Brian Crossman

As the crowd kept filing into Finley Stadium last Sunday, it became apparent that the Chattanooga Football Club was on to something.

About one in every five fans in attendance was wearing a Chattanooga FC T-shirt. The line at the beer stand was at least a dozen people long all evening. And there was an obvious connection between the players -- many of whom are from the area or area college programs -- and the supporters in the stands.

Moises Drumond, a CFC forward and the soccer coach at Soddy-Daisy High School, said the city was long overdue for a regional men's team.

"We've needed this for years, and it's just so awesome to have it here and to be a part of it," said Drumond, a former Bryan College star.

More than three weeks after the National Premier Soccer League team made its debut in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 on May 16, Chattanooga FC had even more supporters on hand last Sunday. The announced crowd of 1,307, spirited and supportive from the start, witnessed the team's first win in its inaugural season, a 2-0 victory over the Saturn Futbol Club based in Marietta, Ga.

"There's been an aggressive grass-roots effort to get the word out, and clearly it's working," Chattanooga coach Brian Crossman said.

Sheldon Grizzle played for Crossman at Covenant College and is both a Chattanooga FC player and one of the team's co-founders. Like several of the others, Grizzle had coached teams in the area and believed there was a potential audience for a high-level men's amateur team. But he said he didn't expect the community to embrace the team the way it has.

"You never know what kind of attendance you're going to get or acceptance you'll get, so we really have been blown away by the first two games in terms of attendance," Grizzle said. "We were hoping for maybe 500 at our first games."

Chattanooga FC is in the Southeast Division of the NPSL, which has 25 teams across the country, and Grizzle said his team is leading the league in attendance. Chattanooga FC is 1-2 three games into an eight-game schedule -- it plays at Atlanta FC this Saturday and hosts Rocket City United on June 20 -- and Grizzle said what really impressed him was that the crowd for the second game was larger than that for the debut.

A big reason is the team's online presence. Along with its sharp-looking Web site, ChattanoogaFC.com, the team is hitting both Facebook and Twitter hard to get the word out about its activities. As of Wednesday, the team had 406 followers on Twitter and 1,406 fans on Facebook. By comparison, Major League Soccer, the top league in the United States, has 1,687 Facebook fans.

"Because of that, that viral nature of what we're doing, we can plug in immediately" to the team's supporters, Grizzle said.

Finley Stadium is primarily the home of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga football team. In recent years it hasn't had much activity outside of football season, but stadium executive director Merrill Eckstein, who attended Sunday's game, said he's eager to see it used more often throughout the year.

He said he's been pleased with the turnout for Chattanooga FC's games.

"We've obviously already had some good crowds in here for soccer, and that's been great to see," Eckstein said. "I've been very impressed so far."

Grizzle said the club was assembled pretty quickly -- that the plans really started to come together in late January -- and he and the other founders are making plans for a solid future.

"We want to be really careful about how we grow this thing. It's got a very personal and grass-roots feel, and I think that's one of the big appeals to it," he said. "Obviously we're going to do this next year, and we hope to be here for a long time."