USL PRO Feature
Monday, April 28, 2014
At its launch, Sacramento Republic FC’s motto was ‘On The Map, 2016’, a nod to the club’s aspirations to join the five teams to make the move from USL professional leagues to Major League Soccer.
The club’s inaugural home opener on Saturday night, which drew a USL PRO regular-season record 20,231 fans to Hughes Stadium, certainly put the club on the map in the eyes of local and national media.
“The opener was quite the spectacle. No question,” Sacramento Bee columnist Ailene Voisin wrote. “With a bed of blue and white clouds hovering in the background, 20,231 soccer enthusiasts squeezed into a facility that normally enjoys this amount of activity only on the holiest of nights.”
Republic FC has reported season-ticket sales for its inaugural season of more than 5,500 fans, which certainly would project to more sellout crowds when the club moves into its permanent home at the 8,000-seat Bonney Field. While the final score didn’t go Sacramento’s way, Harrisburg played spoiler with a 2-1 victory, the enthusiasm of the Tower Bridge Battalion wasn’t dampened, a sign of a bright future for the club both this season and beyond.
"To get 20,000 people out here is incredible," forward Adam Jahn, who grew up in Sacramento County and scored Republic FC’s goal on Saturday night, told ABC News 10. "It just shows the following in Sacramento and it's going to be really exciting going forward."
And as it turned out, local and national media weren’t the only ones paying attention.
