Quite frankly, they were unaware of what awaited them.

When delivered to San Francisco’s Cow Palace in the late winter of 1975, none of the Seattle Sounders seemed to know what they’d signed-up for.

“We were just a bunch of guys getting together and taking a trip down to California for a couple games,” recalls Ballan Campeau.

“We thought it was a preseason fitness thing,” David Gillett remembers. “We were clueless.”

So began Seattle’s first foray into the soccer/hockey hybrid now known as indoor or arena soccer, a game first concocted in Chicago during the Fifties. A generation later, during a pair of exhibitions at Philadelphia’s Spectrum featuring Moscow’s Red Army club, eyes were opened to commercial opportunities.

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