The Denver Spurs started in the Western Hockey League in 1968. When that circuit folded, they joined the Central Hockey League in 1974. The following year, they joined the World Hockey Association, but moved to Ottawa halfway through the season.
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 Cleveland Buckeyes started as the Cincinnati-Cleveland Buckeyes in 1942, before settling permanently in Northern Ohio in 1943. The club won two league titles as well as a Negro World Series championship.
In the professional sports franchise arms race of the 1970s, there were many casualties, particularly in the world of hockey. One of those was the expansion Kansas City Scouts.
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.
The Philadelphia Atoms won the North American Soccer League championship in the debut season of 1973. In doing so, they became the first American pro soccer club to earn the cover of Sports Illustrated. After that charmed first season, though, the Atoms’ fortunes fizzled out and the club was out of business by the end of 1976.
The San Antonio Force, who lasted only a single season at HemisFair Arena, is infamous among the ever-dwindling core of indoor football obsessives for absorbing the only shutout loss in the 30+ year history of the high-scoring Arena Football League.
A detailed history of the Miami Floridians, later just The Floridians, the former Minnesota Muskies that played four seasons in the Sunshine State before folding.
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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