Skyhawks

Ask a resident of Raleigh in early 1991 what to call the new football team, and the answer came back from a ballot: Skyhawks beat out Daredevils and Rogues, a nod to the Wright brothers' flights along the Outer Banks rather than to anything the club had yet done on a field. It had done nothing yet, because it did not exist until that year.

The Raleigh–Durham Skyhawks were one of ten founding members of the World League of American Football, the NFL-backed venture that tried to plant the sport outside the United States as much as inside it. Their entry in the North American East division lasted a single season. Ten games, ten losses, last place. No coach steadied the roster into a winning week, and no player's name survives the one campaign long enough to be remembered for a run or a catch.

Home games were played at Carter–Finley Stadium, a ground built for well over 50,000 that dwarfed whatever crowds a 0–10 team could draw. Red, Kelly Green, black and white were the colours issued for a season that turned out to be the only one. When the league retooled for 1992, the Raleigh–Durham slot did not survive the redraft; the franchise reappeared as the Ohio Glory, playing under a different name in a different state.

Nothing about the Skyhawks continues now. The team folded with the season, the stadium moved on to other tenants, and the ballot that gave Raleigh its Skyhawks decided a name for a club that would carry it for less than a year.