AT DIFFERENT TIMES, Eron Harris and Porchia Green each found themselves home in Indy after wrapping up pro basketball careers abroad. A 2005 Arlington High School graduate, Green led Ball State to its first NCAA Tournament, while Harris got his start at Lawrence North before playing for West Virginia and Michigan State. Both had a desire to keep hooping—and they found their places in The City League and its female league, Queens of the Court.
Talk to enough players and you hear a comparison: Kobe Bryant playing street ball at Harlem’s Rucker Park after winning his third NBA championship.
TCL’s beginnings were humble. Executive director Austin Taylor was in Haiti during the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and was invited to play in a community basketball tournament. “The whole town came out,” Taylor says. “There was a hype man with a mic. It was so much fun. Man, I hadn’t had that kind of experience since high school, where people come out and watch. I thought, We don’t have anything like this in Indianapolis. How do we do something?”
In 2013, the Crosstown Neighborhood Association agreed that Taylor would run open gyms out of Little Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. He applied for and got a small grant that paid for basketballs, pinnies, and a scoreboard table. It wasn’t long before the open gyms filled up and led to tournaments.
The pandemic moved the league to an eight-week June through August season. Since then, games have been played at the Boner Fitness & Learning Center on the campus of Arsenal Tech High School, with a cash prize for the league winner in both the men’s and women’s divisions. The amount fluctuates year to year, but recently it has worked out to about $1,000 per player on the winning teams.
A local educator and former player at Berea College, A.D. Williams proposed the idea for a women’s league in 2021. Maddie McConnell—who works for the Horizon League collegiate athletic conference—built out some of the operations while doing an internship for her master’s degree at IUPUI. “Ultimately, [we] started an open gym at Warren Central back in March of 2021,” McConnell says. “Those open gyms grew to almost 50 people, and our inaugural Queens of the Court league started that summer.”
Teams in TCL can have no more than two former professionals to ensure some degree of parity. And unlike other leagues of its kind, TCL employs what’s called the Elam Ending. Anyone who watches basketball knows how close games are often riddled with timeouts and strategic fouls as the clock ticks down, which slow down the game. The Elam Ending eliminates the chance for those issues to arise by shutting off the clock for the end of the fourth quarter. The team with the lead keeps it, but both teams play toward a target number of points. This gives the trailing team a shot at catching up and keeps things from devolving into a foul-fest.
Part of TCL’s mission is to initiate community-building events, from back-to-school nights, to bike giveaways for kids, to basketball clinics at the Indiana State Fair. TCL is a 501c(3) organization, so donations are tax deductible. “The City League isn’t just about the game; it’s about strengthening communities, and that made them an ideal partner for us,” says Dr. Cameual Wright, whose nonprofit CareSource Indiana has been a sponsor since 2019.
Local sports broadcaster Greg Rakestraw refers to TCL (on whose board Green now sits) as “basketball Thanksgiving,” likening each season to a yearly family reunion, with loved ones catching up as if no time has passed. That characterization shows just how deep roots go in this league. Players still hooping into their late 30s and early 40s often have relationships with peers on the court that date back to high school or even earlier. The City League is the glue that keeps this “family” together, collectively doing what they all love.
