Southern League (1970-1984 & 1991-2016) Born: 1970 – Southern League expansion franchise Re-Branded: November 2, 2016 (Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp) First Game: April 16, 1970 (L 6-5
From 1962 until 2016, Jacksonville’s minor league baseball clubs were known as the Suns, except for 1969 when Wolfson Park sat empty for a summer and this stretch from 1985 to 1990 when the city’s Southern League ball club adopted the identity of their Major League parent club, the Montreal Expos.
Jacksonville’s first professional soccer team was the oddly named “Tea Men”. The Teas arrived in 1981, starting out in the top flight North American Soccer League and the 80,000-seat Gator Bowl before gradually self-relegating to cheaper, lower division leagues and minor league baseball’s Wolfson Park by their final season in 1984. The strange moniker carried over from the team’s previous home in New England (Boston), where the Tea Men name had a double meaning, referring both to the Boston Tea Party protest of 1773 and the team’s original corporate owner, the Lipton Tea Company. The Teas were champions of the American Soccer League in 1983.
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