I agree with you, that turning Driller Park into a soccer stadium would be "fairly screwball."
But I'd like to start off by pointing out that when civic projects don't happen and other proposals fall by the wayside...... you have to pay the consequences when they fail.
I believe Tulsa would have been chosen for a league-owned team in the original Major League Soccer for 1996 had TU chipped in for a grass field at Skelly ($1mil). Heck, that could eventually have evolved into the downsized Chapman Stadium we see today-- only differences would have been a grass field, wider sidelines for MLS, and it could have turned out alot like Houston's Robertson Stadium, home of Houston's MLS team....
In the mid-90s, the proposed Tulsa Project included a 5,000 seat soccer/track&field stadium, part of mayor Susan Savage's effort to put the city in a position to host several amateur athletics events (remember the natatorium?). At the time, John Klein at the Tulsa World told us it was only a matter of time before MLS would come to Tulsa, and that was one of the reasons citizens were supposed to vote for it..... never mind the fact that a 5k-capacity stadium would have needed to be expanded to 20k before MLS would have considered a team here.......
I do believe, however, if that stadium were built, Tulsa would have had an A-League team (equivalent of USL-1). The Tulsa Project went down to defeat... instead, we got the Tulsa Roughnecks D-3 team in 1997 (equivalent of USL-2)... the team tried playing at four different high school stadiums before biting the dust after the 1999 season.
In 1999, a 5,100-seat "soccer specific stadium" was built, the first of its kind.... not in Tulsa, but in Charleston, SC...
http://www.charlestonbattery.com/stadium_overview.aspIn the mid-90s, Rochester, NY took a different path. They built a new baseball stadium that took into consideration the needs of pro soccer, with angles not as sharp as traditional ballparks....
http://www.ballparkreviews.com/roch/frontier.htmFrontier Field was used for A-league/USL-1 soccer from 1996 - 2005...
Per Game Attendance:
1996 A-League 9,991
1997 USISL A-League 10,677
1998 USISL A-League 11,499
1999 USL A-League 11,551
2000 USL A-League 11,600
2001 USL A-League 10,789
2002 USL A-League 10,008
2003 USL A-League 10,169
2004 USL A-League 10,200
2005 USL First Division 9,791
***Scheduling and setup problems with the AAA-baseball club persisted from early on, and because of such high attendance at a ballpark, Rochester tried for an MLS team by proposing its own stadium... it was built in 2006 at a cost of $35mil, capacity 13,768.
By 2002, Lamar Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs and MLS's KC and Columbus teams, still had faith that Tulsa could get it done, and took city officials (incl LaFortune, Bill Christensen, etc, etc...) to games at Columbus's new soccer stadium and KC's inappropriate NFL venue at Arrowhead.
http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4363In the summer of 2003, the MLS venue was dropped from Vision2025. I figure the city likely came to the conclusion that the soccer stadium could have been used as a "lightening rod" by the political opposition. So, in late 2005, a TIF project was being proposed that would bring a team here....
http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showpost.php?p=6682946&postcount=1It failed, and when the East End project was amended on a smaller scale to include a new ballpark for the Drillers, Mayor Taylor was elected and she systematically ignored the project (according to Tim Kissler), allowing Global Development Partners and Walmart to fight it out.... guess what's there now? Nothing.
In the fall of 2007, the River Tax was defeated. So, any hope of a Tulsa Landing project on the west bank has been shelved, at least for the foreseeable future.
ONEOK Park will not host a pro soccer team, despite their little soccer drawing when it was first proposed.......
I know you probably know most of what I've posted, CF. Just a reminder that our decisions have consequences.