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Local sportsOn Feb. 1, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football program is hosting a national signing day party at the Finley Stadium Club beginning at 5 p.m.
Finley Stadium will turn 20 years old in October, but the celebrations and reflections can wait.
The 20,668-seat facility soon will experience a February unlike any other.
Two soccer matches in the span of eight days will give Finley Stadium its busiest winter on record. The United States men’s national team is set to play a friendly against Jamaica Feb. 3, and that will be followed on Feb. 11 by a friendly between the Chattanooga Football Club and the Atlanta United FC, which is a Major League Soccer expansion team.
“These are big deals, both of them,” new Finley Stadium board Chairman Gordon Davenport said. “February is our down time, but this is not a down time. This is going to be great for us.”
Finley Stadium Executive Director Paul Smith said about 13,000 tickets had been sold as of press time for the Jamaica match, which will be the final display for the U.S. team before its CONCACAF “Hexagonal” qualifier for the 2018 World Cup against Honduras on March 24. The United States lost its first two qualifying matches in November to Mexico (2-1) and Costa Rica (4-0).
Jurgen Klinsmann was fired as national coach following those two losses and replaced by Bruce Arena.
The U.S. men’s team rarely plays on turf fields, but team officials have been impressed with the turf and sub-surface at Finley. The most obvious concern for the match is the weather unknown, with Chattanooga having gone through a stretch of bitter cold and unseasonable warmth.
“It could be 76 degrees, and it could be 1,” said Tim Kelly, who is a Stadium Corp. board member and has an ownership stake in Chattanooga FC.
The friendly between the Chattanooga FC and Atlanta United, which has a 3 p.m. start, had sold about 2,000 tickets as of press time. Kelly said marketing for the first opportunity to watch Atlanta’s team would spike after the national team’s visit.
Of the first 1,000 tickets sold to that friendly, roughly half were purchased in Chattanooga and the other half in Atlanta.
“We don’t want to be outnumbered,” Kelly said.
Finley Stadium officials are hopeful of having 8,000 or even 10,000 for the Atlanta United visit, and they are setting their sights on a sellout for U.S.-Jamaica. The U.S. women’s team, on the heels of its World Cup championship, routed Costa Rica 7-2 in a friendly before a Finley crowd of 20,535 in August 2015.
That match essentially sold out in a day.
“The men’s team has been playing in larger cities and drawing 5,000 to 10,000 fans,” Smith said. “We’re a crazy soccer town, and they wanted to bring it to a smaller, more intimate market. U.S. Soccer is confident we’ll get to a sellout.”
Said Davenport: “It’s extraordinary.”