Professional Sports
In addition to having several athletes who were famous natives or residents of the city, Medford played host to several professional sports teams since 1948. It was the home city for several professional baseball teams, most notably the Medford A's, later known as the Southern Oregon Timberjacks, of the Northwest League. They were a short-season single-A minor league baseball affiliate of the Oakland Athletics who played at historic Miles Field from 1979 to 1999 before relocating to Vancouver, British Columbia. There is currently talk about bringing an expansion franchise to Medford, but there is no suitable stadium to host such a team at the moment.
Medford also hosted a professional indoor football team from the National Indoor Football League known as the Southern Oregon Heat in 2001. It played in the Compton Arena at the Jackson County Expo Park.
Medford's Lava Lanes bowling alley previously hosted the PBA's Medford Open every January, which aired on ESPN, the last Open took place in 2009.
Medford is the home of a Junior A hockey team, the Southern Oregon Spartans, who plays their home games at The RRRink in south Medford.
Read more about this topic: Medford, Oregon
Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or sports:
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“...I didn’t come to this with any particular cachet. I was just a person who grew up in the United States. And when I looked around at the people who were sportscasters, I thought they were just people who grew up in the United States, too. So I thought, Why can’t a woman do it? I just assumed everyone else would think it was a swell idea.”
—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 85 (June 17, 1991)