By Abe Avila, Parker Tuerff, Logan Nipper and Macy Morgan
The Red Wolves are coming up on their one-year anniversary, but will both the Red Wolves and The Chattanooga Football club be able to survive in the Scenic City?
“We don’t play each other, we are not in the same league, and we never will be” said Chattanooga Football Club President Sheldon Grizzle.
The Chattanooga Football Club, which was founded in January of 2009, have called Chattanooga home for the last ten years. The team will begin play in the National Independent Soccer Association in the Spring of 2020 after some discussions with other teams. Sheldon Grizzle broke down how the process went with CFC’s league changes. “None of us wanted to join this other league, the USL, but we want to ban together and move together in a single direction,” Grizzle says. So we decided to start our own league known as the NPSL Pro at the time. We got a year into that and then NISA rose out of the ashes. So we decided to throw our hat in with NISA.”
Before NISA, the club played in the Southeast Division of the National Premier Soccer League, a national amateur league. The team plays its home games at Finley Stadium which is shared with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Finley also hosts various high school sports and musical concerts.
At the beginning of 2019, The Chattanooga Football Club sent out an email in an effort to gain more support from the community as well as raise $1 million. It became the first club to offer ownership shares to the public. In just the first day it sold $250,000 worth of shares, creating 991 new owners of CFC. This was an incredible way to gain community involvement as well as spread awareness. Each new owner received a yard sign stating “Owner of Chattanooga Football Club.” If you drive through Chattanooga, you will see these signs in people’s yards and apartment windows. They ended up being pretty successful with their intentions. The campaign ended in June of 2019, CFC sold $873,000 worth of shares. In total, they gained almost 3,000 new owners from all 50 states and 25 different countries.
In 2018, The Chattanooga Red Wolves became Chattanooga’s first professional soccer team. According to the Red Wolves website, the United Soccer League (USL), is one of the most successful professional soccer organizations in the world. In 2017 the USL announced that they would be forming a new league which the Red Wolves are currently in called the League One.
In 2019, the Red Wolves unveiled plans for a permanent home in East Ridge, Tenn. Unlike Finley Stadium, this stadium will be soccer specific. The plans for this stadium include adding retail, walking trails, a hotel, and other things that would benefit the Chattanooga community. Unfortunately, as of August 2019, construction has come to a halt because some violations, but the Red Wolves hope to get this sorted out soon. Currently, the Red Wolves play their home games at Chattanooga Christian school located on Charger Dr. at the bottom of Lookout Mountain. The Red Wolves made their debut on April 6th, 2019 to a welcoming crowd of about 3,000.
Despite being Chattanooga’s newest sports team, the Red Wolves have also been active in the community, hosting several fundraisers at various locations. The Red Wolves office is located on Broad Street between Moon Pie and Rocket Fizz. Inside is a full team store as well as an office area where events are planned for a team. Their second location is in East Ridge near the new stadium site.
Chattanooga Football Club is also planning on building something for the community at Montague Park, which is a staggering 13-acres of city-owned land. Sheldon Grizzle plans to submit a Request for Proposal (RFP).
“We would love to go put together a public park that has three or four soccer fields on it that can also be used for rugby, American football, ultimate frisbee, lacrosse and whatever else. Downtown Chattanooga doesn’t have any park like that right now, so we are excited about building some new facilities that can be used by all kinds of different Chattanoogans.”
When asked about the rivalry between the Red Wolves and CFC, Kevin Friedman, Director of Gameday Operations for the Red Wolves had little to say. He did not comment on outside of the league rivalry. “I mean they (CFC) play soccer. That's the extent of it for me. They are in a different league. We will never play each other or compete for the same championship.”
Sheldon Grizzle with CFC took the rivalry question a little differently.
“What they are doing is very different from what we are doing. We believe we are offering a different and more compelling product than what they are offering.”
There is only one way the clubs meet on the field and that is through the U.S. Open Cup which Grizzle admitted would happen eventually if both clubs are drawn to play each other in the early rounds. But there is no rush to do that right now.
Ultimately, only time will tell how both of these teams will grow with Chattanooga. Will one team come out on top of the other? Will Chattanooga accept both teams? Right now, you can catch both of these teams playing in Chattanooga this fall.
Story and video produced by a team of students from the Sports Writing II class at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga: Abe Avila, Macy Morgan, Logan Nipper and Parker Tuerff