Sacramento Knights

Continental Indoor Soccer League (1993-1997)
Premier Soccer Alliance (1998)
World Indoor Soccer League (1999-2001)

Tombstone

Born: July 7, 1992 – CISL founding franchise
Folded: January 31, 2002¹

First Game: July 19, 1993 (L 11-8 @ Portland Pride)
Last Game: December 9, 2001 (L 5-4 @ Dallas Sidekicks)

CISL Championships: None
WISL Champions: 1999

Arena

ARCO Arena (10,632)²

Marketing

Team Colors: Black, Silver, Blue, Orange & White³

Radio:

1995 – 1996: KHTK (1140 AM) – English
1996: KRCX (1110 AM) – Spanish

Radio Broadcaster:

1995: Steve Buzzard
1996: Steve Buzzard & Jim Burke (English)
1996: Armando Botello & Sal Gonzalez (Spanish)

Ownership

Owners:

1993-1998: Jim Thomas, Eli Broad, Rob Maguire, Ned Fox, Rick Gilchrist, et al.
1999-2001: Joe Maloof & Gavin Maloof

Attendance

Tilting your mobile device may offer better viewing.

Print Download

Sources:

1997 Continental Indoor Soccer League Official Guide (1993-1996 figures)
1997 Continental Indoor Soccer League Post-Season Reference Guide (1997 figures)
Kenn.com Attendance Project (1998 – 2001 Figures)

Our Favorite Stuff

Continental Indoor Soccer League Logo T-Shirt

The CISL was a summertime pro indoor soccer league that played in major NBA and NHL arenas, primarily in the Western U.S., from 1993 to 1997. The league also managed to bring its Continental aspirations into reality with a pair of Mexican franchises. Many of the all-time greats of the indoor game – Tatu, Preki and Branko Segota – chose the CISL over its wintertime competitor, the National Professional Soccer League.

This CISL design is available in White or Sport Grey and can also be ordered as Hooded or Crewneck Sweatshirt today at Old School Shirts!

When you make a purchase through an affiliate link like this one, Fun While It Lasted earns a commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for your support!

Background

The Sacramento Knights were an indoor soccer team that played for nearly a decade under the management of successive ownership groups of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings franchise. The basic details of this club are mostly indistinguishable from hundreds of other defunct teams here on FWIL: team forms, finds a loyal but insufficiently large audience over several seasons and then is quietly euthanized. So before running through those details, I’ll just tell you the strangest story in the Knights file:

From Knight to Bank Robber

Ex-Knights General Manager Hubert Rotteveel, once a member of UCLA’s 1985 national champion soccer team, became a bank robber after the demise of the Knights. And not a great one. On June 30, 2010, a bike helmet and spandex-clad Rotteveel robbed two Sacramento area banks with a BB gun. Authorities nabbed Rotteveel cycling away from the second bank after a dye pack in his loot exploded as he pedaled past a responding police officer. Rotteveel, by many accounts a well-liked and respected executive during his soccer years, is eligible for release in 2014..

Continental Indoor Soccer League

ANYWAY. What happened to the Knights? Original owner Jim Thomas purchased the club as a founding member of the Continental Indoor Soccer League in September 1992, a few months after he acquired control of the Kings. The CISL, which existed from 1993 until 1997, initially attracted a number of NBA ownership groups besides Thomas and the Kings. But enthusiasm for the league and the sport of indoor soccer declined in the mid-1990’s. NBA owners began to look to the new WNBA to fill summer dates in their arenas instead. In addition to the Knights, the Sacramento Kings ownership also operated the WNBA’s Sacramento Monarchs during the summer months. Coincidentally or not, the debut season of the WNBA in 1997 also proved to be the final year for the CISL. The soccer league folded in December 1997.

Final Seasons & Demise

The Knights did play on, however, joining several other CISL refuges in a pair of lower-profile successor leagues starting in 1998.

The Knights won the championship of the World Indoor Soccer League (WISL) in 1999. They also appeared in the championship series – but lost – for the CISL in 1995 and the Premier Soccer Alliance in 1998.

When Jim Thomas sold controlling interest in the Kings to Maloof Sports & Entertainment in 1999, the Knights were tossed in with the deal. The Maloofs operated the Knights for three more seasons through 2001.

In December 2001, the WISL merged with the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) to form the Major Indoor Soccer League. The MISL intended to play a September-March schedule that was similar to the NPSL’s traditional schedule. This pulled the Knights further yet from the summertime indoor soccer schedule that (briefly) made CISL franchises appealing to NBA owners in the mid-1990’s.

In January 2002, Maloof Sports & Entertainment joined the MISL but with an “inactive” status and with no timeline to ever return the Knights to competition. This decision came in despite of a grassroots petition to save the Knights that generated 59,000 signatures in early 2002.⁴ As local fans feared, the Maloofs never re-activated the team and the Knights effectively went out of business on January 31, 2002.