New pro basketball league footprint will include area cities

Yakima will field a team in the fledgling North American Premier Basketball League (NAPB) meaning the newest professional basketball league will have at least two Northwest cities in its footprint when the circuit begins play in January, and another closer to Seattle could be announced soon.

Yakima, where the SunKings once dominated the old Continental Basketball Association, will field a team, joining six other cities ranging from Vancouver, B.C., to Albany and Rochester, NY that will have teams in the new league.

David Magley, a one-time basketball academic all-American at Kansas who has been traveling the country nonstop for the past few months seeking to create the new league by selling a mix of memories and opportunity, made the announcement of the Yakima ownership Tuesday. And he says he may soon have an owner in a city that could assuage some of the Seattle area's hunger for professional men's basketball pending the likely return of the NBA to Seattle somewhere in the future.

The team will be owned by Yakima businessman and orchardist Jaime Campos, who quickly announced a major coup with the landing of Paul Woolpert as Coach and General Manager, bringing home the coach who landed three of Yakima's five CBA titles while becoming the fifth winningest coach in the CBA.

Magley's presentation, being capitalized on in the 60 cities around the country that once had professional basketball teams, including a few that are former NBA cities, is apparently having an impact since in addition to the seven, possibly eight, that begin play in January, Magley has a half dozen others queuing up to join in 2019.

The lineup of cities for the launch of the league, in addition to Yakima, includes former NBA cities Vancouver, Kansas City and Rochester, NY, plus Albany, NY, Akron, OH, Owensboro, KY.

Albany and Yakima were once leading teams in the CBA, with both cities producing large crowds and healthy profits for the teams, before the impact of the Great Recession drove the league to cease operations in 2009. Thus the names Patroons, which the Albany team carried for more than three decades, and the SunKings, which Yakima's CBA carried during its existence, will be resurrected.

Magley, 56, was commissioner of the National Basketball League of Canada until a year ago and says the idea of a new pro basketball league began taking shape in early summer when he began searching for a partner and began pursuing potential ownership in various cities across the country and Canada.

Unique to this league is the fact that players will be expected to spend time with kids and in, which, with the pervasiveness of social media are expected to bring the teams close to their communities.

Campos says he was attracted to owning the Yakima team partly by Magley's explaining that the league's emphasis on "community impact" will have its players active in the school systems delivering messages about self-worth, anti-bullying, dangers of drugs and alcohol and value of staying in school.

The way Campo, 41, whose electrical contracting company is his primary business, put it: "I wanted to do something for kids in the community and that's not a cliché."
"I hope not to lose too much money as we get this thing going," he added. "The in four or five years we can put together a competitive team."

Campos added that if things go well, he might want to have two teams in Northern Mexico in 2019, which Magley notes would give the league a true North American footprint with teams from Canada to Mexico since several Canadian cities have expressed interest in having a team for the 2019 season.