The Carolina Cougars played in the American Basketball Association (ABA) from 1969 to 1974. The team was established as the Houston Mavericks and spent two seasons in Texas before being purchased by North Carolina syndicate. The team was sold and moved to Missouri and became the Spirits of St. Louis in 1974.
The Knights replaced the defunct Hartford Charter Oaks minor league football team on the local sports scene after the Oaks folded in early 1968. Like the Oaks before them, the Knights played out of 10,000-seat Dillon Stadium. The Knights quickly established themselves as one of the finest minor league football squads of the 1960’s. The team formed a loose working agreement with the Buffalo Bills of the American Football League and won the championship of the Atlantic Coast Football League in their 1968 expansion season. The Knights went on to appear in five straight minor league title games.
The Kanas City Monarchs are perhaps the best known Negro Leagues baseball team of all time. They played from the inception of the first Negro league in 1920 until finishing up as a barnstorming team in 1965.
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 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 Norfolk Nighthawks were one of 15 founding franchise in Arena Football 2, a lower-budget, small-market offshoot of the original Arena Football League (1987-2008). AF2 debuted in the spring of 2000 and the Nighthawks lasted for four seasons before folding. Former NFL defensive standouts Kenny Easley and Bruce Smith, both Virginia natives, owned the franchise.
The Oakland Oaks were charter members of the American Basketball Association (ABA) and were introduced, along with the rest of the new league, on February 2, 1967. The franchise’s initial investors were league co-founder Dennis Murphy, along with Los Angeles-based insurance executive S. Kenneth Davidson. The latter pulled in entertainer Pat Boone, an avid basketball fan.
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.
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