FARGO — These are fun times in Frisco, Texas, the Dallas suburb invaded for years by North Dakota State football fans when the Bison made the Football Championship Subdivision title game.
Those days are gone now that the FCS game has moved to Nashville, possibly temporarily and possibly not, and NDSU has moved on to the higher-level Football Bowl Subdivision. Although, as has been relayed in this space, there are two FBS bowl games scheduled for Frisco to which the Bison could be invited.
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Wild Pitch, Bison fans?
World Cup fever is currently engulfing Frisco, which is on par. Toyota Stadium, where NDSU won 10 FCS title games and lost one other, is the home and headquarters of Major League Soccer’s FC Dallas while the area near the stadium off the Dallas North Tollway is soccer practice fields galore.
Frisco was Soccer Central long before it was “Fargo South,” a winter destination for thousands of Bison fans.
It remains so. With the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, a host venue for World Cup games, Frisco is deemed a major hub for the FIFA event. The team from Sweden chose Frisco as its home base, so it is practicing at Toyota Stadium and staying at the nearby Westin Stonebriar Golf Resort and Spa on Legacy Drive near Plano.
Frisco is in the midst of a 39-day celebration of soccer. The downtown plaza area adjacent to the National Soccer Hall of Fame has been remade into a festival area and The Star, the Cowboys’ headquarters down the road, is being used as another festival area with World Cups being shown on the massive outdoor video board near the Ford Center.
Good times.
The same can be said for the city’s political scene.
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A North Dakota State fan says goodbye to Frisco, Texas.
A North Dakota State fan says goodbye to Frisco, Texas.
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Frisco elected a normal human being as its mayor, defeating a right-wing bigot, after months of rancor stirred up by anti-immigrant politicians and influencers.
Mark Hill, a conservative lawyer but by all accounts a “normie” Republican, defeated retired construction company owner Rob Vilhauer, who campaigned on a promise to keep “terrorists” from overtaking Frisco and to prevent local Muslims from implementing Sharia law in the city and state.
Side note: No Muslims have threatened to implement Sharia law in Frisco, nor are there terrorists overtaking the city.
Hill, campaigning as a uniter, won 58% of the vote.
Which means Vilhauer still won 42%, which is scary.
As outlined in this column in April, Frisco found itself in the middle of a battle between traditional Republicans and hard-line right-wingers. The fight came over how the suburb of about 245,000 was growing.
As Bison fans know, Frisco grew at a rapid rate in the last 20 years, going from a quiet farming and railroad community to a bustling and affluent center of commerce, development and sports venues. But as time passed, the city’s population went from being mostly young white families to being diverse. Frisco is now home to a large number of Muslim and South Asian residents. Legal immigrants, to be clear.
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The New York Times says Frisco’s population is about a third Asian, double what it was a decade ago, while the white population has declined to less than half.
That triggered hard right activists to use the city as an example of how white people were “losing” America. They used Frisco on their podcasts, radio shows and blogs.
Vilhauer capitalized, questioning Islam’s status as a religion.
“When they’re coming at us, you can’t tell me that Islam is a religion,” he said in one interview. “It’s a terrorist group.”
For a community that once celebrated its diversity, Vilhauer’s campaign was a shock. But he and Hill emerged from a five-person primary to become the two finalists.
“The terrorists here, the Sharia law folks, they’re hiding under the First Amendment,” Vihauer told the Times. “You have to take a stand somewhere.”
Hill said he wanted to unite the city and warned that continuing down the bigoted, xenophobic path would repel companies and people who wanted to move to Frisco. The city has attracted several corporate headquarters in the past two decades.
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Indicative of how America is split, voters sided either with the country’s history of welcoming immigrants or shunning them to resist change.
“He’s not for all the outside coming in,” said one 76-year-old who voted for Vilhauer, according to the Times. “I want to keep the old way. You can’t go to Sam’s without feeling like you’re in another country.”
And it was such a quiet, friendly place all those times the Bison and their fans made the trip to Frisco. Maybe it will be again.
Mike McFeely
Opinion by Mike McFeely
Mike McFeely is a columnist for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. He began working for The Forum in the 1980s while he was a student studying journalism at Minnesota State University Moorhead. He's been with The Forum full time since 1990, minus a six-year hiatus when he hosted a local radio talk-show.
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