Iwate Grulla Morioka ( Japanese い わ て グ ル ー ジ ャ 盛 岡Iwate Gurūja Morioka ) is a Japanese football club from Morioka in Iwate Prefecture . He has played in the J3 League since 2014 .
The association was founded in 2000 by former students of the Morioka Higher Commercial School and the Morioka-Chūō High School as Villanova Morioka ( ヴ ィ ラ ノ ー バ 盛 岡 , Viranōba Morioka ). Three years later, the "Association to found a J. League team in Morioka" ( J リ ー グ チ ー ム を 盛 岡 に 作 る 会 , J Rīgu chīmu o Morioka ni tsukuru kai ) was created. Shortly thereafter, in February 2004, Villanova was restructured and renamed Grulla Morioka with the intention of advancing to the J. League by 2008 .
Success came quickly. Grulla won the 2nd Division of the Tōhoku Soccer League in the same year and rose to the regional upper house. There the club became the dominant force for the next few years, winning a total of five out of six possible regional championships between 2005 and 2010, but regularly failed in the national regional league finals on promotion to the Japan Football League . In 2011 and 2012, at the regional level, they had to step back into the second tier behind Fukushima United for a short time , before the regional league finals could finally be won at the end of the 2013 season after another league title. This made the leap into paid football, because the winner of the final round was accepted as one of twelve founding teams in the new J3 League . This is remarkable in that new professional teams must have played in the Japan Football League for at least a year beforehand; Grulla is the only team since the introduction of the JFL that has made the leap directly into the professional leagues as a regional league.
Club name
" Grulla " is the Spanish word for crane . This was part of the coat of arms ( Mon ) of the Nambu clan, which ruled Morioka and the surrounding area during the Japanese feudal period for several centuries until the end of the Edo period .
Yasuo Usui
