New league, new look, same winning results the goal for Wichita Wizards basketball team
After bringing professional basketball to Wichita in 2019 by creating his own team, Mark Creed has continued his passion project by helping create a new league for the Wizards to compete in.
The Mid-America Basketball Association debuted last weekend with the Wichita Wizards picking up a 115-106 win over the Kansas City Stealth at Garvey Center on Friends University’s campus.
Creed said fans can expect the same things from the Wizards: local talent winning big. The team has won its conference championship in all three years of its existence, a trend the Wizards hope to continue this season.
“I started the Wizards because I wanted to provide Wichita natives the chance to play professional basketball,” Creed said. “So it’s important to me that the majority of our players have always been native Wichitans or people who have moved here and now live here. Hopefully we can show that we can compete with everybody in our new league and see where we come out.”
With the Minor League Basketball Association crumbling, Creed looked for a new home and wasn’t satisfied with his options. So he went to work to find a solution to his problem.
He began discussions with Tim Simpson, who runs the Tri-State Sixty Sixers in Pittsburg, and Major Wilson, who runs the Oklahoma City Servants, about what a new league might look like. Creed said the trio studied the NBA constitution and condensed it down to what would apply at a much smaller scale for a much smaller league. The group even found a commissioner to help run the league, Romio Harvey, who lives in Lawton, Okla.
“It was a little bit like when I created the team,” Creed said. “We had to figure out a name and a logo, then the structure of the league. We just said, ‘Why not run it like the NBA?’ The NBA is successful, so let’s look at how they run their league and basically trim the fat off of their bylaws and create our own.”
The trio of owners added two more teams to the mix: the Oklahoma Kings and the Kansas City Stealth. The five-team league will play each other twice, then also find games on their own to fill out the schedule in the first season.
The Wizards have a 12-game schedule running from April to June with all home games being played at the Garvey Center. Home dates are scheduled for April 16, April 22, May 20, June 3, June 4 and June 18. Additional details and updated game schedule can be found on the Wichita Wizards’ Facebook page.
“We wanted to start small, so we can figure out the right way to do things and perfect things that might come up that don’t work well or fix small issues,” Creed said. “We’re certainly looking to build the league after this first season and continue to grow.”
The team once again features several former Wichita high school players, headlined by star Kaelon Gary, a Southeast grad who finished with 26 points and 11 rebounds in the season-opening win. Parker Austin, a former Rose Hill standout, scored a game-high 31 points on 13-of-20 shooting, while Heights graduate Curtis Profit Jr. added 16 points, five rebounds, four assists and six steals.
But Creed isn’t just focused on winning basketball.
“We want to make our games feel like events and do as much as we possibly can to keep fans entertained from the time they walk in to the time they leave,” Creed said. “We’ll have a dance team. We’ll have different entertainment at halftime. We’ll do giveaways. We’ll have a singer for the national anthem. We just try to set the bar as high as we possibly can and I think the Wizards have done that from Day One.”
