When he signed with the Chattanooga Football Club in 2020, Richard Dixon was pretty stunned by the amount of people worldwide who knew of the former National Premier Soccer League club.
Chattanooga FC was in the process of beginning its professional era and first year in the National Independent Soccer Association at the time. Having been an amateur organization for more than a decade, though, the club was essentially built from the bottom in a grassroots fashion that only further impressed soccer fans and observers even beyond the Scenic City.
Dixon has now been in Chattanooga for three seasons; he came to the city in 2019 to play with the Red Wolves in the USL League One team’s debut season but moved over last year to CFC. One reason he made the switch was a connection to Bill Elliott, Dixon’s college coach at West Florida who was the head coach of CFC from 2012-19 and is now the pro team’s technical director.
“When I first moved to Chattanooga, I was playing on the opposite team, and when I mentioned that I was playing in Chattanooga, many people thought I was talking about CFC because they have witnessed what the team has done over many years in the NPSL,” Dixon said recently. “They had the game with over 18,000 fans, and you don’t see that in amateur soccer.
“To have that support and to be nationally televised, it shows that people are watching as well and people know about the club. Now you go around the country and you mention CFC, everybody knows about the club.”