Tampa Is Getting a Pro Women's Basketball Team, and It Tried Before
Creative Loafing Tampa Bay reports that Tampa is set to get a professional women's basketball team. The first try was the Tampa Bay Sun of 1980, a team announced with big plans, a 36 game schedule, and a home court that was not finished yet.
Pro women's hoops are coming back to Tampa
Tampa is set to get a professional women's basketball team. Creative Loafing Tampa Bay carried that headline in its October 28 newsletter, with one important piece of context attached: it is not the city's first try at bringing pro hoops to town.
That context matters because Tampa Bay sports fans have seen this movie before, and the first version is a genuinely good story. It starts in the summer of 1980, with a team name revealed on a Wednesday, a schedule already printed, and almost everything else still up in the air.
1980: the Tampa Bay Sun rises, slowly
The first team was the Tampa Bay Sun of the Women's Basketball League. A Tampa Times report from August 15, 1980, republished with the Creative Loafing story, said the franchise had been officially identified as the Sun that week and had released a 36 game schedule, with a league opener set for December 5 against the St. Louis Streak.
The Sun coach was Tom Mosca, a school teacher and basketball coach at Robinson High School, who was set to resign once team owner Bill Byrne arrived to open the team for business. Byrne had a complication no modern expansion owner faces: he founded the league and was still serving as its commissioner in New York, and league matters kept delaying his move to Tampa by weeks.
A team waiting on its building
The hardest problem was the home court. The Sun had confirmed its game dates at the University of South Florida Sun Dome, but construction delays put the 18 home dates at risk, including a four game season opening homestand in December. Backup options under consideration were the St. Petersburg Bayfront Center, Curtis Hixon Hall, and the Hillsborough Community College gym.
Roster building ran on the same clock. The team was negotiating with the ten players it had drafted that June, chasing free agent Liz Silcott, the league second leading scorer at 30.2 points per game with San Francisco, and working on a trade with New Orleans for forward Cindy Brogdon, a University of Tennessee player who had kept her amateur status for the Olympics. Mosca admitted the delays had hurt the team's credibility, and answered it the way coaches do: once we get started, everything should be fine.
What the second try inherits
Read that 1980 clipping today and the lessons write themselves. A team is a schedule, a building, and a roster, and it needs all three locked before the first ticket is sold. The Sun had the schedule first and spent the summer chasing the other two.
Tampa Bay is a different sports town now, with a proven appetite for live events and championship runs across its other teams. A women's pro team arriving with its building, dates, and players settled would start miles ahead of where the Sun started, and would add a new anchor to the local events calendar that this site tracks every week.
- Watch for the new team name and league to be announced
- Watch for the home court, because the building decided the Sun story in 1980
- Watch for opening dates, which belong on every Tampa Bay events calendar
- Watch for local player signings, the fastest route to a hometown crowd
Second tries are a Tampa Bay tradition
Plenty of things this region loves arrived on a second or third attempt. If the new team learns the Sun lessons, building first, roster early, dates locked, Tampa may finally keep the pro women's basketball team it was promised in 1980.
When the first home game lands on the calendar, we will be watching for it.
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