City of Basketball Love (CoBL) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused around the coverage of high school and college basketball in and around Philadelphia. Founded in 2012, the site has become known as one of the top independent sports coverage websites in the entire Northeast, with an award-winning team of correspondents who cover boys, girls, men's and women's hoops in the Delaware Valley year-round.
In addition to its mission to cover amateur basketball as thoroughly as possible, while shining a spotlight on the region's student-athletes, CoBL also serves as a proving ground for young journalists, with over 150 high school and collegiate writers who have honed their skills with the organization over the years. CoBL alumni have gone on to work as journalists and other communications professionals, working for news organizations, professional sports teams, non-profit foundations, and more.
Since 2014, CoBL has also run offseason and in-season events, camps and clinics, helping develop the next generations of ballplayers and helping expose them to high-level instruction and collegiate coaches.
~~~
Relaunch Announcement (June 2, 2021)
When CoBL launched in June 2012, the site was a group of collegiate and high school journalists doing their best to cover the area’s high school and college scene. We were learning on the fly, developing connections and relationships, getting to know the area’s coaches and players — not to mention learning about what types of content our readers wanted, and how we could best serve the local community.
That was Version 1.0.
Our first significant upgrade came in 2015, when we moved from a Wordpress blog onto our current Sports Engine platform. That gave us the ability to host standings and schedules on the site, archive past seasons, create writer pages, and better organize our content. It also helped us greatly as we were starting to run events, including our incredibly successful series of CoBL College Exposure Camps.
That was Version 2.0.
But as much effort as we all put into CoBL over those first six years, we were never quite able to get to where we needed financially in order to be a sustainable business, and after six straight years of working nonstop, in Oct. 2018 I finally hit a wall and shut the site down, reopening in the summer of 2019.
Now, we’re ready for CoBL Version 3.0, and it’s going to be by far the best one yet. And hopefully this is the version that sticks around.
CoBL now operates as City of Basketball Love, a nonprofit corporation incorporated in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on April 26, 2021. CoBL has filed its IRS Form 1023 to seek tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) organization, which it expects to receive in late 2021 or early 2022.
What does this mean? Several things. First, being a nonprofit corporation means our mission and our values can truly align, as CoBL was always an organization built to serve a public benefit rather than generate any sort of revenue for potential investors. It means we’ll be more connected with the community we serve, as well as will rely on support from that community to stick around.
We pledge to be fully transparent with our finances and our expenditures, from how much money our management makes off the site to how much we’re spending on editors, writers, marketing, and more.
It means that those of you who support the site, or anybody who wishes to in the future, will be able to claim your donations as tax deductible when CoBL receives its tax-exempt status from the IRS.
It also means we now have a Board of Directors: editor-in-chief Josh Verlin will serve as the Board’s Executive President, while longtime Philadelphia Daily News scribe Dick Jerardi is our Secretary and our longtime bookkeeper Rachelle Verlin will be our Treasurer; our Directors-At-Large are Andy Edwards, Linda Genther, Karen Healey-Lange, Charles Monroe, Jason Ritter, and Eric Worley.
Our board, whose full biographies can be found here, represent every cross-section of high school and college basketball in Philadelphia and the surrounding area, including South Jersey and Delaware. CoBL will also form an advisory board consisting of regional men’s and women’s high school and college coaches for the purpose of providing feedback to the organization about its coverage and mission.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our days as a boys’ and men’s-only coverage site is over. Former Philadelphia Inquirer writer and current Rowan University journalism professor Kate Harman is joining CoBL as our women’s hoops editor, overseeing coverage that will begin on-site July 1. The goal is to have coverage on the girls’ and women’s side that matches that of the boys and men’s coverage
While we’re smarter, more experienced, more well-rounded and more prepared to cover this area’s hoops scene than ever before, plenty about what made CoBL great in its first iteration will remain.
That includes our events: the CoBL Underclassman Exposure Camps, College Exposure Camps and CoBL Shootout will be returning, as soon as it’s safe to hold them. We were planning on running camps in 2020 before COVID hit, and we’re hoping to hold a couple this fall to benefit the Class of 2022 and 2023.
We’ll still be covering all the spring and summer leagues, the AAU events, the shootouts, and all the offseason happenings that make this region such a fun place to cover grassroots basketball. We’ll get back to our Division III Power Rankings and our postseason awards, the game stories and player features that shine lights on all the different personalities and teams that deserve the attention their forerunners got, even in a changing media landscape.
And we’re going to continue our mission to help educate and train the next generation of sportswriters in and around Philadelphia. We’re already in talks with several area universities about forming partnerships to have their students learn from our staff while getting paid internships and on-the-job learning.
We’re so excited to be back — but to stick around, we’re going to need the help of the Philadelphia basketball community. For-profit journalism is quickly going the way of the dinosaur, and it takes community support to keep sites like ours around and thriving.
There are multiple options if you’d like to support CoBL, so please visit our support page and help us stay around.
CoBL has filed its IRS Form 1023 to obtain 501(c)(3), charitable status. We welcome contributions now — and will be able to provide a charitable contribution acknowledgement once we get our IRS recognition, expected in late 2021 or early 2022.
If fundraising goes well, we’ll be able to expand our coverage into South Jersey and Delaware, covering the entire Delaware Valley region with more stories, features, news, analysis and more than any other news organization around. But we need your help.
I invite you to take a look at our fundraising plan, read about our board of directors, and explore the updated site. Get CoBL back in your bookmarks, and don’t forget to make us a regular stop as you navigate the web.
We can’t wait to see you back in the gym.