The pitch at Hicks Park ain’t perfect.
But on April 5th, 2023, as fans and friends rolled into the lot off South Mingo Road and squeaked open their lawn chairs, it became ground-zero of American soccer romance. As a soft Oklahoma sunset bathed the scene in somber golds, those good folks all stood witness to the essence and promise of the Open Cup.
“Teams come here and kick at the dirt and you can tell they’re wondering, what’s up with this place?” said Aaron Ugbah, in his fifth year with Tulsa Athletic, the amateurs who’ve called Hicks home since 2016. “Yeah Hicks is rough, unique I’d call it. But the field is a rectangle and the ball is round, right?”
The ratio of grass to dirt at Hicks changes depending on the time of year. But for an amateur club who rely on steady pitch-in from fans and community members to keep the lights on and the good times going, you’d expect some bumps.
The opponents on that fateful April day in 2023 were crosstown pros FC Tulsa and the dust whipped around the fading daylight in tiny whirlwinds before kick-off. Those mini tornadoes might have been warnings of things to come for the visitors, members of the Division USL Championship, who found themselves on the wrong end of a 1-0 loss – a Cupset for the ages.
There’s a tangible swell of pride among the fans of Tulsa Athletic. The players too, like Ugbah, a forward who finds time to train around long days building the custom ladders used by airplane mechanics.
No one’s prouder of what the club’s become than Sonny Dalesandro. A former goalkeeper who nipped at the edges of the pro game, he’s a well-known restaurateur and the founder-owner of Tulsa Athletic.
“My dad grills the sausages on game day and my mom takes tickets at the gate,” laughed the 47-year-old Dalesandro, who’ll talk at length about Hicks Park, home of the club he started with partner Dr. Tommy Kern back in 2005 under the name Boston Avenue Athletic Club. “This is a community club – you come out on a Sunday, bring some beers, sit under a shade tree – and maybe help out where you can.”
Dalesandro out mowing the grass on the morning of a gameday, a cloud of dust kicked up around his noisy machine, has become part of club lore. He never tires of telling the stories, like when he was helping spray weed-killer on the field before realizing he needed to be across town, at the restaurant he owns, Dalesandro’s, in an apron “on the line grilling swordfish.”
Like any good restaurateur, there’s a generous dash of the hustler about Dalesandro. Sprinkled with a good helping of charm, though, you don’t mind being led on a merry dance by the man whose major concern is making a “blueprint for smaller clubs in smaller communities” and “being a club that helps grow the game.”
“You won’t see too many team owners out there cutting the grass on the field so it’s ready to go for game time,” said the soft-spoken Titus Grant, a talented Tulsa Athletic midfielder out of Seattle Pacific University who, at the time of the big FC Tulsa Cupset of 2023, taught at a school for adults with disabilities.
When FC Tulsa’s players arrived at Hicks Park for their Open Cup Second Rounder in 2023, it was just another game. They’re paid pros after all. But for Athletic’s players, it was something more. It was a do-over. They’d been beaten by that same team in the previous year’s Open Cup and admitted to being, as Ugbah described it: intimidated by the fireworks and a little star-struck” in the 2-1 loss.
Grant described the 2023 rematch as “a chance to show them what we’re about.”
And where they live too.
When the final whistle went on an historic 1-0 win for the amateurs, the smiles of the fans and players, family and friends and fellows in a cause, were the kind that never truly wash off.
Something will hang there forever, in the air over Hicks Park.
It hasn’t been plain sailing for Tulsa Athletic from the beginning. What started as a Sunday League team to “play and go get some beers and hang out,” turned into a success. By accident. “We kept getting promoted,” Dalesandro laughed about the team’s early climb in the local men’s leagues. And, sniffing out an opportunity, he decided to roll with it.
He rented the former home of minor-league baseball team the Tulsa Drillers and somehow got 4000 people out to Athletic’s opening game in the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) in 2013.
There was a road to becoming a pro club and Dalesandro is nothing if not aware of the possibilities. After a big local media push and launch, the team pulled thousands of fans per game in their first season under the name Tulsa Athletic. But it all turned to dust when FC Tulsa, the very team the Athletic boys beat in that famous 2023 Open Cup Second Rounder – and who they’ll meet again in this year’s First Round, rolled into town and filled up the lanes with big investment and big plans.
