Philly’s WNBA expansion team is a reward for one man’s lifetime of work

Mel Greenberg, a lifetime Philadelphian, was a proponent of women's basketball coverage long before it became popular.

Mel Greenberg, long known as "The Guru" of women's basketball, covered the sport for The Inquirer for decades.Read moreJessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

Published July 10, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

It will not surprise Mel Greenberg’s many friends across women’s basketball that he was asleep when the WNBA announced Philadelphia’s expansion team earlier this month.

The “Guru” of the sport, as he has long been known, famously was a night owl during his decades at The Inquirer. Though he retired from the paper in 2010, that part of him hasn’t changed much. He didn’t know the league’s announcement was coming, so he woke up to a pile of salutes after it happened 10 a.m. on June 30.

That it surprised Greenberg might surprise those friends, given his importance to the game and to the city that’s been his lifelong home. It certainly struck some people that the WNBA kept the news a tight secret, even advising some media members to show up to a news conference without telling them why until a few hours before.

Nor has there yet been a major public celebration in town, the kind in which the local women’s basketball community could thank Greenberg for his years of spotlighting the sport when far fewer people cared.

Collingswood-born WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert traveled to Toronto, San Francisco, and Portland when they got expansion teams, she but announced the latest newcomers — Cleveland in 2028, Detroit in 2029, and Philadelphia in 2030 — in one news conference in New York.

By the time Philadelphia’s team launches, that will be left in the past. When the first tipoff is finally tossed, either at Xfinity Mobile Arena (the new name of the Wells Fargo Center starting in September) or the new building that’s on the way, the focus will be on the players and games.

Might there also be room for the seeds Greenberg planted? No journalist, no matter the size of their ego (and his isn’t all that big), spends 35 years of 40-plus at The Inquirer on a sport outside the big four without caring a lot about it. And in the 15 years since his departure, he has kept right at it, writing for his own blog (often at his own expense) and a few other sites.

So in the wake of the announcement of the city’s first pro women’s sports team since the Independence soccer team folded in 2011, it was time to turn the tables.

‘The new world is kicking in’

“$250 million, that’s the number I saw” for the expansion fee, Greenberg said. “I remember when $10 million was a big thing. They’ve got three teams doing it, plus what they’re going to have to invest in practice facilities. … The new world is kicking in, so this is the norm.”

There’s a new norm in everyday conversations, too.

“I get in an Uber now and then, and if it’s a longer trip and it’s chitchat, and there’s different things where I’ll mention what I do,” Greenberg said. “In the past, I would not have really gotten to women’s basketball. And as soon as I mention the WNBA, the conversation starts more times than not.”

It even does in another great American cultural barometer.

“Even on bad sports nights elsewhere, you go into sports bars and there are games on,” he said.

It’s been four years since Greenberg’s recognition by the Naismith Hall of Fame capped a grand slam of inductions: the Big 5 in 1992, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association in 2002, the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007, and the biggest one of all in 2021. Greenberg, a Temple grad, also has been honored by other local institutions, the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2018 and his alma mater’s Klein College of Media and Communications in 2019.

Yes, his Big 5 induction, a lifetime-worthy honor, was 33 years ago. At the time, Dawn Staley was a college senior at Virginia. Geno Auriemma was in his seventh of what’s now 40 seasons coaching Connecticut, and the NCAA women’s tournament was only a decade old. Natasha Cloud was born in February of that year, and Kahleah Copper wouldn’t be for another two years.

“I just sent Geno and Harry [Perretta] a joke and said the thing the WNBA [ought to] do is to make sure we’re still around in ’30,” the 78-year-old Northeast Philadelphia native said, and they surely received it. Auriemma, a 71-year-old Norristown product, and Perretta, a 69-year-old Upper Darby native who spent 42 years coaching Villanova, are high up that long list of Greenberg’s acquaintances.

‘Look what you started’

“I’m going to give you a comparison in the worst case, even though you may laugh,” Greenberg said. “It’s Moses looking out over [the promised land]. That’s what it is, I guess, at the moment, until we see where we are.”

The idea that Greenberg won’t be there for the culmination, as Moses wasn’t all those millennia ago, might be hard for his friends to believe. And in that context, five years might not be so long. Expansion teams in many sports have proved the time goes fast.

Nor is it a long span in Greenberg’s story. He still vividly recalls being a student manager for Temple’s men’s team when it won the NIT in 1969 — an era when that was a big deal.

“We had a preseason exhibition or whatever that they weren’t all too happy with,” Greenberg said. “The next day, [Don] Casey is giving a whole speech, [Harry Litwack’s] assistant, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I should keep notes all year and do a book.’ And then I go, ‘No, we’re going to end up in the NCAA Tournament, in the first round and bounced, and that’ll be that.’”

Call it one of the only times he didn’t record history.

Greenberg’s turn to women’s basketball came in 1975, when then-Inquirer sports editor Jay Searcy suggested he should launch what became the first national women’s basketball top 20 poll. It began in the 1976-77 season, and Searcy stayed a staunch backer. So did coaches who voted, including Tennessee legend Pat Summitt.

Not everyone at The Inquirer was as supportive over the years, but Greenberg’s former colleagues now pay a lot more attention than they used to. He said that at a recent party honoring former Inquirer editor Gene Foreman, “you would be surprised how many people were coming up to me saying, ‘Look what you started.’”

Some noted they had checked out the New York Liberty, thanks to their success and relative proximity. Others asked Greenberg when Philadelphia would get a team. It was one of the only questions he couldn’t answer.

For all the stories told and jokes offered in a 30-minute phone call, there also was some advice for the game’s power brokers. That, too, is vintage Greenberg, and those people all bear their share of marks from his pen. (Or these days, the stylus with his ever-present iPad.)

“This is a great opportunity in the next five years knowing that there’s a goal for the local college market to build itself in the anticipation, if they can figure out how to do it right,” he said. “You’re not going to have that [WNBA team] until ’30 at the earliest, but you’ve got all this that’s growing, and we’ve got a mega NCAA event coming in ’27.”

He referred to Xfinity Mobile Arena hosting two of that year’s regional finals in the NCAA women’s tournament. It will be the first time the city hosts a women’s regional since Temple’s Liacouras Center did so in 2011.

A day in his honor

That season will mark the 50th birthday of the poll. Back then, the sport was in the AIAW era, and Immaculata’s dynasty was in its final years.

There are plans afoot to prime the 2027 pump with a nonconference showcase event at the big arena. Greenberg said Connecticut and Notre Dame have informally backed the idea, with the latter giving South Jersey-born star Hannah Hidalgo a homecoming in her senior year. Southern Cal is paying attention too, wanting to give JuJu Watkins another big stage for her senior season. UCLA also is interested.

Staley’s South Carolina team would be another natural fit, of course. So would Maryland with its prestige and big fan base nearby.

“Maybe we have momentum to pull off this [event] one way or another,” Greenberg said. “I think the coaches will all have a little get-together, a nice lunch or whatever somewhere and just figure out the college marketing strategy. And what to do, and how to do it, to just start pumping things sooner rather than later.”

Wherever that lunch ends up being — perhaps at The Pub in Pennsauken, one of Greenberg’s old haunts — he’ll likely keep making those calls until Comcast’s turn comes for the bigger work. But there will be a step left for the rest of us, one fellow Inquirer alumnus Mike Jensen first proposed in these pages in 2021.

Call it the Mel Greenberg Invitational.