
A professional basketball team is coming to Baltimore.
The Baltimore Venom will join The Basketball League and plans to start playing in 2025. It will be the second TBL team in the state after the Frederick Flying Cows opened their inaugural season in March.
The TBL, an American minor professional basketball league, was founded with eight teams in 2017. Now, it is home to 38 teams across four conferences, including a couple of teams in Canada.
Baltimore Venom founders Jacob Dennis and Charles Carrington have not yet found an arena to play in; they’ve been touring different spots around Baltimore. While the team doesn’t have a home yet, Dennis and Carrington are committed to playing in Baltimore and have already received approval from the TBL to start a team.
“It’s confirmed that we’re bringing this,” Carrington said. “We’re in the process of raising money currently. We’re in the middle of our marketing plan as it is now; promoting it, getting more people aware of it.”
Carrington, who has family from Baltimore, and Dennis, a UMBC graduate, want Baltimore Venom to be more than just a basketball team. The two want to hone in on Baltimore and make it part of the team’s identity. They hope to roster some homegrown talent from Baltimore but also said players could come from across the country.
Too often, Dennis has seen basketball players leave the Baltimore area, primarily at the high school level. He hopes that with the Venom in town, it will give them a reason to stay.
“[Players are] leaving, especially in high school, and they go into the big prep schools; IMG Academy, or whatever,” Dennis said. “We want to provide a place for them to play here and also elevate them. To date, the TBL has elevated… 10 players into the NBA, over 30 into the G League, and then hundreds of contracts overseas; and that’s in seven years of operation.”
In addition to keeping basketball players local, another goal for the team is to foster a relationship with the Baltimore community and local colleges. Dennis and Carrington have already done that by working with students from Loyola University.
“We actually worked with Loyola [University] with their LCG (Loyola Consulting Group), which is their student-run pro bono marketing group,” Dennis said. “They actually did a really nice marketing project for us, and that’s part of our introduction to the city; getting students in on a ground level of opportunity like this is really, really important to us.”
Carrington looks forward to the relationship the Venom will have with the city and the people in Baltimore.
“It’s not just a business venture,” he said. “It’s bigger than basketball. We’re seeking to affect people, to change their lives, to provide not just a basketball product… that blesses them every time they come out but something that you see as really being involved in the community, actually taking care of the city just as much as it will be taking care of us.”