Panthers Camp Is Gone
Pro Sports in Spartanburg Costs $5 Now

If you grew up in the Upstate, you know the ritual. Every July from 1995 on, the Carolina Panthers loaded the trucks and drove an hour down I-85 to Wofford College, and for a few weeks Spartanburg was an NFL town. You could stand on a berm behind a rope line and watch a professional football team practice — Kerry Collins, Steve Smith, Julius Peppers, Cam Newton, Christian McCaffrey — for the price of showing up. No ticket. No parking pass drama. It was the best free show in South Carolina sports, and it ran for twenty-nine summers.

Search “things to do in Spartanburg” today and a healthy share of the results will still tell you to go. Don’t. There’s nothing behind the rope line anymore.

The Panthers moved training camp to their team headquarters in Charlotte, starting with the 2024 camp. The announcement came in December 2023, and it ended one of the longest team–college training camp partnerships in the NFL — every summer at Wofford from the franchise’s first season in 1995 through 2023, with the lone exception of the locked-down 2020 COVID camp. Wofford’s own farewell headline said it plainly: “End of an era.”

The team’s logic was the modern league’s logic: a purpose-built practice facility, player families at home, control over every variable. Nobody in Spartanburg had to like it, and the economic-impact math stung — for three decades, camp filled hotel rooms and restaurant seats in the dead of summer. But the move is real, it’s permanent, and no amount of listicle inertia brings the rope line back.

Here’s the part the old guides miss, though. By the time the Panthers announced they were leaving, Spartanburg had already broken ground on the answer.

To feel the weight of this, you need one more date: 1994. That’s the year the Spartanburg Phillies played their last season at Duncan Park and affiliated pro baseball left town. For thirty-one years — the entire Panthers-camp era — Spartanburg was a city that watched other cities’ teams. Camp was a loaner. The Panthers always belonged to Charlotte; Spartanburg just got them for July.

On April 15, 2025, that ended. The Hub City Spartanburgers — the Texas Rangers’ High-A affiliate in the South Atlantic League, relocated from Kinston, North Carolina — threw their first pitch at Fifth Third Park, a brand-new 5,000-seat ballpark anchoring the west side of downtown. Not a few borrowed weeks in July: a full April-through-September home schedule, with Rangers prospects on the field and a stadium you can walk to from Morgan Square.

And yes, the name is a burger pun. A minor-league team named the Spartanburgers, in a town whose food identity this site has documented card by card — we could not endorse it harder.

So the honest timeline reads: pro baseball leaves in 1994, the NFL arrives in 1995, the NFL leaves after 2023, pro baseball returns in 2025. Spartanburg spent a single summer — 2024 — without professional sports. The listicles that still mourn the Panthers are grieving over a town that already moved on.

Panthers camp was free, and free is hard to beat. But watch what the Spartanburgers cost, because “nearly free, all season long” beats “free, three weeks a year.”

One honest asterisk, because that’s the house style: berm pricing and fees are what the team charged as of this July, and minor-league pricing drifts — check the Spartanburgers’ own ticket page before you plan around a number.

“Catch Panthers training camp at Wofford in July.” ❌ Dead since December 2023. Camp runs in Charlotte now. Any guide still printing this hasn’t been updated in three seasons.

“Spartanburg hasn’t had pro baseball since the Phillies left in ’94.” ❌ Dead as of April 15, 2025. The Spartanburgers play a full High-A season downtown.

“Duncan Park is where Spartanburg baseball lives.” ⚠️ Half true — the historic 1926 grandstand still hosts amateur and college ball and is worth a pilgrimage, but the pro team plays at Fifth Third Park.

“Spartanburg is a pro sports town.” ✅ Truer than it’s been in decades — and for the first time, the team on the field actually says Spartanburg on the jersey.

The internet has a long memory and a slow update cycle. For years to come, old posts will keep sending visitors to a Wofford practice field where nothing is happening, the same way they keep promising free Disney fireworks from a beach that now checks reservations. Now you know better: the NFL borrowed Spartanburg for twenty-nine summers and gave it back. What the city got instead is its own team, its own downtown ballpark, and the cheapest pro-sports night we’ve found anywhere on this site — $5 grass, free parking after five, and a $20 pizza dinner four blocks from the first-base gate.