A crowd of 9,439 showed up last night for the Salt Lake Sting-San Diego Nomad Western Soccer League game at Derks Field. It was the Sting's final regular season home game, although there will be more to come if the team makes the playoffs, a highly likely possibility.
Starting with the nearly 10,000 who saw the Sting's opening home game in April and finishing with last night's fireworks night crowd, attendance for the summer's 13 home games averaged close to 5,400 a game.Since the owners of the new franchise hoped to average 2,500 for their first season, it seems safe to presume the Sting will not join their Salt Lake pro predecessors, the Golden Spikers of the 1970s, as one-year wonders.
Whereas professional rodeo, and volleyball, and track & field, and football, to name several, have failed to make it in Salt Lake, professional
soccer is making a case that this isn't just a basketball, baseball and hockey town anymore, that there may be room for a pro sport where it's illegal to touch the ball with your hands.
This has not been lost on the Sting's board of governors, most of whom also own the Salt Lake Trappers rookie league baseball franchise.
"The ownership is extremely pleased with this season," says Dave Baggott, the Sting's assistant general manager who is also general manager of the Trappers. "In fact, they're ecstatic."
So, for that matter, is Baggott, who was not particularly excited when Jack Donovan, one of the Trappers owners, telephoned him last winter and told him he was going to have a soccer team on his hands as well as a baseball team.
"To be honest with you, when Donovan called I wasn't too thrilled about the venture," he says. "I couldn't have cared less about soccer. I always hated it. Now, I feel differently."
Baggott, a former Trapper ballplayer before moving into sports franchise management, says there were two big fears before this whole Sting experiment began.
"One, would the field at Derks be too torn up to play baseball on, and two, would the baseball and soccer players - who would have to share a locker room - get along?"
"Well, the field hasn't been torn up at all," he says, "and the teams have turned into this brothership with each other. When they're in town at the same time, they're out there watching each other's games. It's been something to see."
Baggott says all of this with a general manager's gleam in his eye that could only be produced by a soccer team AND a baseball team that are averaging more than 5,000 a game.
"The Trappers are at 102,000 for the season, or about 5,400 a game," he says. "With about half the baseball season to go, we're looking realistically at 200,000.
"When you add the soccer numbers, that's more than a quarter of a million attendance at Derks Field this summer, for 38 dates (13 for the Sting, 25 for the Trappers)."
Already, local businessmen have called the Sting's offices, asking about buying into the ownership. "We've told them we'll talk to them after the season is over," says Baggott. "But it's not going to be cheap."
Just where this soccer enthusiasm has come from is up to conjecture, although Laurie Calloway, the Sting's head coach, suggests that Salt Lake was hungry for professional soccer, even if it didn't know it was.
"It reminds me of when I played with the (San Franchisco) Earthquake in 1974 and 1975," he says. "Everyone was so excited, they came even if we played badly." The '74-75 Earthquake were members of the North American Soccer League, the league that tried to put pro soccer on a grand scale in the U.S. and went defunct in the process.
In the years since the NASL's demise, there have been pockets of pro soccer uprisings. Salt Lake being one of them. The nearly 10,000 who attended the opening game accounted for the largest outdoor crowd to see a professional game in the United States since the NASL collapsed. And last night's crowd of nearly 9,000 wasn't much behind that.
The fireworks display that finished off last night's regular season final match had something to do with the size of the crowd as well. But promotions are nothing new to sporting events.
"It's been quite remarkable, better than we'd hoped," says Calloway.
For an encore, they'll probably do it again.