When football began in Kearny and therefore soccer in the USA a few names stand out as featuring as players and/or officials or administrators. Amongst them are, of course, the Clarks, the Clarks of Paisley, but there are also Robert Raeburn, the Hoods, James Lennox, Roderick McDonald and, in this case, David Ferguson. He would feature in the Kearny Rangers team for its first two seasons from 1884 as its goal keeper. In the first campaign his club would be knocked out in the first round. In its second it would reach but lose the American Cup final to the holders and local rivals, ONT.

So who was David Ferguson? In fact his origins are clear. He was born in 1860 in Milngavie, his mother originally from Ireland but settled there and his father, a cotton spinner, from Duntocher, with the family living in Waterside by Kirkintilloch. However, by 1870 it, the family, had emigrated to settle in Kearny, David aged ten, so before football took off in Scotland, but as a part of the wider, local Scots community. In 1882 he was to marry Jessie Brown, originally from Neilston and with her have four children, he working at a Machinist. But in the meantime football had arrived in town and he had taken it up, as for at least the two seasons the pioneering man between one of its two main teams' posts.

In fact David Ferguson was to work as a machinist or foreman-machinist, remaining in Kearny for the rest of his life. He would die in the town in 1924 at the age of sixty-four, Sarah outliving him by thirteen years with her death once more locally at seventy-three in 1935.