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On CoBL's 13th birthday: our annual update to our readers

06/02/2025, 2:30pm EDT

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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If you’re a long-time reader of City of Basketball Love, then you know that June 2 is always a special day on our calendar. It marks the day where Andy Edwards and I first launched CoBL back in 2012, a date which we mark each year with our annual update on where CoBL is at and where we’re going.

I’m happy to report that as CoBL enters its 14th year of operation, the organization is in as good shape as ever. Our 2024-25 year of coverage was no doubt our best yet from top-to-bottom, and we also fulfilled our duties as a non-profit while ensuring that every dollar we raised was spent on our mission. Personally, I’m also feeling refreshed, after taking a five-year wedding anniversary road trip around the Ohio River Valley, at the end of May, getting to see a part of the country I’d never seen before, and recharging the batteries for the summer and season ahead!

A quick report of how the last 12 months went:

The CoBL staff produced more than 900 stories, or just about 2.5 pieces per day. More than 600 of those came during the season itself (Nov. 1 - March 30), almost four stories per day. Those stories included recruiting notebooks, game coverage, feature stories and analysis; we did our best to balance our coverage 50/50 between the boys and girls, with about 46% of our coverage coming on the girls’ side.

For the first time, CoBL will surpass $200,000 in gross revenue this fiscal year (July 1, 2024-June 30, 2025) including all of our events, donations, merchandise sales, advertisements, and other revenue streams. While we still have one month to go in our fiscal calendar, we’re on the verge of breaking even for the year, meaning every dollar we brought in went right back to our mission of covering local hoops and supporting our area’s amateur youth basketball scene. Half of our gross revenue was spent on coverage and executive salaries; that includes just shy of $50,000 on our stellar group of freelance writers, who really give CoBL the breadth and depth that makes us the go-to source for coverage of the Philadelphia-area high school and college hoops scene.

Additional expenses include our events director, Steph Garafolo, who’s really taken control of running CoBL’s camps and team events over the last year, as well as all of our operating expenses — including facility rentals, camp jerseys, camp workers, insurance, travel, marketing materials, and other related costs.

We will release a financial report following the conclusion of the 2024-25 fiscal year for anybody who wants to see how CoBL operates.

I want to give special thanks to our core group of writers who pour so much into the organization all throughout the year: Owen McCue, Andrew Robinson and Joseph Santoliquito, whose bylines have been all over the website for the last few years, and we hope for years to come. That trio combined to write hundreds of stories this past year, including many of the top pieces on the website, from features to game stories, offseason coverage and more.

Several newcomers this year deserve mention: David Comer has been a fantastic addition for his work in Bucks County and on the small-college landscape, and Matthew Allibone (and more recently Mike Gross) are experienced veterans whose work has been a welcome addition. That’s before we get to the terrific work put in by Dan Arkans, Sean McBryan, Rich Flanagan, Jeff Griffith, Chad Graham and more CoBL veterans who contribute when they can — as well as, of course, our longtime photographer Mark Jordan, who’s logged more games for the site than anybody besides myself.

That combination of a successful 2024-25 as well as a great group of writers on board all leaves me with as positive an outlook for the next 12 months as I can remember for CoBL. We already have plans to continue growing our camps and events into the 2025-26 campaign and beyond, and we’ll be working to grow our fundraising and corporate partnerships with the goal of once again having a second full-time employee.

Of course, none of that happens without your support. Last year, we raised nearly $50,000 from the basketball community to fund our coverage. We need to equal that number this year, and we’re not yet halfway there. To help us push towards our goal and continue our mission, please visit our support page and consider a one-time or monthly donation to City of Basketball Love.

Please keep visiting the site regularly to stay on top of all of our coverage, and we look forward to seeing you all out on the courts this summer and beyond!

Sincerely,

Josh Verlin

Co-Founder, Editor-In-Chief
City of Basketball Love