Spectator Sports

Charlotte offers more professional sports than any other city from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta. We’re home to the NFL Carolina Panthers, the NBA Charlotte Bobcats, a premier PGA Tour event, NHRA Championship Drag Racing, and three NASCAR races, including the circuit’s All-Star race and the Coca-Cola 600, a Memorial Day weekend tradition that’s among the largest single sporting events in the world.

Outside the major leagues, the Queen City is home to minor league baseball, minor league hockey, USL professional soccer, a Champions Series pro tennis tourney, a professional golf mini tour, and two prominent NCAA Division I basketball teams—the Charlotte 49ers and Davidson Wildcats.

The Queen City has been a sports-crazy town to varying degrees over the years. Flirtations with upstart pro football leagues never took hold, but the Panthers have been widely popular, selling out the vast majority of games since settling into their 73,778-seat palace in 1996. The city’s first big-time sports franchise—the Charlotte Hornets—was the hottest ticket in the NBA for several years. The Hornets set league records for attendance and consecutive sellouts at the now-demolished Charlotte Coliseum and were given a ticker-tape parade and treated as royalty until the ownership group committed a series of blunders and moved the team in the face of waning support. The Bobcats marked the NBA’s return to Charlotte in 2004, but our once-innocent sports psyche was damaged by the Hornets and the city has been slower to warm up to the Bobcats.

Our passion for NASCAR has always run high thanks to annual races at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the migration of most NASCAR team headquarters to areas north and northeast of the city. Given our long and devoted love affair with stock car racing, it was only natural that NASCAR chose Charlotte for the location of its Hall of Fame.

College basketball is another passion in these parts. Alumni and fans of Atlantic Coast Conference schools North Carolina, North Carolina State, Duke, and Wake Forest are everywhere, supporting the nation’s best basketball conference that’s held so many of its tournaments in the Queen City. Before the NCAA Final Four was required to play in domed stadiums, Charlotte hosted the 1994 Final Four, won by Arkansas in an exciting game against Duke. Charlotteans have special traditions for March Madness—televisions are rolled into classrooms and employers often look the other way when office workers are absent during the ACC tournament, and when they fill out their NCAA brackets. While ACC hoops are most prominent, our local teams have plenty of fans and have grabbed their share of the limelight. UNC Charlotte’s unheralded squad made a Cinderella run to the Final Four in 1977, led by future NBA All-Star Cornbread Maxwell, while Davidson embarked upon a storybook run of its own in 2008, reaching the Elite Eight in the NCAA tournament behind the exploits of future NBA lottery pick Stephen Curry.

So, you can say that sports are part of the fabric of life in the Queen City. And that’s something in which we take great pride.

In this chapter you’ll find information for the spectator—from professional and collegiate sports teams to the most popular sporting events in the area. For recreational activities and participant sports, see our Parks and Recreation chapter. Entries are arranged alphabetically by sport. Listings are located in Charlotte unless otherwise noted.