Major Professional Teams
The first professional team to play in Seattle was the PCHA Seattle Metropolitans, which played in the Seattle Ice Arena between 1915 and 1924. The NHL has proposed relocating or expanding to Seattle.
In 1967, the NBA's Seattle SuperSonics (more commonly known as the "Sonics") became the first modern-day major professional sports franchise in Seattle. However, in 2008, the Sonics' ownership group moved the team to Oklahoma City. Two years after the Sonics arrived in Seattle, the Major League Baseball Seattle Pilots were established, but only played one year in Seattle before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Pilots' sole season was immortalized in Jim Bouton's book Ball Four. It wasn't until 1976 that Seattle got another professional sports team, in the form of the NFL's Seattle Seahawks. One year after that and following years of legal wrangling over the move of the Pilots, the MLB awarded Seattle a new baseball franchise, the Seattle Mariners. From 1978 to 1985, all three teams played in the Kingdome, with the Seahawks and Mariners continuing to play in the Kingdome until it was imploded in 2000. The final professional team to arrive in Seattle was the WNBA's Seattle Storm in 2000. The Storm currently play in KeyArena, the Seahawks in CenturyLink Field, and Mariners in Safeco Field.
Soccer in Seattle has always involved the Seattle Sounders, whose original incarnation played in the defunct NASL in the 1970s through to its demise in 1983. The name lived on in a second incarnation of the team, which played in the second level of US soccer from 1994 through 2008. In November 2007, Major League Soccer announced that Seattle would host the league's fifteenth franchise to start play in 2009. The team held a vote among its fan for the team's name between March 27 and March 31, 2008 and Seattle Sounders FC was chosen. The current version of the Sounders plays at CenturyLink Field. In September 2012 the Seattle City Council agreed to build a new $490 million in the SoDo neighborhood, which could bring the NBA back to Seattle along with the NHL.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Seattle
Famous quotes containing the words major, professional and/or teams:
“A major problem for Black women, and all people of color, when we are challenged to oppose anti-Semitism, is our profound skepticism that white people can actually be oppressed.”
—Barbara Smith (b. 1946)
“Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don’t brag about it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die—at least not in the act—and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)