a minor league football team that operated in the Washington suburbs for three seasons from 1966 to 1968. The Sailors captured back-to-back ACFL titles in 1966 and 1967 and returned to the championship game once again in 1968, only to see their three-peat bid spoiled by the Hartford Knights.
Cox’s squad returned to the title game in 1968 with a chance for a three-peat, but lost 30-17 on the road to the Hartford Knights.
The Baltimore Elite Giants got their start in Nashville, before moving to Columbus, Ohio for one year, then to Washington, D.C. They moved down the road in Baltimore in 1938 and played there until 1950, before spending their final season back in Tennessee.
The original Winnipeg Jets were charter members of the WHA in 1972. They moved to the NHL in 1979, along with three other WHA squads. In 1995, they were sold and moved to Phoenix for the 1996-97 hockey season. The name was revived when the Atlanta Thrashers moved to Manitoba in 2011 and assumed the Jets name but not their history.
The Atlantic City Surf were one of the six original franchises in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball. The Atlantic League was (and remains) the most ambitious league to arise out of the independent baseball boom of the 1990’s. The Surf played at the Sandcastle, a 5,900-seat ballpark built on the grounds of Atlantic City’s municipal airport, Bader Field. The stadium was built with $11.5 million in Casino Reinvestment Development Authority funds and $3 million in taxpayer bonds.
The sport of indoor soccer spread across the country during the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. Thanks to organizations like the Major Indoor Soccer League, National Professional Soccer League and the Continental Indoor Soccer League, practically every Major League city in the country had seen one or more indoor soccer teams come through town by 1999. Salt Lake City, Utah was an exception until the upstart World Indoor Soccer League (WISL) rolled into town at the E Center in West Valley in 1999.
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.
A detailed history of the New Orleans Buccaneers (1967-1970) a founding member of the ABA that played three seasons in the Big Easy and later moved to Memphis.
The Birmingham Barracudas were the final American expansion team awarded during the Canadian Football League’s failed incursion into the United States during the mid-1990’s.
