The Canadian Soccer League played seven seasons of summertime outdoor soccer from 1987 to 1992. Organizers formed the league in the wake of Canada’s first-ever qualification for the World Cup in 1986 and two years after the demise of the North American Socccer League (1968-1984) which featured several Canadian team’s over it’s run.
The Tulsa Mustangs were a minor-league football outfit that last for only 5 games of a planned 16-game schedule in the American Football Association in 1979. The team had a 1-4 record at the time they folded in midseason. The AFA was a southern U.S. minor league that stretched from Jacksonville to San Antonio and as far north as Louisville during the 1979 season. Read more…
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.
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.
The Tennessee Valley Vipers was the name used by a pair of Huntsville, Alabama-based Arena Football franchises that played ten seasons between 2000 and 2010. The team was known as the Alabama Vipers during their final season. In their finest hour, the Vipers won the 2008 Arena Cup as champions of Arena Football 2, after the team’s barely used back-up quarterback Tony Colsten engineered a shocking road upset of the league’s best team.
The American Basketball Association (ABA) was formed in 1967 as a competitor to the established National Basketball Association (NBA). It started with 11 teams, and within a few years was angling for a merger with the older league. In 1976, the NBA took in four ABA teams, while three other surviving teams disbanded.
Yes, strange as it sounds, but the small, poverty-stricken city of Shreveport, Louisiana once had its very own Canadian Football League franchise: the Shreveport Pirates. The Pirates’ shambolic leadership made a series of head-scratching personnel moves, including the signings of troubled over-the-hill NFL stars Dexter Manley and Mark Duper, and fired the team’s first head coach before taking a regular season snap. Meanwhile the team staggered to a two-year record of 8-28 in the CFL before going out of business at the end of the 1995 season.
