In the past five years, spring football in the United States has produced three professional leagues through four ownership groups and one merger. It has pushed thoughtful rules and new technologies into the football ecosystem. And perhaps more than anything, it has established that St. Louis is a football town. While most of the markets in the XFL, USFL and now UFL have struggled to gain traction in their home stadiums, St. Louis has displayed wildly disproportionate support for its Battlehawks, who came into existence with the renewal of the XFL in 2020. The team has averaged 32,531 fans in 12 games at The Dome at America Center since that season. On an annual basis, the Battlehawks' attendance has stood anywhere between 40% and 70% higher than the rest of the league the team was in. The UFL's average attendance in the seven games not in St. Louis this season has been 9,421. 'It starts with how rabid the fan base is for sports in totality in St. Louis,' said Russ Brandon, the UFL's CEO/president. 'It's just a super vibrant area, and obviously they love football. I always tell the story that my first game there [in 2023], it was a bitter cold morning. We're playing a 3 p.m. game, and I go out for a run at 9 a.m. I hear all this those noise behind the dome and there's 6,000 people tailgating, wearing costumes and with bands and everything else. I was like, 'Wow, we've got something here.' Attendance isn't the only metric of team or league success, but it delivers an important visual cue. Brandon called it 'critical' because 'full buildings drive a lot of other revenues.' Spring football has yet to prove it can sustain itself economically amid the dominance of the NFL, and the significance of the Battlehawks' story is not yet clear. Is it the first sign of a breakthrough, with more markets to follow? Or is it an outlier born from the ashes of the Rams' acrimonious departure? 'You would love to see a lot of the markets duplicate it,' Battlehawks coach Anthony Becht said. 'And it could definitely happen. I will say this is a unique market where something was taken from them. And the fans, actually a lot of them show up just because of that.' Indeed, one of the most consistent features of Battlehawks home games is references -- including T-shirts and handmade signs -- to Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who moved that team from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 2016. In his relocation application, Kroenke criticized St. Louis for a population decline and questioned its economic ability to support major league sports, prompting a legal battle with the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority that ended in a $790 million settlement in 2022. John Lewis, a fan who makes the four-hour drive from Louisville to St. Louis for at least one game per season, said the enmity and motivation is clear for all to see. 'It's a community experience with a shared interest in spring football and a shared hatred of Stan Kroenke,' Lewis said. 'When I talk to some of the old-timers there, they're like, 'We loved the Rams. They did so much for this community, and then they snuck out.' Having a good professional football team in the place where the Rams played is kind of like a middle finger to Stan. It's like, 'We don't need you. Look what we have here.' And it's so much more accessible and cheaper than trying to go to a Rams game.' THE ORIGINS OF SUPPORT are not that simple, of course. When the XFL selected St. Louis as one of its home markets for the 2020 season, it hired Missouri native Kurt Hunzeker as its team president. Hunzeker began marketing the team by showing up at local high school football games, carrying an XFL banner and finding out what local football fans were interested in. One theme became clear. In its history, St. Louis had taken in two NFL franchises, the Cardinals from Chicago in 1960 and the Rams from Los Angeles in 1995, and then seen both depart for new stadiums elsewhere. Football fans in St. Louis wanted a team grounded in the local market. 'It was like there was a missing void,' said Hunzeker, who is now executive vice president of commercial operations for the National Lacrosse League. 'So we honed in pretty quickly on this being St. Louis's first homegrown pro football team, and people took great pride in that. It became theirs rather than an adopted team, so to speak.' The XFL's central leadership, led at the time by commissioner Oliver Luck, recommended that teams market family-friendly experiences at their games. The Battlehawks installed a daycare room and a bounce house in America Center, but they soon removed both after surveying the crowd at their 2020 home opener. They replaced the area with a bar. 