A life long friendship of over thirty (30) years between Peter Miller, John McGrenaghan and the late Rudy Zitz launched the effort to create Team Catskill USA in 2003.  Peter Miller and Rudy Zitz provided the hard weather, long distance performers and a white grizzle cock hand picked from Mike Ganus was added to introduce the “Ghost Grizzles”.  The late Chris Peeman hand selected a daughter out of his famous white grizzle “Crystal” and the project of creating a grizzle high performance gene pool was assigned to Rudy and the family began to emerge.

The impact was immediate as 2003 – 2004 and 2005 produced over 80,000 points in major one (1) loft competitions.  Top performers were brought home at auctions, with no expense spared to grow the gene pool.  Cancer struck Rudy in 2004 and after three (3) long years, he finally succumbed on July 14, 2007.  A friendship developed in 2005 with Roy and Laura Necaise and their long time friend Charles Lee out of Mississippi, as Roy began to follow the success of the "Ghost Shadows".