After one of its most beloved players suddenly died, the ‘Dadball’ pickup basketball group is fighting to save the gym where they play

As people age, basketball is usually one of the first things that leaves them. Knees grind and ache, while the specter of a blown Achilles haunts every explosive movement.

But after he turned 50, Greg Anderson kept playing, even while it required an elaborate stretching and foam rolling routine that grew nearly as long as the time he would spend on the court. His game was more Mahorn and Rodman than it was Steph Curry, but Anderson also defied athletic convention by getting better as he grew older, developing a reliable hook shot to go alongside his rebounding and enthusiasm for the game.

He was one of the founding members of Dadball, a pickup basketball run in Germantown started a decade ago by a group of new dads. What began as a game of 2-on-2 has grown into a full organized run played three days a week at the Germantown Life Enrichment Center, and a community of men and their families.

Lately, that community has been missing an integral piece. Anderson died in April after suffering cardiac arrest during a Dadball game. The group lost one of its most beloved members, and someone who defined its ethos.

“He was somebody who was there for you when you went through a hard time. That I experienced firsthand. He was just the best kind of person,” said Doron Taussig, one of the original Dadballers.

Before Anderson died, he and other Dadballers were working to raise money to save GLEC. The building is in dire need of repairs and the future of its services is threatened. On Monday, GLEC received a shutoff notice from Peco and could soon close.

While the group uses the space for its basketball gym, GLEC primarily serves as a community center in Germantown and provides transitional housing and other vital supports for over 100 formerly homeless men.

Now, Dadball is committed to honoring Greg Anderson by following through on the fundraising mission he was so dedicated to.

“We’re gonna try and do it in a way that’s faithful and is reflective of Greg. Greg was always putting others first,” said Gary King, another founding player.

Before Dadball had its name or home at GLEC, King was looking for a pickup game. It was the fall of 2013, and he had just moved to Philadelphia from Los Angeles with his wife and nearly 1-year-old daughter. He was searching for a regular pickup game like he had in L.A., and found a handful of guys to play on the outdoor courts at Allens Lane Park in West Mount Airy, including Anderson.

They kept playing through the winter even while the temperature dropped below when your fingers can fully grip the ball, and they needed snow and leaf blowers to clear the courts when nature rose against them. Taussig joined a few months later, and the group began to grow into a miniature institution.

“It was such a blast. A lot of us were new fathers at that point, and it was really fun to go out and play basketball,” Taussig said.

Taussig went looking for an indoor court for the group, and discovered GLEC. While most other gyms would have charged significant fees or required complicated group insurance, GLEC welcomed them in on Sunday mornings in exchange for $5 per player and some signed waivers.

Taussig joined the GLEC board a few years ago, and joked that he came back from the bathroom once at a meeting and was told he was now its chair. He asked the Dadballers if anyone would join the board to help him out, and Anderson raised his hand.

Lyn Kuebler, CEO of GLEC, claims to have come up with the Dadball name. She remembers often coming into the center before church to finish up work for the coming week, and seeing the men play while a group of children in their pajamas sat on the benches.

“It’s just the cutest thing,” she said. “I’m saying, ‘Wow, these are some really wise women. They’ve like sent all the kids with the dad so they could get a Sunday morning to themselves,’ and I started calling it Dadball.”

Since the 2-on-2 days, the group has grown to the point where email sign-ups are limited to the first 15 players who snag a spot. But the competitive — yet not overly serious — spirit has remained.

Being a dad, or over the age of 30, is not a prerequisite to play, though most of the regulars are both. Some moms and kids have even played over the years. The real requirement is being willing to play competitive hoops, no matter your athletic ability, while keeping arguments and trash talk to a minimum.

“Dadball has a really great balance of people [who] are trying really hard and playing hard but also not getting too vicious about whether or not they’re winning, and a fairly limited amount of cheating,” Taussig said.

A few years ago, one of the Dadballers took it upon himself to start filming the pickup games and uploading them to YouTube so players or their families could watch later. The playback is a humble reminder of the state of their game; a player’s in-game blunder can get turned into GIFs for the group’s text thread. Once, a random person from upstate New York commented on a video to check them:

“It was like, ‘4:42, that’s a travel’,” Taussig said.

While Dadball has built a unique community, it all starts with a shared love for hoops.

“Number one, it’s about basketball. Everybody that plays is a lover of the game, and the way that playing the game should feel. … We’re not as good as we used to be. We have jobs, and we have families and kids, but we still love the game,” King said.

Basketball was the entry point for the guys to talk about their lives after sessions over a beer, or meet up at the major Halloween party that Anderson and his wife, Melanie Anderson, threw every year.

She said that after her husband died, she worried that Dadball and its community might not continue.

“Oh, God, are these guys gonna stop playing Dadball? Because that’s not what Greg would want,” she said.

He was an extroverted, curious, intelligent person who could talk to nearly anyone about anything, Melanie Anderson said, from sports to Star Wars and politics in equal measure.

