New Jersey Xtreme?

[ml91]

**********

[Fran]

Here's an article about it being official


Indoor football coming back to Meadowlands

STEVE STRUNSKY

Associated Press


NEWARK, N.J. - Call them the Xanadu Xtreme.

Staten Island's Xtreme indoor football team is planning to move into the Continental Airlines Arena even as New Jersey's professional basketball and hockey teams prepare to vacate the facility, state and team officials said Monday.

The National Indoor Football League New Jersey Xtreme will occupy the Continental Airlines Arena in 2005, two years before the NBA's New Jersey Nets and hockey's New Jersey Devils plan to move out, officials said.

"We will be playing in 2005," said H.P. Paterson, the Xtreme's executive vice president and director of football operations.

The Xtreme would also be the first team to play within the planned $1.4 billion Xanadu sports and entertainment complex, which is to surround the aging Continental arena with shops, restaurants, an indoor ski slope, minor league baseball stadium and other attractions.

The Mills Corporation, Xanadu's developer, did not immediately return calls.

The Xtreme would be the second New Jersey franchise for the six-year-old, 28-team NIFL, whose teams play a condensed, rough-and-tumble version of the NFL game on fields about half the length and width.

Last spring, the Atlantic City CardSharks became the league's first New Jersey team. However, the Cardsharks may exercise their right to sit out a season in 2005 after poor attendance marred the team's inaugural season in 2004, said NIFL President Carolyn Shiver.

Shiver said the Xtreme played for one year in a 2,500-seat ice rink on Staten Island, intended to be a temporary location. But, she said, the team left after plans to build a bigger arena stalled.

The CardSharks were not New Jersey's first indoor football team, and the Xtreme will not be the first to play at the Continental Arena. For several years the arena was home to the New Jersey Gladiators of the Arena Football League, an NIFL rival league.

But the Gladiators left for Las Vegas after the 2002 season following years of such meager attendance that the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority stopped charging the team rent.

"It was not good," George Zoffinger, the sports authority president, said of the Gladiators' attendance.

Zoffinger said the Xtreme's lease guarantees the sports authority a profit. Lease details would be made public on Thursday, he said.

"There is no question that the facility is the right kind of facility," Zoffinger said. "The real question is going to be, can they create the excitement?"

[mikehuey]

the team has done what it needed to do "FIRE" that bad coach who came to SI from the Bluecats. All he did was make a fool out of the team by brining in rejects from the old teams he was with. Lets hire a real coach and do this right.