Earlier this month, the Jacksonville-based women’s professional basketball league Upshot (stylized all-caps) announced that it will be awarding an expansion franchise to the city of Tampa for the 2027 season.
The announcement of the yet-unnamed team marks not the arrival, but the return of women’s professional basketball to the city. More than four decades ago, the Tampa Bay Sun (yes it had the same of Tampa’s current women’s professional soccer team, which launched in 2024 and went on to win the inaugural USL Super League championship) proved to be more of an idea than an actual franchise, but still managed to leave a legacy as the team that never was.
In the late summer of 1980, Michele Himmelberg loaded an overnight bag into her red MGB convertible and set out for the two-hour drive north to Tampa. It was a trek she had made plenty of times for her job at the Fort Myers News-Press, usually to cover the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but this trip, while the same route and also for work, was a bit different. Beside her reporting notebook on the passenger seat were a pair of high-top sneakers and a brown knee brace. She was going to an open tryout for the Tampa Bay Sun, the newest franchise of the Women’s Professional Basketball League.
The WBL began play in 1978, six years after Title IX passed and two years after the debut of women’s basketball in the Olympic Games. The eight founding franchises offered the first opportunities for women to play basketball at the professional level here in the United States, and the novelty carried a verve.
“It was part of the emerging development of women’s basketball,” recalls Himmelberg, 46 years removed from her tryout. “The idea of a league, and the idea that there were people with the money and the foresight and the passion to want to make it happen, was really exciting for anyone who followed or liked women’s sports.”
Nearly 8,000 fans attended the league’s first game between the Milwaukee Does and the Chicago Hustle. Walter Cronkite covered the event for the CBS Evening News. The on-court product was strong throughout the league, and the momentum and intrigue alone were enough for the league to approve the addition of six new franchises for the 1979-1980 season, its second. There were teams across the country, from California to New York, Louisiana to Minnesota, but still none in Florida.
The rapid 1979 expansion quickly proved ill-advised. Most organizations struggled to sell tickets. Missed payments to players became commonplace. Three of the new franchises, Philadelphia, Washington, and California, folded during the season, and four more, including the two previous league champions in the Houston and New York, followed during the 1980 offseason. The fate of the league was writ large, yet, rather improbably, the WBL announced it would return for a third season in 1980-1981, and into the void marched two new franchises, one in Omaha, Nebraska, the other in Tampa Bay. Florida had its team.
The Sun, it was announced, would be owned and operated by Bill Byrne, who was the founder and President of the WBL. The immediate question levied by journalists was whether he could, on a reasonable timeline, transition out of his responsibilities with the league and into this new capacity as a team owner. The answer was no. Several months into the offseason, Byrne still had yet to set up a team office in Tampa or pass off his league duties. The few personnel moves he was making were being done remotely, including the hiring of Katie McEnroe, formerly of the Iowa Cornets, as the team’s General Manager in May. Roughly a week later, McEnroe quit. She would later resurface in the same role for the WBL’s other new franchise in Nebraska.
Without a GM or any real presence in Tampa, the team’s first and only WBL Draft was a mess. The night started with some good news: the Sun had a coach. Tom Mosca, who had turned nearby Thomas Jefferson High School into a local powerhouse, would lead the new team. From there, though, the night devolved. Tampa’s first round pick, Julie Gross, later admitted she had not been in contact with the Sun and was thus shocked by the selection, telling St. Petersburg Times journalist Paul Roach that she wasn’t even sure whether she would play in the WBL. Second round pick Anne Gregory, a star at Fordham University, had already made up her mind that she was going to follow in the footsteps of her brother, Bob, and go play in France instead.
“It was a decision that I had to make before I knew that Tampa was going to fold, or not exist, I didn’t even know that yet,” remembers Gregory, who later returned to the States to play for the WBL’s New Jersey Gems.
Third round pick Jen Bednarek, who scored over 1,000 points at Penn State, was at her parents’ house in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey when she got a call on the landline telling her she’d been drafted by Tampa. She was flattered, but told them she’d need to call back with a decision. She hung up and turned to her father, Frank. They both already knew the answer. She had already received an offer to become a graduate assistant coach at Southern Illinois University.
“If it would have been closer, I probably would have given it more consideration, but you know, from Jersey to Florida, it’s like, what are you going to do?” she recalls. “So I just said no, and I appreciated the phone call. I called them back, and then I just kind of moved on because I had to get out to Carbondale [Illinois].”
Following the draft, the team went quiet. Mosca later told Ron Martz of the St. Petersburg Times that Byrne only made one appearance in town during the summer of 1980, for five days. Byrne did hire a replacement for McEnroe, bringing in Steve Brown as General Manager, but other than that, by the time the announcement was made about the public tryout in September, nobody had heard anything substantial from the Sun for months.
“Vital life signs have been hidden under dark shadows of financial instability and vague promises,” wrote Himmelberg.
Thus, for Himmelberg, the tryout was an opportunity to gather information about the mystery organization. She was only a few years removed from playing collegiately at the University of Southern California, and still regularly played pickup.
“I’m gathering information for a story, but I still want to play well,” she wrote.
More than 40 women attended, most of them from other states. The event was held in the MacDill Air Force Base gymnasium where Mosca proctored a series of drills and scrimmages. The ceiling fans remained off the entire day and the gym was hot and sticky. A few of the prospects were invited back to run it back the following morning. Himmelberg was not. Initial competitive disappointment quickly subsided into physiological and professional relief.
“If it sparked anything, it was the realization that I was a writer and not going to be a professional athlete,” she chuckles.
Himmelberg still has the t-shirt that she was given to wear at MacDill (blue, with orange lettering), and the story she wrote about the experience was later anthologized in Ron Rapoport’s “A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women.”
“It was fun to give an inside view,” she says. “It’s hard to open yourself up like that, you have to be a little bit vulnerable to talk about your flaws and capabilities and those kinds of things, but that’s also what, I think, made it appealing to readers and fun for me to do.”
Following the tryout, team personnel retreated back behind the curtain of silence. There was a bit of movement in September, most notably a reported $22,500 deal to bring in Olympian Cindy Brogdon. Otherwise, outside of the occasional public reassurance that the team both existed and would play, Sun brass was mum.
Finally, in October, the announcement was made: Byrne would sell the Tampa Bay Sun to a group of New England investors and the team would relocate to the northeast. The Sun would never play a game in Florida. The news shocked no one, not even Mosca.
“I thought it was probably one of three things,” Mosca told Ron Martz of the St. Petersburg Times about Byrne’s elusiveness. “Either he didn’t have money, he was trying to raise the money, or he was trying to sell the franchise. It turned out to be No. 3.”
Mosca, a Tampa native, was able to return to his post at Jefferson and later coached at the collegiate level at the University of Tampa and Air Force Academy, but never returned to the professional level. The WNBA eventually brought pro women’s hoops back to Florida with the Orlando Miracle and Miami Sol. Orlando played four seasons in the downtown TD Waterhouse Centre Arena before relocating to Connecticut. Miami, which shared American Airlines Arena with the Heat, folded after three seasons. The Jacksonville Waves of the Upshot league tipped off this summer and as Tampa prepares to join them next year, the city might just get its answer to the lingering “‘”what if.”
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This article appears in Oct. 22 – 28, 2026.
