The WCL changed its name prior to the 1980 season and has been known since as the South Atlantic League, a Class A circuit with teams up the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to New Jersey.
It featured teams in eight North Carolina locales: Gastonia, Hickory, Lexington, Newton–Conover, Rutherford County, Salisbury, Shelby and Statesville, but soon expanded to sites in South Carolina.
The first professional baseball team based in Monroe, North Carolina came into being when the Statesville Indians moved into town on June 20, 1969 and finished the year as the Monroe Indians.
For nearly 60 years, 1948 through 2007, the WCL/SAL's dominant figure was league founder and president John Henry Moss, who started the WCL as a young man in 1948, refounded it in 1960 and then led it into the new century.
Moss, also the longtime mayor of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, retired at the close of the 2007[1] Sally League season and died, at age 90, on July 1, 2009.