Something has shifted.
We are no longer a football town.
Were we ever? Yes, I think so. For much of the 20th century and into the 21st, football has been the dominant sport here, which was true of most Southern cities. No, we don't have the D-1 devotion of places like Knoxville or Tuscaloosa. We don't have their tailgates or coliseums.
Yet for the longest time, being a sports fan in Chattanooga has primarily meant being a football fan; it was the alpha sport through which we saw ourselves, our values and the world around us.
David CookRead more
* Through storm, rain U.S. Women's National Soccer Team wins a 7-2 blowout * Sold-out crowd set to watch World Cup champs' exhibition match tonight * Are Women's World Cup champs ready to fill Finley Stadium twice? * New York Cosmos B defeat Chattanooga FC, 3-2, win league championship * Chattanooga Football Club defeats Indiana Fire 3-0, will play for national title
Today, our identity is different.
Just look over your shoulder at the last month.
Over a period of three days, nearly 50,000 people traveled to Finley Stadium - a place historically associated with football - to watch three soccer matches.
The first? The Chattanooga FC's playoff game, which drew a crowd of 9,000.
The second? The CFC's championship game, with more than 18,000 fans.
The third? The U.S. Women's National team's friendly game against Costa Rica, which packed the house at more than 20,000.
(What a night. How fabulous is Carli Lloyd? It all seemed biblical: both the storms, and the hallelujah crowds. One woman I know fled the Exodus-like lightning storm, waded to her car, drove home, turned on the TV to see the game had resumed, and got in her car and drove back to the stadium.)
Three days, nearly 50,000 people.
"Chattanooga has become known worldwide as the soccer city of the South," the CFC board declared.
That CFC championship game? There was something in the air that night. Going to the game felt historic in a way, as if the evening was somehow as much social and political as athletic.
Fans that night set national attendance records - us, not New York, not Atlanta - for amateur soccer.
"It was like holding up a mirror," said Krue Brock, co-founder of CFC.
Well said.
I'm not suggesting football's on a fast train out of here; it is still the top sport in the nation, and will remain so for some time. Football, for all its glory and blessings, also has a contagious quality to it: you can't escape it.
But here locally, our home-grown, indigenous sports are not as football-dominant. The sports that are now arising out of our city's athletic culture are far less homogeneous than they once were. To use an investment term: we've diversified.
We are Outside magazine's "Best Town Ever" for a second time. We host an Ironman, full and half. We host the USA Pro Cycling event. A few days ago, columnist Jay Greeson offered this: Let's build a large soccer complex in the heart of downtown.
"The old Wheland Foundry site," he suggested.
It's a brilliant plan.
How about this, too?
X Games Chattanooga.
Since the mid '90s, X Games have been the premier action sports event in the nation. Once in L.A. for 10 years, and now in Austin through 2017, the summer X Games brings an estimated $50 million each year for a host city, quadruple the estimates of hosting an Ironman.
Could we host one here?
"That would be the icing on the cake," said Brent Sanders. "Our goal first is to get the facilities in place to entertain something like that."
Sanders is one of three men behind the Chattanooga Skatepark Project, a nonprofit dedicated to updating our skate-park facilities into some of the finest in the South. Updating our current park while building new ones - Sanders has some top-shelf ideas on what those could look like - would be a one-two punch: more sports for area teens, more attractions for far-away tourists.
"People drive three or four hours to go to skate parks," Sanders said. "If you build it, they will come."
Not just minivan families - or, ahem, mini-Vans families - but top-shelf pros and internationals.
"Once a park like that is built, you would have pros and top riders in the world coming through," Sanders said.
To dream of X Games Chattanooga is more than a daydream about motocross and Tony Hawk; it's to dream of the continued growth of our athletic identity: skaters next to linebackers next to mid-fielders next to mountain bikers next to open-water swimmers, with a welcome place for all the culture-lingo-ethos-politics they each represent.
Men and women.
Girls and guys.
In this widening world of non-traditional Chattanooga sports.
Contact David Cook at dcook@times freepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCookTFP.