Yes, Evelyn Greer Magley is married to a former KU basketball player, and the sport has been a large part of her life for the better part of their 44 years together. But no, she did not expect to become a trailblazer in basketball herself.
“It’s not like I sat around and said, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to own a men’s professional basketball league,’” says Magley, d’81, d’81, who in 2018 founded The Basketball League (TBL) and is the first Black woman to own a male professional sports league. “I mean, never. It wasn’t something that was on my radar.”
TBL originated from an unlikely place: Magley’s bathroom floor, where she retreated one night, “bawling my eyes out because of different things that were going on in our lives personally.”
To hear her tell it, she talked to God on that bathroom floor: “And I was just really crying out to Him, and I was in a bad place,” she says. “And I heard a very still voice that said, ‘Why are you crying?’” And then, “‘Do you trust Me?’” From there, Magley says, the idea came to start her own basketball league.
She resisted: “‘Start my own league?’ I said. ‘But I’m a retired music teacher!’” The directive didn’t waver. She ran to wake up her husband, David, c’82, a former commissioner of the National Basketball League of Canada. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“It’s a God-given vision,” Magley says of TBL’s roots. “It is simply using the game of basketball to show love to community.”
The initial vision in those early ideating hours was to “go out into communities, we’ll see the basketball players as being a real person and not just an athlete,” Magley remembers. “We’ll be able to teach life skills.” She and David stayed up until 5 a.m. “I can’t even describe it,” Magley says. “I was so wired.”
From there, she went to the bank with “$20 and a vision.” TBL began with eight teams. Today, seven years since its launch, TBL has 35 teams across the U.S. and Canada, as well as another league, the Basketball Super League, which has a separate season from TBL’s.
“It is a league that offers opportunities for communities that don’t have a pro basketball team in their community,” explains Magley, who is also the league’s CEO. “And the communities that we’re in, our teams are literally community assets. We’re not the NBA, and we’re not trying to be the NBA. We’re boots on concrete. We are grassroots basketball.”
TBL’s footprint extends coast to coast, with teams based in cities including Halifax, Nova Scotia; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Enid, Oklahoma; Great Falls, Montana; and Long Beach, California.
TBL, at present, is all male. Athletes get paid, and “they get an opportunity to play at the highest level below the G League in America,” Magley adds. In addition to the players, the league creates jobs for numerous other community members, from dancers to statisticians to hospitality workers.
“You have a platform that the community can come together, show their gifts and their talents and their strengths, and bring something to a community that they can participate in and also reap the rewards financially by having streams of revenue that are now going to come into that community,” Magley says.
TBL is headquartered in Indianapolis—where David was Indiana Mr. Basketball in 1978—and Magley knows she’s “definitely in a man’s world in this sport of basketball, being that it’s a men’s pro league,” she says. “And it’s been a real experience.”
Magley is from the Rosedale neighborhood in Kansas City and studied music therapy and music education at KU before becoming a music teacher. Looking back on her KU years, Magley says she “learned music therapy, and I learned a lot about teaching and people and life.”
“When I went to the University of Kansas, it was one of the most remarkable experiences that I think I could have had,” she says. She points to KU’s international population and getting to meet people from so many cultures as a turning point for her.
Among those welcome connections was David, whom she met on a blind date. At the time, he hadn’t firmly committed to playing basketball at KU and was being recruited by other schools. But he went home to Indiana after that blind date and told his brother that, while he still didn’t know where he was going to school, “I know I just met my wife.” David chose KU, he and Evelyn began dating, and they married right before his senior year.
David is now president of TBL, and the league has a staff of five. Magley says she sees TBL expanding beyond the U.S. and Canada, and eventually adding women’s basketball too.
“You have to have a passion,” Magley says of what keeps her going in her work. “You have to believe; you have to have a reason. For me, that reason has to be beyond me, because if this were about me, I would’ve given up a long time ago.”
“It’s hard, it’s difficult,” she continues, “because you’re going to have to sacrifice a lot of yourself to meet what is required to touch and change lives. You can’t just be about yourself.”
TBL’s tagline is “Where the Spirit of the game lives”—with the “s” on spirit intentionally capitalized, hearkening back to the league’s tear-soaked, bathroom-floor beginning. The motto continues to drive Magley today. “The spirit of the game lives,” she says, “and the spirit of the game is love.”
Rachel Burchfield Appling, j’09, is a freelance writer who contributes regularly to InStyle, Harper’s Bazaar and Forbes.