“So many men have told me just amazing things about how they always felt like they could be who they were with him, or some two different men told me on separate occasions, ‘He was the model of fatherhood to me’ … a constant theme and how people talk about him is really that he made them feel safe,” she said.

One thing in particular that she loved about him is how he wasn’t very good at basketball. He never played in any formal setting, “but what I loved about him is that his ego didn’t get in the way of that. He was like, ‘I don’t care. It’s good exercise, I get to be with people I like, and it’s a good time,’” she said.

On the night he died, Dadball did what it could to help Melanie Anderson and their family. Taussig stayed with the Anderson kids when Melanie Anderson went to the hospital, and another Dadballer came from home and stayed with her through resuscitation efforts.

In the days since, they have given the kids rides from school and activities and shown up to support Melanie Anderson. She wrote a letter to the Dadballers saying they had better not stop playing.

“I feel very taken care of in how this all happened. … Those guys were there and some of them were in the ER with me, which is also really special. … I wasn’t alone in it,” she said.

Ten days after Greg Anderson died, Dadball met for its first pickup run without him. The men planned to hold a moment of silence for him before they started playing, and at the last minute, Taussig texted Melanie Anderson asking if she was interested in joining.

She came, alongside all of Greg Anderson’s family from Nebraska and Alaska who were still in town. It turned into an improvised memorial, with Dadballers and siblings alike trading stories about the man they all loved.

“I think everyone getting to be together and sort of reminisce about Greg was really helpful on both sides,” Melanie Anderson said. She and her husband’s siblings and parents stayed to watch the games and see firsthand this institution that mattered so much to him.

“Which to me really felt like a sort of permission,” Taussig said.

And now, Melanie Anderson still goes back to the GLEC. Greg Anderson was a secretary on the center’s board and, like the rest of Dadball, came to feel like part of its community, not just a passive user of its space.

“I like to be in the room that he took his last breath in,” she said. “That feels right to me.”

It is unclear how much longer GLEC will be able to stay open without an influx of money.

While GLEC offers an assortment of programs to serve community members of different ages and backgrounds, those who would suffer the most from its closure are the formerly homeless men living in GLEC’s transitional housing program. They come referred by the Philadelphia Office of Homeless Services or through the Philadelphia Housing Authority’s Section 8 program.

GLEC provides an individual unit, with a communal bathroom and cafeteria, as well as a number of services to help the men progress into their own homes.

“The first question we’re trying to figure out is ‘Why are you unhoused?’” Kuebler said. The answer could be anything from needing mental health or alcohol treatment to lacking the proper identification and birth certificates necessary to get decent jobs. Later, GLEC may support the men by paying for job certification courses, getting them suits for interviews, or finding employers who are willing to give them a chance.

While some men stay indefinitely at GLEC, most transition to standard housing within a year.

" We help them move to whatever the next level is, even if it means we’re losing a tenant to do it," Kuebler said.

This housing and support are essential for these men. When Vern Boone came to GLEC looking for help several years ago, he was in a rough place. He had remained clean from drug use for over 15 years at that point, but worried about relapsing after the deaths of his wife and daughter. GLEC took him in, and he has stayed sober with their support.

“I’m grateful for this place, because if it wasn’t for this place, I’d still be in the same situation,“ he said in a testimonial video about his experience at GLEC.

“If you’re somebody who’s lost your way, there’s people in here that will help you find your way,” said Justin Sanders, a former resident who came to GLEC through a homeless shelter and then moved on to senior housing, in another testimonial video. He said he would be coming back to the program to help other men make the same transition out. “You’re here to get yourself together … we need more places like this,” he said.

GLEC’s building opened in 1922 and has not received any major renovations since the 1990s. Its needs are more than aesthetic — Kuebler said it was clear that an overhaul was needed for foundational heating and cooling systems when she started working there in 2010.

The center was barely getting by, and then the pandemic struck. Membership and childcare participation have not recovered, and maintenance costs have risen.

“If we were operating on duct tape and a prayer before, I’ve run out of duct tape and now I have prayers,” Kuebler said.

The needs are large enough that Dadball and Kuebler are raising money first to hire a development director, who would run further fundraising efforts and manage grants to keep the building open in the short term, and eventually finance the larger renovations necessary to sustain GLEC’s future.

Taussig said he hopes they can raise $100,000 by the end of the year for the development director.

“We want to find a way to not just keep this place open, but actually turn it into the really amazing community resource that it could be if it got what it needed,” he said.

GLEC is hosting a fundraising event on Tuesday at Awbury Arboretum and is accepting donations online. The Dadball kids and families will also be setting up stands across Northwest Philly this weekend, selling lemonade, snacks, and bracelets to help GLEC.

But the center has bargained itself some time. After Peco told GLEC that it would shut off utilities by the end of this week, it agreed to work with the center on a credit plan while it seeks more funding.

It’s unclear what will happen to Dadball if the lights do shut off in the gym, but even in the darkness, the space will carry the group’s mark. The GLEC board recently voted that in the near future, the gym will be renamed after Greg Anderson.