The Virginia Squires of the American Basketball Association (ABA) began as the Oakland Oaks. After two seasons they were sold and moved to Washington, D.C., for one year, before moving to the Tidewater region of Eastern Virginia. They folded in 1976, just a month shy of the NBA-ABA merger.
The 1975 Portland Thunder were the Rose City’s second and final go-round with the World Football League, a ramshackle mid-70’s start-up that briefly sought to challenge the NFL for top collegiate and veteran stars. The Thunder followed on the feels of the Portland Storm, who played in WFL’s debut season of 1974 before tax problems and bounced checks drove the team out of business. Like the Storm before them, the similarly-named Thunder dressed in green & blue and played at Civic Stadium. The Thunder had a record of 4-7 when the WFL went out of business midway through its second campaign in October 1975.
The Seattle Steelheads were members of the West Coast Negro Baseball Association (WCNBA) in that circuit’s only season, 1946. The team was actually the Harlem Globetrotters baseball club and returned to barnstorming when the WCNBA ceased operations.
The New York Americans hockey team played in the National Hocky League from 1925 until 1941. Just before the start of the 1941-42 season, they were renamed the Brooklyn Americans in name only, still playing their games in Manhattan, at Madison Square Garden. They folded in 1942.
The “89ers” (1962-1997) is the best known appellation of Oklahoma City’s long-running Class AAA minor league baseball team. The team’s name derives from the Land Rush of 1889, the same frenzied appropriation and settlement of Native American lands that inspired the University of Oklahoma’s “Sooners” nickname. Following the 1997 season, the 89ers changed leagues, stadiums and names all at once. The franchise became the Oklahoma RedHawks in 1998 and, after another re-brand in 2015, plays on today as the Oklahoma City Dodgers.
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.
Today’s Brooklyn Nets have a tangled, New York/New Jersey border-hopping history dating back to the formation of the ABA back in 1967.
The Baltimore Stallions played two seasons in the CFL starting in 1994. The most successful of the league’s American teams, they went to the Grey Cup following both seasons, winning in 1995. The team experienced grief off the field from the NFL, first with a lawsuit over using the name Colts, then by the relocation of the Cleveland Browns.
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