Tag Archives: Husky Stadium

Know Your History, NW Collegiate Soccer, Seattle Pacific University, Washington Huskies

Live, Coast to coast

It was a big game, for sure. A chance for the Little School by the Canal to once again burnish its image as a collegiate soccer upstart. Oh, yeah, and have witnesses coast-to-coast.

Such was the set-up 40 years ago, when Seattle Pacific met Southern Illinois-Edwardsville in the second game of the 1979 season. The Falcons were defending NCAA Division II champion and SIUE arrived in Seattle ranked No. 4 in all the land, having reached the Div. I quarterfinals the previous season. And a new cable network, hungry for live content, saw fit to televise it.

SPU coach Cliff McCrath, left, next to opening goal-scorer Mark Metzger.

The yellowed newspaper clippings reference the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Before long, it would become known by its acronym, ESPN.

“We were told, and we believe it was the first soccer game televised by ESPN,” says Cliff McCrath, the legendary SPU coach. ESPN had only been on the air for four days by September 11. Cable TV was relatively new and not available in many neighborhoods in Seattle, so in some ways the broadcast was no big deal at the time.

Only 20 million U.S. homes had cable at the time, and just 1 million carried ESPN. In Puget Sound, Viacom and Teleprompter cable systems served 73,000 homes, though not all had – or were aware that they had – the new all-sports station whose first live game broadcast was from the Slow-Pitch Softball World Series.

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Cascadia, Early Days, Know Your History

Soccer in Puget Sound: It’s Rarely a Holiday

If your idea of a perfect winter holiday is to while away the hours watching live top-class soccer, you best not live near Seattle.

Among native Puget Sounders, perhaps only octogenarians can speak of such an experience in their lifetime. As we take a view to scores of frigid, rain-swept Premier League matches pressed into a cramped calendar, we can only surmise that long ago someone came to their senses and simply said, No more.

Most state league games through 1920 were played on playfields with little grass and no seating for spectators, who ringed the pitch.

Who knows, someday MLS may conform to the FIFA time table. But a look back at the last century or so illustrates why playing through the winter is problematic in Cascadia and downright impossible in the majority of MLS markets. New Year’s Day 2018 forecasts 12 of those cities mired in sub-freezing temperatures. Montreal’s high is predicted to reach minus-6 degrees F.

But enough about MLS. This is more a story of the hardened souls (masochists, some might say) in Seattle’s long-ago past who truly played for the love of the game and the sense of community it fosters, and did so in some of the most trying of circumstances. This is a tale of how and why our forefathers once tread the less-than-firma terra during the short, bleak and, yes, festive days of winter.

Holiday Bonus: Another Play Date

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