Shawn Windsor

Detroit Free Press

The singing could be heard from blocks away, rising out of the stadium, over the brick walls enclosing it, beyond the railroad tracks hugging its south side, settling over the middle of Hamtramck.

If there were a more inviting sound to a team opening its new home, it’d be hard to imagine. Then again, how to explain what happened at Keyworth Stadium on Friday night?

The soccer. The 7,500 people watching it — yes, 7,500 fans, for an amateur soccer game, crammed around a renovated football field — the American kind.

Smoke plumes wafting. Korean marinated meat sizzling. Kielbasa and kraut waiting for fans lined in Keyworth’s north end, blending in with lines of fans waiting for beer, for hard cider, for Detroit City FC gear, its colors — rouge and yellow — already festooning every corner of this unlikely soccer takeover.

And it was a takeover. Not by the players, so much — Detroit City FC played AFC Ann Arbor, a comparative upstart, to a 1-1 tie. But by the growing interest in this game.

It was beyond even what Detroit City FC’s owners could have fathomed.

“We’re in the middle of Hamtramck,” said Alex Wright, one of the soccer clubs co-owners. “How many people are here for the first time?”

Not that Hamtramck isn’t worth visiting. It’s just not a place in our region that conjures the sporting scene. But boy, was it Friday night.

“I think this surpasses our expectation,” said Wright.

How could it not?

Even by the standard of buzz he and the organization created the past four years filling up the football field at Cass Tech, this was different. Felt different. Looked different.

Not just the view, either, though surely looking at rooftops of homes and the sight of industry and a moving freight train added to the milieu. Were there hipsters? Of course.

But there were strollers, too. And pre-teens. And locals.

Count John Hipple among them. He stood before two massive flat-top grills behind the stadium’s north goal, looking out over the field, the packed stands off to his left and right. He was responsible for the smoked sausages his food tent was serving.

“Unbelievable,” he said.

No, not the sausages, though they smelled heavenly. The scene.

“My jaw was on the ground all night,” he said.

Hipple works for Srodek’s, a nearby restaurant on Hamtramck’s main drag — Joseph Compau. And wasn’t sure what to think when he heard Detroit City FC had approached Srodek’s to see if they wanted to set up shop at the stadium this summer.

It was, after all, soccer.

To be played in what had been a forlorn stadium, before Detroit City FC raised the funds to redouble its crumbling bleachers, reroute its plumbing, paint its rusty railings. That the money came rolling in from the team’s supporter club, and from hundreds of other local investors, should have tipped us off of what was in store Friday night.

Wright had figured they might draw 5,000 to 6,000. Might.

But the standing room only crowd blew that away. And it could’ve been more, but the club had to turn fans away, mostly because the stadium renovations are still ongoing, and some of the bleacher space wasn’t ready. (Keyworth is built to hold 11,000.)

Those empty areas, by the way, were covered with massive rouge and yellow banners, paid for and designed by the supporter club, by fans, as it were.

Fans who chanted and sung all night, who even engaged the family side of the stadium late in the second half.

It was an ideal beginning in almost every way, save for the long lines before the bathrooms, and the T-shirt stand, and the beer tent.

“I’m going to spend the next few days thinking about how to fix everything,” said Wright. “Expectations just got raised.”

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.