The Mississippi Coast Sharks were a doomed minor league basketball team that played just 16 games out of a planned 56-game schedule at Biloxi’s Mississippi Coast Coliseum before its league, the Global Basketball Association, folded in midseason in December 1992.
The Boston Steamrollers were a minor league football team that played for one season in Everett, Massachusetts, a small city on the northern border of Boston, during the autumn of 1965. The ‘Rollers had a strong season on the field (8-5) but moved at the end of the season to become the Lowell Giants in 1966.
The small Oklahoma city of Ardmore (pop. 20,184 in the 1960 census) hosted Class D ball in the Sooner State League during the post-WW II minor league baseball boom, but the Ardmore Cardinals folded along with the rest of the Sooner State League following the 1957 season. The city lucked into a Class AA ball club in the spring of 1961 when Derrest Williams, owner of the Texas League’s Victoria Rosebuds, grew weary of losing $500 per night playing to puny crowds in that Texas city. 43 games into the season, Williams gained approval from his fellow league owners to pull up stakes and move to Ardmore’s 2,800-seat Cardinal Park.
The short-lived Jacksonville Jets had played all of ten days in their new home city before team owner Ted Stepien began threatening to move his nomadic Continental Basketball Association (CBA) franchise. Again.
American Basketball Association (1969-1970) Born: August 20, 1969 – The Oakland Oaks relocate to Washington, DC Moved: July 30, 1970 (Virginia Squires) First Game: October 18, 1969
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