History
Greek American Atlas Astoria, formally New York Greek American Atlas Astoria Soccer Club, was formed in 1941. The club was founded by Greek-American Tom Laris and would go on to become one of the most successful and longest continually operating teams in American soccer history. The club has a long-standing rivalry with New York's Cyprian team and fellow multiple National Cup champion, the Pancyprian Freedoms.
The Greek Americans have won America's nationwide domestic soccer tournament, the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, formerly the National Challenge Cup, four times in its history, from 1967 to 1969 and in 1974. The club is one of only two teams, alongside the Seattle Sounders FC, to have won the annual tournament on three consecutive occasions.
The team currently plays in the 5th tier of the American soccer pyramid, under the USASA in the Cosmopolitan Soccer League. The club plays out of the Metropolitan Oval in Maspeth, Queens and has been a perennial contender in the league, winning five of the last eleven Eastern New York Championships. While the club had not qualified for the Open Cup since 2005, it returned to the tournament in 2012 but lost in the first round to Reading United of the USL's Premier Development League, by a score of 2-1.
Their reserve team is the Greek-American Atlas Reserves FC that plays in the Cosmopolitan League's Reserve Division.
Read more about this topic: Greek American AA
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)