'It was absolutely a hardcore football fan base from the start,' Hunzeker said. Some traditions percolated organically. Without much marketing to encourage it, thousands of fans showed up at 7 a.m. to tailgate before a 2 p.m. kickoff. And the now-ubiquitous 'Ka-Kaw' battle cry did not originate from the team but from fans. Hunzeker decided to let it grow, rather than attempt to impose a team-generated slogan, even after consulting with a local bird sanctuary -- where an ornithologist confirmed that the sound actually comes from a crow and not a (Battle)hawk. THE NEW OWNERS of the XFL, who purchased the league out of bankruptcy prior to the 2023 season and then merged it with the USFL in 2024, have worked to maintain the connection despite a significant change in operation. Rather than locate each team in their markets, as the XFL did in 2020, the subsequent leagues have combined all of their teams in a hub location to help manage expenses. The UFL's headquarters is in Arlington, Texas, and its teams travel to local markets on the day before games and then depart immediately after. Each maintains a front office staff in its city. Becht, however, said he marketed his candidacy to be the Battlehawks' head coach in part on his willingness to connect with the community, including offseason visits and frequent posts on social media. The team hosts select fans at walk-through practices the day before home games, and players have served as guest coaches at local high school football clinics. 'We've got to continue to grow St. Louis,' Becht said, 'because if we've got to hold the fort down [in the UFL] for another year and a half or so, that's fine. Because if we could put a good product on the field, that's what I sell on the other end, that we're going to have a good team. And that's my responsibility from a football standpoint. So if we get a good team and a fan base that loves what we're doing, we can kind of correct the schedule and get it on the TV stations and the places that matter, then all those things equal a benefit for our league in a totality standpoint.' The atmosphere at Battlehawks home games gives players a sense of what they could experience if they find their way to the NFL, as many hope to do. 'It's just the energy and the feel, like you actually feel like you're in the [NFL] again,' said Battlehawks quarterback Manny Wilkins, who spent time on the Green Bay Packers' practice squad in 2019. 'You really feel like this is an NFL environment. The fans. The walkout. The intros. Everything, like, it just really feels like such an NFL environment, and the city of St. Louis has been so loving and welcoming and, 'Oh, we have football back here.' You can see the excitement in people's faces, the passion that the fans have.' I would say, for guys that are in this league who maybe get down on themselves or feel like they're not good enough or they haven't gotten their shot or whatever, that's a real taste to motivate somebody to work their ass off to make it to the next level. It's a blessing to be in St. Louis.' CAN IT BE replicated elsewhere? The DC Defenders might be the closest comparison. They've averaged about 14,000 fans per game at Audi Field since the start of the 2020 season, but the facility's capacity of 20,000 makes crowds of that size more intense. Fans have created a tradition of building a 'beer snake' out of empty plastic cups. 'It's about being connected into the community culture within every one of our markets,' Brandon said. 'It's taken time for us, coming out of the [2024] merger, to get the right people in place. But people that represent that brand in the marketplace, it's critical. You see it across minor league baseball where all sports and challenger leagues where you look at, 'Well, the players may not be there all the time and the coaches may not be there all the time, but you have boots on the ground.' Hunzeker had worked in minor league baseball prior to joining the 2020 XFL and brought much of its branding ethos, right down to an idea for a mascot -- Archie B. Hawk -- that the UFL ultimately introduced this season. Players come and go quickly in the minor leagues, but mascots, as silly as they might seem, are 'your identifier and the personification of your brand,' Hunzeker said. 'That's a playbook that can be replicated everywhere,' he added. 'It's being community-centric, community-minded, and focusing on the fan development and fans of all ages. You can have a mascot that can go into elementary schools, and then the other, you can host happy hours in bars. You could do that in Birmingham. You can do that in Memphis, you can do that wherever you want to put potentially future teams. And it can absolutely work.' The UFL has leaned in wherever possible, giving St. Louis an extra home game this season when San Antonio's Alamodome was booked for the NCAA men's college basketball Final Four. But there is no doubt the UFL hopes the rest of its markets can catch up. 'We are trying to find every lever and opportunity to get more people in the buildings,' Brandon said. 'We have a very disciplined approach as we continue to build these markets. And we've been fortunate coming out of the merger to have good markets that we're working on working through with our staffs. But again, it takes time.' ESPN reporter Todd Archer contributed to this story.