Dalesandro was “blindsided” and it led to inevitable talk of “should we keep doing it?”
Maybe it was stubbornness or, as Dalesandro himself suspects, a benign kind of mid-life crisis. But he kept going even when, in 2016, USA BMX wanted to move to Tulsa. And more specifically, wanted the land Athletic's then home field sat on to build a headquarters and hall of fame.
“That was a normal time to stop,” Dalesandro said. “But we just thought, f@#k it.”
It was then that the Tulsa Parks Department approached with an idea.
A beat-up, run down old baseball field in a rough part of town needed someone to love it and make it into a home. Something of use. “It almost felt like fate,” for Dalesandro. “The old NASL team [the Roughnecks of the 1970s and 80s] used to train here.”
“I mean, Johan Cruyff played there!” enthused Dalesandro, who’s old enough to remember. That was Athletic Community Field at Hicks Park. And the rest is history.
The fans and owners and players (there’s no real use messing with normal distinctions at this club) went to work getting the field ready. “We tore down a huge old baseball backstop and left part of it up as a top rail like at a lower-level English club,” said Dalesandro, a self described “soccer meganerd” who was energized by the few years he spent in England as a younger man.
The field is still the spiritual home of Tulsa Athletic. The club switched leagues to the UPSL after being suspended by NPSL for the 2024 season – leaving the club unable to defend their 2023 national title. They’ve since moved on to a brand-new The League for Clubs (Note: they competed in this year’s 2025 Open Cup Qualifying Rounds as members of the United Premier Soccer League – UPSL).
“You don’t have to spend a million dollars,” Dalesandro said, proud of his modular locker rooms made from old shipping containers and painted in the club’s loud green with yellow pinstripes. “There’s a way to do it in this country. To be nimble and a part of a neighborhood.”
It’s no surprise that Dalesandro calls the 1-0 win over FC Tulsa back in 2023 “a magical evening.” It was that and more for his team. “It was one of the best nights in my soccer life,” said Ugbah, on the phone from his work, the sound of air wrenches whizzing through the phone line. “A little amateur club knocking off the pros from our own town.
“You saw how they stormed the field after,” he said of those fans, many who’d put their backs into getting the field ready through the years. “You see what it meant to them. They’re a huge part of what we did.”
Aboubakr Diallo didn’t have the words to describe that night. “It’s still quite unbelievable,” smiled the man, originally from Gabon, in his thick West African accent. “I kept calling my parents. I just wanted to reach out to someone so that they could tell me it was real. That we really did what we did.”
After the celebrations and the selfies, the afterglow with the dry earth of Hicks Park kicking up around them like gold dust, Dalesandro had all the boys over to the restaurant for a tradition going back to the very start of the club. “Three points and a shot [of scotch whiskey],” he laughed. “It’s part of the lore – but I’m pretty sure none of these young guys really like to drink scotch.”
That famous win opened another door – it’s what the Open Cup is built on. In the 2023 Open Cup’s Third Round, Tulsa Athletic – the amateurs from Oklahoma – strolled into Children's Mercy Park to take on four-time Open Cup Champions (and 2024 Runners-up) Sporting Kansas City of MLS.
The stadium is a 18,467-seat modern wonder which cost just shy of $241 million to build – and it hosted the 2017 Open Cup Final. It will also be a practice facility for World Cup teams in 2026 — and it was a world away from Hicks Park. “We went there with belief,” said Grant, quiet and mild-mannered, before the Dream ended in a resectable 0-3 loss. “To go and show them who we are.”
Who they were – and still are – is Tulsa Athletic. They’re a beacon, a rebuke to all who’d throw their hands up and toss in the towel. And they’re back in Open Cup action on Tuesday, March 18 against a familiar and fancied foe who they’ve bested once before and believe, without question, that they can do so again.
Jonah Fontela is editor-in-chief of usopencup.com. Follow him at @jonahfontela on X/Twitter.